[2] Significant speakers included Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and humanist Marxist Herbert Marcuse.
This means clearing the field of all preconceptions regarding who, what and where we are, as well as all manner of socially convenient academic conventions that are propped up by politics, ideology and false philosophical justifications.
As summarised by historian Alexander Dunst, the intellectual luminaries at the Congress included Gregory Bateson, Herbert Marcuse and Stokely Carmichael.
CLR James spoke, as did a number of Black British and Caribbean writers: the poets Andrew Salkey and John LaRose, as well as the Cuban novelist Edmundo Desnoes, author of Memories of Underdevelopment.
The activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nat Han reported from Vietnam and the Marxist philosopher Gajo Petrovic analyzed the political situation in Yugoslavia.
Emmett Grogan, who co-founded a San Francisco community action group called The Diggers, gave a lecture as did Julian Beck, from the Living Theatre in New York.
[10] The BBC hosted a live discussion on between Carmichael, Laing and Paul Goodman on its Panorama programme, and hired director Roy Battersby and Iain Sinclair to produce a 90-minute documentary.
[6][7] Carmichael's three speeches at the congress (and his meetings with UK-based activists such as CLR James and Michael X) played a major role in building the British Black Power movement.