The Speaker is an authoritative voice delivering a spoken-word exhortation to their racial community. They reject consumerist culture, mass media, and political moderates, demanding instead that their listeners engage in active, grass-roots revolution. The Speaker uses sharp satire and vivid pop-culture allusions to mock figures of authority and to expose the ways television and corporate interests deaden political consciousness.

"Brother" represents the complacent Black American audience the poem targets. This figure has grown accustomed to substituting political action with passive consumption, whether through watching television, abusing substances like heroin, or drinking alcohol. The poem acts as an intervention designed to break this figure out of their media-induced trance and push them into the streets to fight for liberation.

Richard Nixon is the President of the United States, functioning in the poem as a symbol of oppressive white political power and warmongering. The Speaker uses ridiculous, highly satirical imagery—such as Nixon eating confiscated hog maws from a Harlem sanctuary—to highlight how the political establishment exploits and consumes Black culture while actively avoiding true representation on television.

Whitney A. Young is the real-life head of the Urban League, presented in the text as a moderate, co-opted political leader. The Speaker dismisses him as a "dandy" who is more concerned with his chemical hair-straightening process than with radical liberation. He serves as an example of the top-down, moderate leadership that the actual revolution will bypass and reject.

A leader of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins is utilized in the poem as a symbol of formal, buttoned-down civil rights leadership. The Speaker highlights his distance from aggressive grass-roots activism by placing him in the absurd, highly unlikely scenario of wearing Pan-Africanist colors. He represents the kind of safe leadership that power brokers prefer over genuine revolutionaries.