Stokley Carmichael
1941-1998
Civil rights activist. Born June 29, 1941 in Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael, known in later life as Kwame Ture, is credited with originating the slogan "Black Power," which became the watchword for numerous black liberation groups in the 1960s. One of the most radical of the civil rights leaders, Carmichael sought to unify blacks under a more militant agenda, advocating revolution if necessary. His views ultimately led him into the Pan-African movement; he changed his name to Kwame Ture and became an international spokesman for the All-African People's Revolutionary Party.
A native of the British West Indies, Carmichael moved to New York City's Harlem in 1952 and was educated at the elite--and at the time, mostly white--Bronx High School of Science. It was during his high school years that he became aware of the civil rights movement and the thwarted aspirations of many African Americans. In 1960 he entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. and began participating in the Freedom Rides sponsored by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). In 1964 he joined what was then the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where he gained influence as the leader of a task force sent to increase black voter registration in Lowndes County, Mississippi. The task force helped raise the number of registered black voters in the predominantly black county to a number that surpassed the white populace. Carmichael later helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom organization, an all-black political party that adopted the panther as its symbol.
His activism came at a cost. He was arrested more than thirty times and was once sentenced to Mississippi's notorious Parchman Penitentiary, where he served forty-nine days. Sickened by the violence that was perpetrated on black protesters, Carmichael grew disenchanted with the sort of nonviolent actions that had become associated with the SNCC. When he became chairman of the group in 1966 he used his skills as a speaker to incite his listeners to a new level of radicalism. With "Black Power"as their slogan, a younger generation of African Americans began to make both demands and threats. "Adverse reaction was powerful and immediate," noted Kaufman. "After the integrationist, nonviolent speeches and sermons of Dr.
King and others, few Americans, white or black, were prepared for the uncompromising demands of black militants who rallied to Carmichael's cry." Some groups contended that "Black Power" embodied racism in reverse.
Carmichael left SNCC in 1967 to join the more militant Black Panthers, an urban group whose political base was primarily found in the ghettos of American cities. Carmichael rose to the level of prime minister with the Black Panthers, yet took issue with the party's acquiescence towards white radicals, and in May of 1969 left the United States on a self-imposed exile to Guinea, West Africa. Carmichael resigned from the Black Panthers in July of the same year, stating in a publicly disclosed letter: "The party has become dogmatic in its newly acquired ideology and thinks that it has the only correct position. . . . Furthermore, the alliances being formed by the party are alliances which I cannot politically agree with, because the history of Africans living in the United States has shown that any premature alliance with white radicals has led to complete subversion of the blacks by the whites, through their direct or indirect control of the black organization."
By the late 1960s, Carmichael's politics were Pan-Africanist in nature, advocating a homeland in Africa for oppressed black minorities throughout the Western world. Although now more international in scope, his aims were no less radical. As Yohuru Williams put it in the Negro History Bulletin, Carmichael "forwarded an ideology that called for international revolutionary cooperation in the struggle against imperialism." It was during this period that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture, a name that honored two African politicians with whom he had become close: Kwame Nkrumah, a former president of Ghana, and Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea. It was in Guinea that Nkruma founded the All African People's Revolutionary Party to which Carmichael devoted much of his energy in his later life.
Carmichael's 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, co-written with Charles V. Hamilton, examines the concept "Black Power" and its implications for the Civil Rights movement. The book advocates the need for blacks to reject the values of an American society fraught with racism, and to develop their own independent, self-supportive organizations. In the authors' words, Black Power "is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society." Carmichael and Hamilton explain that the concept "rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks." In the preface to Black Power, the authors state the urgency of their message: "This book presents a political framework and ideology which represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerilla warfare." Reception of Black Power, as well as Carmichael's 1971 collection of speeches and essays, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism, was mixed, ranging from those who saw the book as a major document of revolution, to those who viewed Carmichael and Hamilton's proposals as non-revolutionary or in need of a more thorough analysis.
Early in 1996 Carmichael learned that he had prostate cancer. He underwent treatment in the United States, some of which was paid for by donations from well wishers. As long as he could he continued to travel and lecture, but he finally lost his battle with the disease in November of 1998. The Los Angeles Times quoted the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who called Carmichael "one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down."
http://www.biography.com/search/article.jsp?aid=9238629
© 2001, Gale Group
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