Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His parents immigrated to New York when he was a toddler, leaving him in the care of his grandmother until the age of 11, when he followed his parents to the United States. Carmichael’s mother was a stewardess for a steamship line and his father worked as a carpenter by day and a taxi driver by night. His father chased the American Dream that his son would later criticize as an instrument of racist oppression. As Carmichael later said, “My old man believed in this work-and-overcome stuff. He was religious, never lied, never cheated or stole. He did carpentry all day and drove taxis all night and the next thing that came to that poor black man was death from working too hard. And he was only in his 40s."

In 1954, at the age of 13, Stokely Carmichael became a naturalized American citizen and his family moved to a predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx called Morris Park. Soon Carmichael became the only black member of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. In 1956, he passed the admissions test to get into the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, where he was introduced to an entirely different social set, the children of New York City's rich white liberal elite. Carmichael was popular among his new classmates. He attended parties frequently and dated white girls. However, even at that age, he was highly conscious of the racial differences that divided him from his classmates.

Though he had been aware of the American Civil Rights Movement for years, it was not until one night toward the end of high school, when he saw footage of a sit-in on television, that Carmichael felt compelled to join the struggle. "When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South," he later recalled, "I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair. Well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.'' He joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), picketed a Woolworth's store in New York and traveled to sit-ins in Virginia and South Carolina.

Carmichael received scholarship offers to a variety of prestigious predominantly white universities after graduating high school in 1960. He chose instead to attend the historically black Howard University. There he majored in philosophy, studying the works of famous philosophers and considering ways to apply their theoretical frameworks to the issues facing the civil rights movement.

Carmichael continued to increase his participation in the movement itself. While still a freshman in 1961, he went on his first Freedom Ride, an integrated bus tour through the South to challenge the segregation of interstate travel. During that trip, he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for entering the “whites only” bus stop waiting room and jailed for 49 days. Carmichael remained actively involved in the civil rights movement throughout his college years, participating in another Freedom Ride in Maryland, a demonstration in Georgia, and a hospital workers' strike in New York. He graduated from Howard University with honors in 1964.

Carmichael left school at a critical moment in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) dubbed the summer of 1964, rolling out an aggressive campaign to register black voters in the Deep South. Carmichael joined the SNCC as a new college graduate and was quickly appointed to field organizer for Lowndes County, Alabama. When he arrived in Lowndes County in 1965, African Americans made up the majority of the population but remained entirely unrepresented in government. In one year, Carmichael managed to raise the number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600, 300 more than the number of registered white voters in the county.

Unsatisfied with the response of either of the major political parties to his registration efforts, Carmichael founded his own party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. To satisfy a requirement that all political parties have an official logo, he chose a black panther, which later provided the inspiration for the Black Panthers founded in Oakland, California in 1966.

Stokely Carmichael adhered to the philosophy of nonviolent resistance advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In addition to moral opposition to violence, supporters of nonviolent resistance believed that the strategy would win public support for civil rights by drawing a sharp contrast between the peacefulness of the protestors and the brutality of the police and hecklers opposing them. However, as time went on, Carmichael, like many young activists, became frustrated with the slow pace of progress and with having to endure repeated acts of violence and humiliation at the hands of white police officers without recourse.

By the time he was elected national chairman of SNCC in May 1966, Carmichael had largely lost faith in the theory of nonviolent resistance. As chairman, he turned SNCC in a sharply radical direction, making it clear that white members, once actively recruited, were no longer welcome. In June 1966, James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, embarked on a “Walk against Fear” from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. About 20 miles into Mississippi, Meredith was shot and wounded too severely to continue. Carmichael decided that SNCC volunteers should carry on the march in his place, and upon reaching Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, Carmichael gave the address for which he would forever be best remembered: “We been saying ‘freedom’ for six years. What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power.’”

The phrase “Black Power” quickly caught on as the rallying cry of a younger, more radical generation of civil rights activists. The term also resonated internationally, becoming a slogan of resistance to European imperialism in Africa. In his 1968 book, “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation”, Carmichael explained the meaning of black power: “It 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.”

Black Power also represented Carmichael's break with Dr. King's doctrine of nonviolence and its end goal of racial integration. Instead, he associated the term with the doctrine of black separatism, aligning with Malcolm X. “The turn to black power was very controversial and evoked fear in many white Americans, even those previously sympathetic to the civil rights movement. The movement exacerbated gaps within the civil rights movement itself between older advocates of nonviolence and younger advocates of separatism. Dr. King called black power “an unfortunate choice of words.”

In 1967, Carmichael took a transformative journey, traveling outside the United States to visit with revolutionary leaders in Cuba, North Vietnam, China, and Guinea. Upon his return to the United States, he left SNCC and became prime minister of the more radical Black Panthers. He spent the next two years speaking around the country and writing essays on black nationalism, black separatism, and pan-Africanism.

In 1969, Carmichael quit the Black Panthers and left the United States to take up permanent residence in Conakry, Guinea, where he dedicated his life to the cause of pan-Africanism. “America does not belong to the blacks,” he said, explaining his departure from the US. Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor both the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the president of Guinea, Sékou Touré.

Kwame Ture made frequent trips back to the United States to advocate pan-Africanism as the only true path to liberation for black people worldwide. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1985 and died on November 15, 1998. Carmichael stands out as one of the preeminent figures of the American civil rights movement. His spirit is best captured by the greeting with which he answered his telephone until his dying day: “Ready for the revolution!”