Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael, who later took the name Kwame Ture, was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on 29 June 1941. He moved to New York at eleven to join parents who had settled there years earlier, and he grew up in Harlem and the Bronx. At the Bronx High School of Science he met veteran Black radicals and Communist activists. In 1960, as a senior, he learned of the Southern sit-ins and joined CORE protesters picketing Woolworth stores in New York over segregated lunch counters. He entered Howard University as a philosophy major that year. He later said he had assumed civil rights was something adults did, and the sit-ins convinced him that young people could and should act. At Howard he joined the Nonviolent Action Group, affiliated with SNCC.

At nineteen he was among the youngest participants in the 1961 Freedom Rides and served fifty-three days in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary. He returned to Howard and came back to the Mississippi Delta every summer to organize voter registration. After graduating in 1964 he joined SNCC's staff full time for Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He also worked in Cambridge, Maryland, alongside Gloria Richardson. When the national Democratic Party refused to seat the MFDP at its 1964 convention, he concluded that meaningful change required Black political power, ideally through an independent Black party, and he grew skeptical of interracial activism inside existing political structures. He did not discard nonviolent action. He credited it with giving his generation, especially in the South, a way to confront entrenched and violent racism, and he said there was nothing passive in it. He had always treated it as a tactic rather than a guiding principle.

After the Selma-to-Montgomery march in March 1965 he stayed in Lowndes County, Alabama, a county that was about 80 percent Black and had one registered Black voter. People were wary of SNCC at first. A breakthrough came when he refused police orders to leave a school where he was handing out registration material and told the officers to leave him alone or arrest him. Young people swarmed the SNCC workers afterward. Working with local leaders such as John Hulett, he helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, whose symbol was a black panther. Within a year Black residents were a majority of registered voters, and in 1970 Hulett became sheriff. The organization supported armed self-defense and Black political power. Carmichael's method here was conversation with local people, confrontation when necessary, and building institutions that residents controlled.

In May 1966 he replaced John Lewis as SNCC chairman. In June, on the Meredith March Against Fear, he told a Greenwood, Mississippi rally that after six years of saying freedom, the call would now be Black Power. He later described it as a call for Black people to define their own goals and lead their own organizations. He admitted using the term in part to force Martin Luther King Jr. to take a stand. King and Carmichael respected each other but argued fiercely. King criticized the slogan's connotations, yet said Carmichael's views came from seeing brutal white violence go unpunished. They later converged in opposing the Vietnam War, and King invited Carmichael to sit in the front row at Ebenezer Baptist Church in April 1967. With Charles V. Hamilton he wrote Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967). He left the SNCC chairmanship that year, traveled to Cuba, China, North Vietnam, and Guinea, and became a target of FBI COINTELPRO efforts and CIA surveillance. He opposed expelling whites from SNCC but moved toward Black nationalism, then briefly served as prime minister of the Black Panther Party before leaving in 1969 over its willingness to work with radical whites. He moved to Guinea, took the name Kwame Ture to honor Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure, helped found the All-African People's Revolutionary Party in 1972, and urged African Americans to work for African liberation and Pan-Africanism. He died of cancer in Guinea on 15 November 1998.