Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

About the Author

Stokely Carmichael, later in life known also as Kwame Ture, was born on June 29, 1941, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His parents left him in the care of his grandparents at an early age and immigrated to New York City, where they worked in blue-collar jobs. Carmichael eventually joined his parents in New York and attended the Bronx High School of Science. In 1960 he began attending Howard University, where he became involved with the newly formed SNCC. While he was a member of SNCC in 1965, Carmichael established his effectiveness as an organizer when he played a lead role in increasing the number of registered black voters in Lowndes County, Alabama, from seventy to twenty-six hundred. There he worked with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Coincidentally for the future member of the California-based Black Panther organization, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization had as its mascot a black panther, which it used in juxtaposition with the white-controlled Democratic Party’s local mascot, a white rooster instead of the nationwide symbol of the donkey. As a representative of the militant wing of SNCC, Carmichael rose to become the organization’s chairman in 1966.

Carmichael was at first supportive of the work of Martin Luther King. He joined with King in 1966 to continue James Meredith’s March against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, after Meredith had been shot by a white sniper. Carmichael would later repudiate King’s nonviolent stance, although as late as April 15, 1967, he joined King in speaking out against the Vietnam War. Through the force of his rhetoric, Carmichael became a celebrity, but others in SNCC resented his prominence. He was replaced as chairman of SNCC by H. Rap Brown in 1967 and was soon formally expelled from the organization. That year, Carmichael joined the more militant Black Panther Party. As “honorary prime minister” of the Panthers, he became an even more forceful critic of the Vietnam War and lectured throughout the world and the United States, often on college campuses. However, Carmichael never rose to become the official spokesperson for the Panthers. Eventually, he broke with the Panthers over the issue of whether whites should be allowed to become members.

After the assassination of King on April 4, 1968, Carmichael was in Washington, D.C., and, although he was no longer officially a member of SNCC, led members of that organization in trying to maintain order. In 1969 he left the United States and the Panthers to live in the Republic of Guinea, which had gained independence from France in 1958. There he changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of two figures: Guinea’s president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from its liberation until his death in 1984; and Kwame Nkrumah, the former president of Ghana, who, after he had been overthrown, was offered refuge by Touré. From his base in Guinea, Carmichael wrote and spoke, advocating pan-Africanism and Socialism.

Carmichael died of prostate cancer on November 15, 1998, at the age of fifty-seven, Before his death, he had claimed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had infected him with a strain of cancer in order to assassinate him. It was later learned that he had been the subject of surveillance by the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency since 1968.