Carmichael, Stokely

June 29, 1941
November 15, 1998

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael, an activist, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1960 and received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Howard University in 1964. During his college years he participated in a variety of civil rights demonstrations sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As a freedom rider, he was arrested in 1961 for violating Mississippi segregation laws and spent seven weeks in Parchman Penitentiary. After college, he worked with the Mississippi Summer Project, directed SNCC voter-registration efforts in Lowndes County, Alabama, and helped organize black voters through the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.

Elected SNCC chairman in 1966, Carmichael took an outspoken, militant stance that helped distance SNCC from the moderate leadership of competing civil rights organizations. A chief architect and spokesperson for the new Black Power ideology, Carmichael coauthored (with Charles V. Hamilton) Black Power (1967) and published a collection of his essays and addresses, Stokely Speaks (1971). He left his SNCC post in 1967. The next year he was made prime minister of the Black Panther Party; in 1969 he quit the Black Panthers and became an organizer for Kwame Nkrumah's All-African People's Revolutionary Party. Studies with Nkrumah of Ghana and Sékou Touré of Guinea confirmed his Pan-Africanism and, in 1978, moved him to change his name to Kwame Ture. For the last thirty years of his life he made Conakry, Guinea, his home, and he continued his work in political education, condemning Western imperialism, Zionism, and capitalism while promoting the goal of a unified socialist Africa. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.

See also Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Stokeley Carmichael

"We are going to use the term 'Black Power' and we are going to define it because Black Power speaks to us."

from speech on black power, university of california–berkeley, july 28, 1966. reprinted in john bracey, august meier, and elliott rudwick, eds. black nationalism in america. indianapolis: bobbs-merill, 1970, p. 470.

Bibliography

Carmichael, Stokely, and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.

william l. van deburg (1996)
Updated by author 2005