Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture (born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American activist who helped shape both the U.S. civil rights movement and the international pan-African cause. He rose to prominence as a key figure in the Black Power movement, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party, and finally as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, worked as a stewardess on a steamship line; his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter. When Carmichael was two, his parents moved to the United States, leaving him with his grandmother and two aunts. He attended Tranquility Boys Intermediate School in Port of Spain. At age 11, in 1952, he rejoined his parents in Harlem, New York City. The family later moved to the Van Nest neighborhood of the East Bronx, an area mostly populated by Jewish and Italian immigrants and their descendants. In a 1967 interview with *Life Magazine*, Carmichael said he was the only Black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954. In 1956, after scoring high on a standardized entrance exam, he entered the Bronx High School of Science. There he knew fellow student Samuel R. Delany. After graduating, Carmichael attended Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C. His professors included poet Sterling Allen Brown, Nathan Hare, and novelist Toni Morrison. Along with fellow activist Tom Kahn, Carmichael helped fund a five-day run of *The Three Penny Opera* by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Kahn, as treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council, and Carmichael, as floor whip, secured council votes to buy out remaining performances; council members then gave tickets to friends and constituents. Carmichael’s apartment on Euclid Street became a gathering spot for activist classmates. He earned a degree in philosophy in 1964 and turned down a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University.

At Howard, Carmichael joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus chapter of SNCC. Kahn introduced him and other SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, who became an influential adviser. Inspired by the southern sit-in movement, Carmichael grew more active in civil rights. In the 1950s, the far-right European group Jeune Europe, led by Jean-Francois Thiriart, later expressed support for Carmichael’s international civil rights and anti-imperialist work.

In 1961, during his first year at Howard, Carmichael joined the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). These rides aimed to desegregate interstate buses and bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., which were under federal law but segregated by custom. He was arrested many times—he lost exact count, sometimes estimating 29 or 32 arrests. In 1998, he told the *Washington Post* he thought the total was fewer than 36. On June 4, along with eight other riders, he was arrested again.

Carmichael was one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders under Diane Nash’s leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses. Like many young SNCC members, he grew disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates. He then pushed for independent all-Black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party. Inspired by Malcolm X, Carmichael articulated a philosophy of Black power, popularizing it through provocative speeches and more measured writings. (Writer Richard Wright is credited with coining the phrase in his 1954 book *Black Power*.)

By the late 1960s, Carmichael was one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover secretly identified him as the person most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America’s "black messiah." The FBI targeted him through its COINTELPRO counterintelligence program, prompting Carmichael to move to Africa in 1968. He settled first in Ghana, then in Guinea by 1969. There he adopted the name Kwame Ture and began campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism. He died of prostate cancer in 1998 at age 57.