Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture (/ˈkwɑːmeɪ ˈtʊəreɪ/ KWAH-may TOOR-ay; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, he grew up in the United States from age 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. Ture was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party and as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Carmichael was one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders of 1961 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 most young people in the SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state. Carmichael eventually decided to develop 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's example, he articulated a philosophy of black power, and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. The author Richard Wright is credited with coining the phrase in his 1954 book Black Power.

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

Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. He attended Tranquility School there before moving to Harlem, New York City, in 1952 at the age of 11, to rejoin his parents. They had migrated to the United States when he was two, and he was raised by his grandmother and two aunts. He had three sisters.

His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line. His father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The reunited Carmichaels eventually left Harlem to live in Van Nest in the East Bronx, at that time an aging neighborhood primarily of Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants. According to a 1967 interview Carmichael gave to Life Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

Carmichael attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York from 1956, being selected through high achievement on its standardized entrance examination. He was acquainted with fellow Bronx Science student Samuel R. Delany during his time there.

After graduation Carmichael enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. His professors included the poet Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare, and Toni Morrison, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Carmichael and fellow civil rights activist Tom Kahn helped to fund a five-day run of the Three Penny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill:

Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances. It was a classic win/win. Members of the Council got patronage packets of tickets for distribution to friends and constituents.