STOKELY CARMICHAEL

CARMICHAEL, STOKELY

African American activist, leader, and militant
STOKELY CARMICHAEL is known for the galvanizing
cry “Black Power!” which helped transform
the later years of the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT. The raised fist that accompanied
the slogan was a rallying point for many young
African Americans in the late 1960s. Carmichael’s
forceful presence and organizing skill
were compelling reasons to join. In 1966, he was
elected chairman of the STUDENT NONVIOLENT
COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC), a CIVIL
RIGHTS organization popularly called Snick.
Leaving Atlanta-based SNCC in 1967 with a
more radical vision, Carmichael became prime
minister of the Oakland-based BLACK PANTHER
PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE (BPP), perhaps the
most militant of 1960s African American
groups. Members of Congress denounced him
for allegedly seditious speeches, other politicians
and civic leaders blamed him for causing riots,
and the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
(FBI) matched this fervor with counterintelligence
activities. Bitterly severing his ties with the
BLACK POWER MOVEMENT in 1969, Carmichael
announced that he would work on behalf of
Pan-Africanism, a socialist vision of a united
Africa. He moved to Guinea,West Africa, where
he lived and worked until his death in 1998.
Carmichael was born in Port of Spain,
Trinidad, on June 29, 1941. Two years later, he
was placed in a private school, as his father,
mother, and two sisters immigrated to the
United States. At school he earned the nickname
Little Man for his quick intelligence and precocious
awareness, traits that had him urging his
aunt to vote when he was turned away from
polling booths at the age of seven. He received a
British education at the Tranquillity Boys
School, a segregated institution, from the age of
ten to eleven, before nearly dying of pneumonia.
As an adult, he would recall the Tranquillity
School experience with bitterness for “drugging”
him with white European views. His parents
brought him and three sisters to live with them
in Harlem in June 1952.
In Harlem, he found conditions disappointingly
different from those in Trinidad, where the
black majority had found access to positions in
elective government and professional employment.
His mother,Mabel Carmichael, worked as
a maid. His father, Adolphus Carmichael, who
had been successful enough as a skilled carpenter
to build a large house in Port of Spain, struggled
at driving a cab to make ends meet but
remained optimistic about the United States.
For this dream, Carmichael later said, his father
paid a high price, working himself to death, and
dying the same way he began, poor and black.
By junior high school, Carmichael’s disillusionment
revolved around a life of marijuana,
alcohol, theft, and a street gang of which he was
the only nonwhite member. However, when he
entered the respected Bronx High School of Science,
his scholastic interests blossomed, and he
began to read widely in politics and history.
Social opportunities began to appear for him, too. Yet, later, he could not dispel a sense of
alienation and anger. “I made the scene in Park
Avenue apartments,” he recalled in a 1967 interview.
“I was the good little nigger and everybody
was nice to me. Now that I realize how phony
they all were, how I hate myself for it.”
Social and political change were in the air as
Carmichael was finishing high school. The civil
rights movement was in full swing and a new
generation of young African Americans began
holding lunch counter sit-ins in segregated cafés
and restaurants in the South. At first skeptical
about these “publicity hounds,” Carmichael
changed his mind when he saw televised images
of white students pouring sugar and ketchup on
the heads of the peaceful protesters. By mid-
1960 he was in Virginia taking part in a sit-in
organized by the CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY
(CORE), a civil rights group founded nearly
two decades earlier. Beaten up during his first
demonstration, Carmichael was undeterred. He
attended more sit-ins and pickets, notably
against the F.W. Woolworth Company in New
York, as such demonstrations spread widely
across the country, resulting in integrated businesses
in several states.
Several scholarship offers awaited Carmichael,
including one from Harvard. His decision
to reject them in favor of attending Howard
University in Washington, DC, marked a turning
point in his life. In 1961, CORE sponsored
trips by young activists to the South. Known as
the Freedom Rides, these journeys were
intended to fight SEGREGATION. As a freshman,
Carmichael went along. He escaped the violent
mob beatings that many of the activists suffered
while white police officers watched and did
nothing, but he and several other CORE activists
were arrested in Mississippi, jailed for 53 days,
zapped with cattle prods, and forced to sleep on
hard cell floors. Such treatment was not the
worst inflicted on the Freedom Riders: three
were murdered. Released finally, he returned to
the university and changed his major from medicine
to philosophy, in which he took a bachelor’s
degree upon graduation in 1964.
Leaving Howard, Carmichael became an
organizer with SNCC. Founded during his final
year in high school, the group had emerged from
meetings organized by ELLA J. BAKER, the associate
executive director of the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC)—the
civil rights organization of which MARTIN
LUTHER KING JR. was president. SNCC contained
the seeds of a major change in direction
for the civil rights movement. As it grew in the
early 1960s, SNCC attracted young volunteers
who were impatient with the progress of older
organizations such as CORE and the SCLC.
It sent black and white young people from predominantly
northern, middle-class backgrounds
into rural areas of the Deep South, their goal
being to educate illiterate farmers, increase voter
registration, and set up health clinics. A field
organizer for a SNCC task force in Lowndes
County, Mississippi, Carmichael brought about
noteworthy successes: the number of registered
black voters increased from 70 to 2,600, a dramatic
rise for a county in which African Americans
outnumbered whites but had no share in
political power.
In 1966, Carmichael was elected chairman of
SNCC. The group’s goal was evolving from
INTEGRATION to liberation. In Mississippi, he
had organized a political party called the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization. Its symbol, a
black panther leaping with a snarl, would
become nationally recognized in the years to follow.
So would the words Black Power! that
Carmichael shouted to black sharecroppers as
he and other participants in the JAMES MEREDITH
Freedom March passed them in June 1966.
The cross-state march was a project launched by
Meredith, who had been the first African American
to attend Mississippi University, to prove
that black citizens could enjoy their rights in the
state without fear. Such fear was well placed. On
the second day, shotgun blasts badly wounded
Meredith. As another march took place and
more violence followed, “Black Power!” became
the marchers’ chant.
In Carmichael’s view, black power meant
several things: political power, economic power,
and legal power. It was both local and international
in scope. “We want control of the institutions
of the communities where we live, and we
want control of the land, and we want to stop
the exploitation of non-white people around the
world,” he said. This control would be achieved
by any means necessary, he promised, drawing
on the famous words of the activist MALCOLM X.
SNCC members carried guns for SELF-DEFENSE,
a practice defended by Carmichael this way: “We
are not [Martin Luther] King or SCLC. They
don’t do the kind of work we do nor do they live
in the same areas we live in.” In contrast to the
harmonious message of King, Carmichael’s
rhetoric stirred fear and antagonism in many members of the mass media, who quickly
accused him of reverse racism. Time magazine
dubbed him a black powermonger. As riots tore
through major U.S. cities in the summers of
1966 and 1967, Carmichael was condemned for
making inflammatory speeches that his critics
said sparked them.
Within SNCC, more than rhetoric was
changing. As the organization began to speak of
oppressors and the oppressed, it also took practical
steps that distanced it from older civil rights
groups. Carmichael had SNCC pull out of the
White House Conference on Civil Rights, a
move that brought condemnation from the
SCLC, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), and the Urban
League; CORE, however, was moving in the
same direction. Support for SNCC began to dry
up. Older black activists deserted the organization;
white supporters withdrew funding. In late
1966, SNCC purged all white members from its
ranks.
Law enforcement agencies turned their
sights on the increasingly militant group. Fights
between the group’s members and police officers
broke out in several cities. In August 1966,
a raid by 80 Philadelphia police officers on a
SNCC office resulted in several arrests and
charges that dynamite was stored there. As a
result, the city’s mayor and chief of police tried
to bar Carmichael from speaking in Philadelphia.
He was soon arrested and convicted in
Atlanta of inciting a riot. Federal authorities
also became concerned. The FBI had begun surveillance
of SNCC in 1960; now it stepped up
the supervision. In the summer of 1967, COINTELPRO,
the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program,
officially added SNCC to its list of revolutionary
groups to monitor, infiltrate, and, if possible,
discredit.
Stepping down from the SNCC chairmanship,
Carmichael gave lectures on college
campuses and traveled worldwide. To an international
audience that viewed him as a revolutionary
leader, he gave speeches in Europe,
Africa, and North Vietnam. In a talk given in
London in July 1967, he so enraged British political
leaders that he was barred from entering
more than 30 countries in the British Commonwealth.
Harsh criticism in the U.S. press followed
an appearance in Havana where he said,
“We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for
our defense in the cities. . . . It is going to be a
fight to the death.” President Fidel Castro of
Cuba offered Carmichael political ASYLUM,
which he declined. Upon Carmichael’s return to
the United States on December 12, 1967, U.S.
MARSHALS seized his passport. Lawmakers in
Congress denounced him for TREASON and
SEDITION, and, as a result, considered legislation
favoring bans on travel by U.S. citizens to countries
deemed enemies of the United States.
Overseas, Carmichael had espoused his view
of Pan-Africanism. This political movement
favored uniting African countries under a common
socialist leadership. SNCC expelled
Carmichael in August 1968, disagreeing with his
political turn, but by this time he had already
joined the BPP. Organized to prevent police brutality
toward African Americans, the Black Panthers
had adopted the symbol Carmichael
popularized in Lowndes County, a leaping,
snarling black panther. The BPP’s members carried
guns, demanded equality and justice, and
occasionally exchanged gunfire with police officers,
leading to the conviction of one of its founders, HUEY P. NEWTON. As honorary prime
minister of the BPP, Carmichael organized over
two dozen chapters across the country.
Black power’s growing appeal—and, in the
eyes of many white U.S. citizens, its danger—
seemed to reach a symbolic height at the 1968
Olympics. There, two medal-winning members
of the U.S. Olympic Team raised their fists in
expression of their solidarity with the movement,
a protest that ended in U.S. officials stripping
them of their medals.
Events during this period increased
Carmichael’s sense of alienation from the
United States. He alleged that the FBI harassed
him and his wife, Miriam Makeba, a South
African–born singer, by following them wherever
they went. Carmichael and Makeba felt that
Makeba lost singing jobs and recording contracts
because of Carmichael’s notoriety. When
the Black Panthers allied themselves with white
radicals he broke with the organization. “The
history of Africans living in the U.S. has shown
that any premature alliance with white radicals
has led to complete subversion of the blacks by
the whites,” he said in July 1969. He called upon
all Africans “as one cohesive force to wage an
unrelenting armed struggle against the white
Western empire for the liberation of our people.”
His departure sounded a death knell for the
black power movement; by the early 1970s it had
all but vanished.
In 1969, Carmichael prepared to leave for
self-imposed exile in Africa. Before going, he
organized a branch of the All-African People’s
Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in Washington,
DC, a Pan-Africanist group established the previous
year in Guinea, West Africa. After settling
in Africa, he briefly returned to the United States
in March 1970, and appeared before a congressional
subcommittee on national security matters.
Questioned about revolutionary groups in
the United States, he pleaded the FIFTH AMENDMENT
throughout the hearing. Back in Guinea,
he worked for the AAPRP, taught at the university
in Conakry, and, in 1978, changed his name
to Kwame Ture, partly in honor of Sékou Touré,
former president of Guinea, who was his friend
and benefactor. Following the death of President
Touré and the rise of the MILITARY GOVERNMENT
in Guinea, he was jailed several times for
unknown reasons.
Carmichael traveled and spoke in a number
of countries since the 1980s. In 1982, the British
Commonwealth briefly lifted its ban on his
crossing its borders, but it quickly renewed the
prohibition after he made a 1983 visit to Britain
advocating international black solidarity and the
overthrow of capitalism. British officials claimed
that he urged black lawyers to throw bombs.
Later, he paid several visits to the United States.
In 1989, looking back on the accomplishments
of the civil rights and black power movements,
he expressed skepticism. Citing the 304 African
American mayors then in office in the United
States, he dismissed them as impotent to effect
real change. “All of them singularly and in block
are powerless inside the racist political structure
of the U.S.A.,” he said. “These African mayors
represent the biggest cities . . . yet the conditions
of the masses of our people are worse today in
these very cities than before the advent of
African mayors.”
Carmichael and Makeba divorced in 1978
and he later remarried. He received an honorary
doctor of law degree from Shaw University, in
North Carolina, and authored two books, Black
Power: Politics of Liberation in America (1967)
and Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism
(1971).
In June 1998, Carmichael donated his papers
to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center of
Howard University. He died on November 15,
1998, at the age of 57, of prostate cancer. In May
1999, Carmichael was posthumously awarded
an honorary doctorate by Howard University
and his friends and supporters began a drive to
establish the Kwame Toure Work-Study Institute
and Library in Conakry, Guinea.
FURTHER READINGS
Carmichael, Stokely. 1971. Stokely Speaks: Black Power to
Pan-Africanism. New York: Random House.
Johnson, Jacqueline. 1990. Stokely Carmichael: The Story of
Black Power. Parsippany, N.J.: Silver Burdett Press.
Kaufman, Michael T. November 16, 1998. “Stokely
Carmichael Dies at 57.” New York Times. Available
online at (accessed June 13, 2003).
Makeba, Miriam. 1987. Makeba: My Story. New York: New
American Library.