Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture)

Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad in 1941, and moved to the United States at age 8. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement from a young age and eventually moved to Guinea where he died of cancer in 1998. His life was one committed to a more radical method for achieving black equality.

Civil Rights Era

In 1960, he started attending Howard University and joined the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As a member of this group, he was fed directly into the Freedom Rides Movement during which he was arrested and a victim to police violence. In 1966, he was named Chairman of SNCC and a vital leader in the Freedom Summer project. In the same year, Carmichael joined in a march lead by James Meredith that would venture from Memphis to Jackson to rally individuals in the cause of racial equality. Leaders like Martin Luther King participated in this crusade as well. During this journey, Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time. Upon his release from prison, he made his famous Black Power speech which powerfully declared the importance of black unification and a rejection of American values.

In the following year, he published Black Power, but the book was not popular with other leading civil rights groups like the NAACP and SCLC. Carmichael was not patient with the ideas of nonviolence. As a member of the Black Panther Party, he advocated for action, and militancy. As a member of SNCC, he had also argued against white membership. His colleagues had disagreed with him, but as a Black Panther, the interference by sympathetic whites was a non-issue. He was, in addition, able to reject American values by defying the draft for the Vietnam War. The government took his passport in response. His ideas help explore and explain the spectrum of solutions both black and white leaders sought to alleviate, and end, racial injustice.

Bibliography

Information for this biography was gathered from the following sources:

Return to Eyes on the Prize I Interview Index