Whether you knew him as Stokely Carmichael or Kwame Ture, the man who coined the iconic phrase “Black Power” is still as complex in death as he was in life. Here are 12 things to know about Ture, a charismatic civil rights leader who was fiercely passionate about the liberation of Black people.
Stokely Carmichael was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad on June 29, 1941 to parents Adophus and Mabel Carmichael. The pair migrated to America in search of a better life, leaving Carmichael with his grandmother during his early years. He joined them in Harlem, New York when he was 11.
His parents eventually moved to the Bronx, where Carmichael said he was the only Black member of the Morris Park Dukes gang. He left the gang after being admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, he said in an interview with Gordon Parks.
”They were all reading the funnies while I was trying to dig Darwin and Marx,” Carmichael said, according to his obituary in the New York Times.
His father died of a heart attack at the young age of 41 in 1962 and Carmichael’s mother struggled to support the family.
Carmichael was extremely intelligent and received several scholarships to attend white universities. However, he rejected them to attend notable HBCU Howard University in Washington D.C., starting in 1960.
He graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1964.
Carmichael said he was inspired to become active in the Civil Rights Movement after he saw students – both Black and white – participate in sit-ins at lunch counters.
”When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South,” he told Gordon Parks in Life magazine in 1967, ”I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair — well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.”
Carmichael became a Freedom Rider at the end of his freshman year. The riders were often victims of racist violence and Carmichael was arrested on multiple occasions. One of his sentences lasted 49 days at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi.
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Carmichael was said to have “amazing charisma” by biographer Peniel Joseph and others who knew him. He was well spoken and deliberate with is words. He also encouraged Black people to be proud of the melanin in their skin.
“That was really one of his most important legacies,” Joseph said. “He was really defiant in declaring ‘Black is beautiful’ well before that became popular in the late ’60s.”
After graduation from college, Carmichael joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and helped register thousands of Black voters. He succeeded civil rights icon John Lewis as SNCC chairman.
SNCC cut ties with Carmichael in 1967 when he became more radical and militant. He went on to become the prime minister of the Black Panther Party but found himself at odds with it because of its willingness to collaborate with white people.
After being arrested for the 27th time in 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi for protesting nonviolently, Carmichael, then 24, had enough. He lost faith in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolent approach to protesting and embraced Malcolm X’s “By Any Means Necessary” philosophy.
“This is the 27th time that I’ve been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. I ain’t going to jail no more,” Carmichael said with conviction after he was released. ”We been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years … The only way we gonna stop them white men from whupping us is to take over. We’ve been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.”
He elaborated on what Black Power meant in a book of the same name he published in 1967 with Charles Hamilton. ”It is a call for Black people in this country to unite,” they wrote, ”to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.”
He also created the all-Black Lowndes County Freedom Organization and made the black panther its symbol, which was later adopted by BPP.
In 1967, Carmichael testified before a Senate subcommittee, pleading the fifth on a lot of questions about his work with SNCC, the Black Panther Party and his overall work fighting racial injustice.
A recording of an interview he did in Havana, Cuba with Mexican magazine editor Mario Menendez was introduced as testimony. During the recording, Carmichael called for Black people to take up arms.
“But after one year many of us decided that demonstrations were not the answer. The only answer was organizing our people. So we moved into the worst state, Mississippi, and began to organize our people to fight, and we’re now at the front where we are encouraging people to pick up arms and fight back,” Carmicahel said. He added when asked about guerrilla warfare, “ … Urban guerrilla warfare is the one way we will beat the United States because they cannot use bombs on us, because we are inside their country. They will have to fight us hand-to-hand combat. We will win, we will win.”
Dissatisfied with what he perceived as both organizations’ pandering, Carmichael moved to Guinea, West Africa, in 1969. After seeing countless friends and colleagues maimed and murdered, Carmichael said he felt Dr. King was right about a lot. However, “he only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience.”
He married twice there – first to South African musical artist Miriam “Mama Africa” Makeba and then to Guinean Dr. Marlyatou Barry. He said moving to Guinea was “the wisest decision I ever made.”
According to the Times, Ture “became a globe-trotting exponent of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, returning to American campuses to recruit. He maintained that continued progress for Black Americans could be made only through ‘mass political organization on a pan-African scale.’”
”Black power,” Carmichael said, ”can only be realized when there exists a unified socialist Africa.”
Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture in 1978 to pay homage to African leader Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of independent Ghana, and Ahmed Sekou Toure, the first president of Guinea, according to the Times.
He’d served as secretary to Nkrumah when he was president and studied under Toure when he was president, according to reports.
Ture died in Conakry, Guinea at age 57 of prostate cancer. Critical of the U.S. until the end, Ture said the cancer ”was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them,” according to his obituary in the Times.
Despite being dead for over 20 years, Ture is still criticized by U.S. government officials, including former U.S. President Bill Clinton at John Lewis’ funeral last week.
