Carmichael, Stokely

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

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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

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure).

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

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.

"AN ORGANIZATION WHICH CLAIMS TO SPEAK FOR THE NEEDS OF A COMMUNITY ? MUST SPEAK IN THE TONE OF THAT COMMUNITY."

?STOKELY CARMICHAEL

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,

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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,"...