Maria Haymandou’s newest blog post!
Stokely Carmichael speaking at Berkeley, while a “Black Power” banner waves proudly and defiantly behind him.
Back in the 60s, Stokely Carmichael popularized the term “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), yet surprisingly, not too many people know about him. Historian Peniel E. Joseph, whose book “Stokely: A Life” just came out, is on a mission to “recover” the name of Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture. Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, had access to interviews, exhaustive research and 20,000 previously unreleased pages of FBI files on the 1960s militant.
Stokely, a Trinidadian-American who grew up in the Bronx before he fled to Guinea, West Africa to try and promote a revolutionary Pan-African movement. He died in 1998, at the age of 57, in Guinea. Over the course of his political life, Stokely worked with civil rights activists like Dr. King, and also helped to start the Black Panther Party. He became more and more radicalized as time passed, and finally declared that the highest political expression of black power was the Pan-African movement.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, described Stokely as the “link” between the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the radical black movement that emerged amongst the younger generations. Many scholars and activists think that the book will invite debate about Stokely’s actions and legacy. A good amount of that debate will probably focus on Stokely’s decision to leave the country in 1969, when the Black Panthers were in a violent struggle, Dr. King had just been assassinated and Stokely was being harassed by the FBI.
Many people will probably ask questions about Stokely’s increased radicalism and obsession with Pan-African ideology in the later part of his political life. Scholars are still debating Stokely’s Pan-African ideology, and whether it betrayed a deep understanding or excessive idealism of his thinking. Joseph, however, insists that his plan was to create an unbiased, even-handed picture of Stokely. He portrays the revolutionary as a complex, charismatic figure. He pushed his friend Dr. King to denounce the Vietnam War, worked with voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and hung out with activist Tom Hayen. He also had a tendency towards womanizing, which led to his divorce to South African singer Miriam Makeba. But more than anything else, Stokely was an excellent organizer who participated in and helped put together every major civil rights demonstration and development in America during the early 60s.
Joseph has suggested that one of the reasons Stokely isn’t as well-known as his contemporaries Malcolm X and Dr. King might have to do with the fact that he wasn’t martyred. But that should in no way trivialize the massive impact that Stokely had on the black power movement. In the words of Joseph, Stokely pushed the envelope in racial discourse. By talking about antiwar activism and anti-imperialism, he was looking at both racial and economic injustice. Many of Stokely’s contemporaries are still alive, and have only good things to say about their now deceased comrade.
Maria Haymandou 