Kwame Ture | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Kwame Ture | |
| Born | Stokely Carmichael June 29, 1941 Port of Spain, British Trinidad and Tobago |
| Died | November 15, 1998 (Age 57) Conakry, Guinea |
| Cause of death | Prostate Cancer |
| Nationality | Guinean |
| Political orientation | Communsim Nkrumahism (developed what is now known as Nkrumahism-Toureism-Cabralism) Scientific Socialism Pan-Africanism |
| Political party | Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Black Panther Party Democratic Party of Guinea - African Democratic Rally All-African People's Revolutionary Party |
Kwame Ture, born Stokely Carmichael, was a prominent civil rights organizer and founder of the Black Power movement. After studying Marxist theory in high school, Ture would go on to embrace political activism throughout his years in Howard University. During those years, he was introduced to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which despite being founded on the belief that racism and aparthied could be ended through nonviolence, the influences and later the leaderships of Kwame Ture and H. Rap Brown would lead the organization into becoming a hotbed for Black Power ideology. While leading SNCC, Kwame Ture led an ideological shift which resulted in the expulsion of white members from the organization, denunciation of Zionism and capitalism and calls for Black Power as a means to counteract white supremacy. After taking up Nkrumah's offer while in Conakry, Kwame Ture moved to Guinea, where he befriended Co-Presidents Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah and lived with his wife, Mariam Makeba. The purpose of him moving was to build the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and carry out a continental war of people's liberation.[1]
Biography
Early life
On June 29th, 1941; Stokely Carmichael was born in his father's house in the city of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His father, Adolphus Carmichael, was a carpenter and had built the house in which he and his family resided in. In 1944 his mother, Mabel Carmichael, who was born in the US Panama Canal Zone, moved to the United States due to tensions with her in-laws. Two years later his father would join her in Harlem, leaving Stokely to be raised by his grandmother and aunts for 6 years.
At 11 years old, Stokely and his siblings then moved to his parents to New York; where the Carmichaels lived as one of the few Africans in a predominantly white community in the Bronx populated by Italian, Irish and Jewish folk. His father was able to purchase the home in the white community due to it being cramped and ugly, making it undesirable for most buyers. Because of the building's state, Adolphus Carmichael worked tirelessly to renovate and improve the house, thus gaining respect from the locals. After being integrated with the locals, Stokely engaged in petty theft due to peer pressure from his friends, but later left the Morris Park Dukes street gang after they started producing zip guns.
Carmichael was later enrolled at the Bronx High School of Science, an elite predominantly white school in his area. While in high school, Stokely consistently excelled beyond his peers despite their affluent backgrounds and become an exotic attraction to white observers die to his race and high intelligence. During these years, Stokely became good friends with Gene Dennis, a member of the Young Communist League (YCL) and son of Communist Party USA member Eugene Dennis. This friendship introduced the young Carmichael to a series of YCL meetings and study sessions. His introduction to Marxism also heightened his interest in politics, which over time made him familiar to names like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Despite this, he didn't join any Marxist organizations due to his religiosity. To better understand the experiences of Black people, Carmichael turned to authors like C. L. R. James and George Padmore.[1]
Howard University
Graduating in 1960, Carmichael would enroll at Howard University where he would receive his degree in Philosophy. While in Howard University, Stokely's political life grew more active when presented with the popularity and successes of Dr. King's nonviolent movement in Alabama. Due to King managing to rake in support from white moderates to combat Jim Crow, he gained a deep sense of respect for King and was an avid supporter, leading him to part ways with black nationalists in the community. During this period, Stokely went on to protest against a number of issues, such as the Sharpsville Massacre in South Africa and Segregation. While protesting against the Committee for Un-American activities with local communists, Carmichael noted the lack of Africans present which he found typical of the socialists groups he was aware of. It was at the protest where he discovered an all black group associated with the D.C's Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), a group made up of mostly Howard University students. It was believed that Howard University refused to recognize NAG to give the school administration plausible deniability, avoiding the expulsion of black student activists as done prior in several black universities. The discovery prompted Stokely to join enthusiastically, as prior he felt isolated and surrounded by white faces. In NAG, he met H. Rap Brown, who would go on to become a heavily influential figure in the Black Power Movement. As a young adult in Howard, Stokely was introduced to the immense self-immolation of black identity that was omnipresent in campus, as well as the attempts to prevent non-American Africans from interacting with Afro-Americans. The latter was brought to his attention during the school's orientation for foreigners, in which administrators warned them not to interact with "American Negros" on the basis of cultural differences and violence in their communities. In another instance, his girl friend was threatened with expulsion for wearing her natural hair.[1]
SNCC
In the aftermath of the Greensboro sit-ins, a nation-wide trend of social activism began to take place. Initially, Stokely didn't think much of it given it was a minor case of African-Americans sitting at a segregated area. Soon afterwards, however, sit-ins began to take place across the Black Belt before spreading across the rest of the United States four months later. The rise in public disobedience and participation in the civil rights movement then led to Ella Baker founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) two months later with the help of Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Despite King's intention of creating a youth wing subordinate to the SCLC, Ms. Baker envisioned an independent student movement and refused to be apart of any arrangement that would lead to the coopting of the student movement by Dr. King and his ministers of the SCLC, prompting her to walk out of the student conference that created SNCC.[1]