78 Facts About Stokely Carmichael

1.

Stokely Carmichael was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party, and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party.

2.

Stokely Carmichael became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses.

3.

Stokely Carmichael eventually decided to develop independent all-black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party.

4.

Stokely Carmichael became one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders of the late 1960s.

5.

The FBI targeted him for counterintelligence activity through its COINTELPRO program, so Stokely Carmichael moved to Africa in 1968.

6.

Stokely Carmichael reestablished himself in Ghana, and then Guinea by 1969.

7.

Stokely Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

8.

Stokely Carmichael attended Tranquility School there before moving to Harlem, New York City, in 1952 at the of age 11, to rejoin his parents.

9.

Stokely Carmichael's mother, Mabel R Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line.

10.

Stokely Carmichael's father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who worked as a taxi driver.

11.

Stokely Carmichael attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, being selected through high achievement on its standardized entrance examination.

12.

On student recognition Sunday at his church, Stokely Carmichael gave an eye-opening student sermon to the almost totally white congregation.

13.

Stokely Carmichael's Washington, DC apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates.

14.

Stokely Carmichael graduated in 1964 with a degree in philosophy.

15.

Stokely Carmichael was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University but turned it down.

16.

At Howard, Stokely Carmichael joined the Nonviolent Action Group, the Howard campus affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

17.

Stokely Carmichael was frequently arrested, and spent time in jail.

18.

Stokely Carmichael was arrested so many times for his activism that he lost count, sometimes estimating 29 or 32.

19.

Stokely Carmichael gained notoriety as a witty and hard-nosed leader among the prisoners.

20.

Stokely Carmichael served 49 days with other activists at Parchman.

21.

At 19, Stokely Carmichael was the youngest detainee in the summer of 1961.

22.

Stokely Carmichael spent 53 days at Parchman in a six-by-nine cell.

23.

Stokely Carmichael kept the group's morale up in prison, often telling jokes with Steve Green and the other Freedom Riders, and making light of their situation.

24.

In 1964, Stokely Carmichael became a full-time field organizer for SNCC in Mississippi.

25.

Stokely Carmichael worked on the Greenwood voting rights project under Bob Moses.

26.

Stokely Carmichael worked closely with Gloria Richardson, who led the SNCC chapter in Cambridge, Maryland.

27.

Stokely Carmichael soon became project director for Mississippi's 2nd congressional district, made up largely of the counties of the Mississippi Delta.

28.

Stokely Carmichael said, "what the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position".

29.

Stokely Carmichael became disillusioned with the growing struggles between SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which opposed Forman's strategy.

30.

Stokely Carmichael thought SCLC was working with affiliated black churches to undercut it.

31.

Stokely Carmichael was frustrated to be drawn again into nonviolent confrontations with police, which he no longer found empowering.

32.

In 1965, working as a SNCC activist in the black-majority Lowndes County, Alabama, Stokely Carmichael helped increase the number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600, being 300 more than the number of registered white voters.

33.

Stokely Carmichael refused, and avoided arrest after challenging the two officers to do so.

34.

Stokely Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966, taking over from John Lewis, an activist who later was elected to Congress.

35.

Stokely Carmichael did not want the big civil rights organizations or leaders involved, but was willing to have individual black men join him.

36.

Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book The Wretched of the Earth, along with others such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael led SNCC to become more radical.

37.

Stokely Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites.

38.

Stokely Carmichael said that whites should organize poor white southern communities, of which there were plenty, while SNCC focused on promoting African-American self-reliance through Black Power.

39.

Stokely Carmichael considered nonviolence a tactic, not a fundamental principle, which separated him from civil rights leaders such as King.

40.

Stokely Carmichael criticized civil rights leaders who called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle-class mainstream.

41.

At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, Stokely Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement.

42.

Stokely Carmichael encouraged King to demand unconditional withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, even as some King advisers cautioned him that such opposition might have an adverse effect on financial contributions to the SCLC.

43.

Stokely Carmichael privately took credit for pushing King toward anti-imperialism, and historians such as Peniel Joseph and Michael Eric Dyson agree.

44.

Stokely Carmichael joined King in New York on April 15,1967, to share his views with protesters on race related to the Vietnam War:.

45.

In May 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and was replaced by H Rap Brown.

46.

Stokely Carmichael accepted the position of Honorary Prime Minister in the Black Panther Party, but remained on the SNCC staff.

47.

Stokely Carmichael tried to forge a merger between the two organizations.

48.

Secondly, Stokely Carmichael discussed searching for different forms of political structure to solve political and economic problems.

49.

Stokely Carmichael discusses the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, the 1966 local election in Lowndes County, and the political history of Tuskegee, Alabama.

50.

Stokely Carmichael chose these examples as places where blacks changed the system by political and legal maneuvering within the system, but said they ultimately failed to achieve more than the bare minimum.

51.

Stokely Carmichael believed the Black Power Movement had to be developed outside the white power structure.

52.

Stokely Carmichael continued as a strong critic of the Vietnam War and imperialism in general.

53.

Stokely Carmichael lamented the 1967 execution of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, saying:.

54.

Stokely Carmichael visited the United Kingdom in July 1967 to attend the Dialectics of Liberation conference.

55.

Stokely Carmichael was present in Washington, DC on April 5,1968, the night after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

56.

Stokely Carmichael led a group through the streets, demanding that businesses close out of respect.

57.

Stokely Carmichael tried to prevent violence, but the situation escalated beyond his control.

58.

Stokely Carmichael held a press conference the next day at which he predicted mass racial violence in the streets.

59.

Huey P Newton suggested Carmichael was a CIA agent, slander that led to Carmichael's break with the Panthers and his exile from the US the following year.

60.

Stokely Carmichael became an aide to Guinean president Ahmed Sekou Toure, and a student of the exiled Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah.

61.

Three months after his arrival in Guinea, in July 1969 Stokely Carmichael published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning them for not being separatist enough and for their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals".

62.

The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Stokely Carmichael had come to agree with Malcolm X that white activists should organize their own communities before trying to lead black people.

63.

Stokely Carmichael remained in Guinea after his separation from the Black Panther Party.

64.

Stokely Carmichael continued to travel, write, and speak in support of international leftist movements.

65.

In 1971 he published his collected essays in a second book, Stokely Carmichael Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism.

66.

Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture in 1978 to honor Nkrumah and Toure, who had become his patrons.

67.

Stokely Carmichael was a Central Committee member during his association with the A-APRP and made many speeches on the party's behalf.

68.

Stokely Carmichael became a member of the Democratic Party of Guinea, the revolutionary ruling party.

69.

Stokely Carmichael sought Nkrumah's permission to launch the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, which Nkrumah had called for in his book Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare.

70.

Stokely Carmichael spoke on its behalf on several continents, at college campuses, community centers, and other venues.

71.

Stokely Carmichael formed the A-APRP with the initial goal of putting "Africa" on the lips of Black people throughout the diaspora, knowing that many did not consciously or positively relate to their ancestral homeland.

72.

Stokely Carmichael went to New York, where he was treated for two years at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, before returning to Guinea.

73.

Stokely Carmichael was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country.

74.

When Meredith got shot, Stokely Carmichael came up with the phrase and gathered a crowd to chant it in Greenwood, Mississippi.

75.

Stokely Carmichael participated in and contributed to the Black Freedom Struggle.

76.

Stokely Carmichael never switched from left to right in his politics as he got older, and his trajectory both marked and influenced the course of black militancy in the United States.

77.

In November 1964 Carmichael made a joking remark in response to a SNCC position paper written by his friends Casey Hayden and Mary E King on the position of women in the movement.

78.

Stokely Carmichael appointed several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chairman of SNCC; by the latter half of the 1960s, more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the first half.