It occurs to me that I should do a Black History Top Comments during the month of February. Yeah, I thinks it’s more than just a coincidence that it is the shortest month. The African American people have survived and even learned to thrive despite every effort of mainstream America, otherwise known as White America, to the contrary. Yeah, I said it. What?
Perhaps it is the name, most likely it is the name, that makes Stokely Carmichael stand out in history for me. I always liked the man’s style and greatly appreciate his revolutionary work with SNCC. There is no such thing as a perfect person, much less a perfect revolutionary. No human being can be summarized on a few pages of text.
Tonight, I do some homework. On Stokely Carmichael …
After a thorough reading of Denise Oliver Velez's FP from this morning
and stopping by Funky Parade part III in the Community Spotlight
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So, This Is Stokely Carmichael ...
Trinidadian by birth, raised in New York, and educated at Howard University. Stokeley Carmichael is a unique figure in the Civil Rights movement. In my opinion, his name is not well enough known, most likely for being “too radical” for popular culture. Carmichael evolves, in my mind, across the space between Dr King and Malcolm X. Like both of these men, Stokely Carmichael put efforts into action to make positive change and sustain movements.
from snccdigital.org
Because of his call for “Black Power” during the June 1966 Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael is often remembered as confrontational in style and far removed from nonviolence. Yet he credited nonviolent activism as leading him and other young Black people like himself into the Movement.
“It gave our generation–particularly in the South–the means by which to confront and entrenched and violent racism. It offered a way for a large number of [African Americans] to join the struggle. Nothing passive in that.”
Above all else, Stokely Carmichael was a grassroots organizer.
...
At 19-years-old, Carmichael was the youngest person to participate in the 1961 Freedom Rides, and he served fifty-three days in Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary. After his release from Parchman, Carmichael returned to Howard but came back to the Mississippi Delta every summer to work with SNCC organizing local voter registration efforts.
*emphasis added
Carmichael is credited with creating the phrase "Black Power" on June 16, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi. Reverend James Lawson, present at that moment, disagreed with Carmichael’s words and the manner in which he delivered them. I’m sure I am not alone in seeing the generational conflict at work here. I would guess that Carmichael’s youth made him hard for the older movement leaders to understand. At least from my little bit of research.
Stokely betrayed us in two ways: first, he became chair of SNCC after John Lewis had already been elected and had to leave, so that’s an old, tyrannical tactic that did not become Stokely or the movement.
Second, because he wanted to plant this notion of black power into the Mississippi March Against Fear, in ’66. He should have been talking to Martin as early as 1965. Stokely was getting frustrated in Lowndes County by that time. So he should have been talking to King and to others of us about all of this early on.
We were his friends. We had spent time in jail together. So he should have been exploring that discussion early on, as soon as he was developing it instead of deliberately — as he admitted — injecting it into the ’66 Meredith march.
For a slightly different perspective, check urbanintellectuals.com
Stokely Carmichael (also Kwame Ture; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian–American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement.
Growing up in the United States from the age of eleven, he graduated from Howard University and rose to prominence in the civil rights and Black Power movements, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and later as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party.
But, was he too radical for the Black Panthers?
As I mentioned, he was as much Malcolm as Martin and he was convinced that white activists needed a white movement to raise their own culture’s awareness first. Parenthetically, this was Malcolm’s position. The Panthers thought that there was a place for whites within the movement. Myself, this echoes debates I see today about exactly how black and white activists should work together intersectionally. The phrase “Get Your People” comes to mind.
Eventually, Carmichael married, expatriated to Africa, and denounced the BPP.
In 1968, he married Miriam Makeba, a noted singer from South Africa, and they left the US for Guinea the next year. Carmichael became an aide to the Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré, and a student of the exiled Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea’s official delegate to the United Nations. Three months after his arrival in Guinea, in July 1969, 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”.
Further reading, excerpted from NPR:
Historian Peniel Joseph's new biography of Carmichael, titled Stokely: A Life, shows that for a time, the Trinidad-born New Yorker was everywhere that counted in the South, a real-life Zelig: "He is an organizer who had his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960-1965."
Joseph, a professor at Tufts University, says Carmichael was ever-present in what he considers "the second half of the civil rights movement's heroic period." (After the Montgomery Bus Boycott and before the attempts to integrate the North.)
Photographs from the time show him walking down dusty highways with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, chatting easily with farmers in Lowndes County, Ala., listening to elderly black ladies who plied him with sweet tea on their front porches while he (often successfully) charmed them into joining him in organizing their neighbors. Joseph says Carmichael had "amazing charisma."
TOP COMMENTS
from your humble diarist:
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*(Trix = boy/girl? or just rabbit?) —diarist’s query — see poll*
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from elenacarlena:
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by the way, speaking of Kwame Nkrumah ...