Column: Black World
January-February 1999

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) 1941-1998

by Lou Turner

Editor's Note: This month I've turned "Black World" over to the following in memoriam to Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) by Michael Flug.—Lou Turner

It is said that in the last weeks of his life, as Kwame Ture was dying of cancer at his home in Conakry, Guinea, he still answered the telephone by saying "Ready for the Revolution." From the 1960s, when he was known as Stokely Carmichael, to his death on Nov. 15, 1998, he never wavered from the view that the "oppressive capitalist-racist system" needed to be overthrown.

Stokely came to New York City from Trinidad at the age of 11. He was a senior at Bronx High School of Science when the student sit-ins broke out across the South in February 1960. I first met him on a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) picket line outside a Woolworth's store. In 1961, he volunteered for the Freedom Rides, was arrested in Jackson, Miss., and incarcerated at Mississippi's notorious Parchman Penitentiary. After his Parchman experience, he joined SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee).

BLACK POWER IN THE SOUTH

It was in the mid-1960s that Stokely first came to national prominence. The Civil Rights Movement had reached a crossroads; members of SNCC, CORE and SCLC saw that the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, far from signalling the end of the struggle, revealed the need for a fuller attack on the roots of American racist society. Stokely went to Lowndes County, Ala., determined to register Black voters and form an independent political party.

The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), born in 1965, drew wide press attention when it chose an image of a black panther as its party symbol, and later when it became known as the "Black Panther Party." But there were differences of views in the LCFO. Lillian McGill, one of its founders, said that even though no whites had joined the LCFO, the press should not imply that LCFO members were "Black nationalists. We are not. We have asked many whites in the county, poor working-class whites, to join with us, to join our party."

Carmichael, however, stressed all-Black political organization and armed struggle for the LCFO. Charles Denby, editor of NEWS & LETTERS, and a native of Lowndes County, took issue with him. In his book, INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKER'S JOURNAL, Denby wrote: "My own conviction was that power did not come out of the barrel of a gun, but out of the mass power and reason of the people organized to win and defend freedom... [Stokely's] 'Black only' policy had the result of isolating the Black mass movement from the white revolutionary element."

In the same period, SNCC held a conference at Waveland, Miss. One of the subjects debated there was the role of women in SNCC. During the course of the debate, some of the men who had been dismissive of the issue were asked what they thought was the proper position for women. Stokely made a one-word response: "prone." He never repeated the remark, but he never lived it down either.

When the publicity about the LCFO was at its height, Stokely was elected chairman of SNCC. Two weeks later he joined the James Meredith March in Mississippi. On June 17, 1966, at a rally in Greenwood, Miss., Carmichael repeatedly used the slogan "Black Power" to rouse up the crowd. The press carried accounts of the rally around the world. Even though (as Carmichael often stated himself) another SNCC staffer, Willie Ricks, was the first to use the slogan, Carmichael quickly became known as the leading exponent of "Black Power."

THEORIES OF BLACK LIBERATION DEBATED

Debates soon erupted over the meaning of the concept. In a series of articles that summer, Carmichael argued that the struggle for "psychological equality" necessitated Black Power, and that the "white psyche" rendered all whites, "whatever their political persuasion," incapable of joining a liberation struggle in the U.S. He singled out the Niagara Movement, led by W.E.B. DuBois in the first decade of the 20th century, as a model to follow.

Raya Dunayevskaya responded that such a perspective obscured both the class line within white America and the vanguard role of Black Americans in shaping American history. She pointed out that the Niagara Movement was exclusively an organization of the "talented tenth," too conscious of their own privileges as an elite ever to become a mass organization. This separation between the elite and the masses, she said, resulted in a "type of thinking which Hegel called 'self-determination applied externally.' That is, from above, not as it emerged from internal self-development."

As the concept of "Black Power" was adopted by the Black masses it drew a dynamism of its own from the urban revolts. The way the masses reworked the "Black Power" concept took a different course than Stokely had intended. Stokely, however, continued to follow out the logic of his own viewpoint. He co-authored BLACK POWER: THE POLITICS OF LIBERATION with Charles Hamilton. In 1968 he left SNCC. The next year, he moved to Guinea to work with former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, then in exile there. He changed his name to Kwame Ture, and never lived in the U.S. again.

From his base in Guinea, Ture adopted the philosophy of Pan-Africanism and launched a new organization, the All-African People's Revolutionary Party. In frequent speaking trips to the U.S., he argued that Black Americans should adopt Pan-Africanism as their philosophy of liberation. As late as his afterword to the 1992 edition of BLACK POWER, written only weeks after the Los Angeles rebellion, he wrote, "Pan Africanism is the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism...[Black Power] can only be understood within the context of the African Revolution."

In the early 1990s, when I last spoke with Ture, I said that his viewpoint located the Subject for the American Revolution not within the Black masses who had proven their revolutionary character from slavery to today, but in an external force. He did not disagree, saying that the most important actions Black Americans could take were those supporting "progressive struggles" in Africa, because no real change in the conditions of Black Americans would be possible until Africa experienced a Pan-African revolution. Such a perspective is, I think, very far removed from the creative energy of the Black youth, women and workers who made the Civil Rights Movement a truly revolutionary struggle.

While it is of course true that no one life embodies a whole movement, Kwame Ture's life is much more than one man's story. In his development from a high school activist to a movement thinker and leader and in the way he set course down a "river of no return," he represented the best of the generation of 1960s revolutionaries born out of the Civil Rights Movement. Unfortunately, his legacy also reveals the limitations that movement reached when the theories it developed were not equal to the challenge of the times.

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