He struggled all his life, he struggled until the last second of the last minute of the last hour of the last day," Bob Brown, a longtime friend, told cheering people at a memorial service at Conakry's Gamal Abdel Nasser University. Ture's politics shifted over the years, from the nonviolence of the freedom riders to angry calls for armed revolt, but he never stopped championing the cause of socialist upheaval. Leftist rhetoric suffused the memorial, with Guinean politicians and American activists invoking the rallying cries of the s.
While some speakers were in their 20s and 30s, most were decades older, men and women who first got to know him - or at least know of him - as Stokely. Ture began his political career as a college student in the s, helping integrate public transportation in the American South as a freedom rider.
He soon became one of the most fiery figures of the era, popularizing the term "Black Power" and changing the way the once-nonviolent civil-rights movement was viewed. Carmichael was popular among his new classmates; he attended parties frequently and dated white girls. However, even at that age, he was highly conscious of the racial differences that divided him from his classmates.
Carmichael later recalled his high school friendships in harsh terms: "Now that I realize how phony they all were, how I hate myself for it. Being liberal was an intellectual game with these cats.
They were still white, and I was Black. Though he had been aware of the civil rights movement for years, it was not until one night toward the end of high school, when he saw footage of a sit-in on television, that Carmichael felt compelled to join the struggle. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair—well, something happened tox me.
Suddenly I was burning. A stellar student, Carmichael received scholarship offers to a variety of prestigious predominantly white people universities after graduating high school in There he majored in philosophy, studying the works of Camus , Sartre and Santayana and considering ways to apply their theoretical frameworks to the issues facing the civil rights movement.
He graduated from Howard University with honors in While a freshman at Howard University in , Carmichael went on his first Freedom Ride — an integrated bus tour through the South to challenge the segregation of interstate travel. During that trip, he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for entering the "whites only" bus stop waiting room and jailed for 49 days.
Undeterred, Carmichael remained actively involved in the civil rights movement throughout his college years, participating in another Freedom Ride in Maryland, a demonstration in Georgia and a hospital workers' strike in New York. Carmichael left school at a critical moment in the history of the civil rights movement: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had dubbed the summer of " Freedom Summer ," and rolled out an aggressive campaign to register Black voters in the Deep South.
With his eloquence, charisma and natural leadership skills, the newly minted college graduate was quickly appointed field organizer for Lowndes County, Alabama. When Carmichael arrived in Lowndes County in , African Americans made up the majority of the population but remained entirely unrepresented in government. In one year, Carmichael managed to raise the number of registered Black voters from 70 to 2, — more than the number of registered white voters in the county.
Unsatisfied with the response of either of the major political parties to his registration efforts, Carmichael founded his own party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. To satisfy a requirement that all political parties have an official logo, he chose a black panther, which later provided the inspiration for the Black Panthers. In addition to moral opposition to violence, proponents of nonviolent resistance believed that the strategy would win public support for civil rights by drawing a sharp contrast — captured on nightly television — between the peacefulness of the protesters and the brutality of the police and hecklers opposing them.
However, as time went on, Carmichael — like many young activists — became frustrated with the slow pace of progress and with having to endure repeated acts of violence and humiliation at the hands of white police officers without recourse.
By the time he was elected national chairman of the SNCC in May , Carmichael had largely lost faith in the theory of nonviolent resistance that he had once held dear. As chairman, he turned the SNCC in a sharply radical direction, making it clear that white members were no longer welcome. Carmichael decided that SNCC volunteers should carry on the march in his place. Upon reaching Greenwood, Mississippi, the enraged leader gave the address for which he would be best remembered: "We been saying 'freedom' for six years," he cried.
The phrase "Black Power" quickly caught on as the rallying cry of a younger, more radical generation of civil rights activists. The term also resonated internationally, becoming a slogan of resistance to European imperialism in Africa. In his book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation , Carmichael explained the meaning of the term: ''It is a call for Black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.
Black Power also represented Carmichael's break with King's doctrine of nonviolence and its end goal of racial integration. Instead, he associated the term with the doctrine of Black separatism, articulated most prominently by Malcolm X.
Unsurprisingly, the term proved controversial, evoking fear in many white Americans, even those previously sympathetic to the civil rights movement, and exacerbating fissures within the movement itself between older proponents of nonviolence and younger advocates of separatism.
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