Kwame Ture ( KWAH-may TOOR-ay; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, he moved to the United States at age 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. Ture was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party and as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
Carmichael was one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses. Like most young people in the SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state. 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. Inspired by Malcolm X's example, he articulated a philosophy of black power, and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. The author Richard Wright is credited with coining the phrase in his 1954 book Black Power.
Carmichael became one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders of the late 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover secretly identified Carmichael as the man most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America's "black messiah". The FBI targeted him for counterintelligence activity through its COINTELPRO program, causing Carmichael to move to Africa in 1968. He reestablished himself in Ghana, and then Guinea by 1969. There, he adopted the name Kwame Ture, and began campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism. Ture died of prostate cancer in 1998 at the age of 57.
Kwame Ture was born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael on June 29, 1941, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line. His father, Adolphus, was a carpenter. When he was two years old, his parents moved to the United States, leaving Carmichael to be raised by his grandmother and two aunts. He attended the British Tranquility Boys Intermediate School in Port of Spain. In 1952, at 11, Carmichael moved to United States to rejoin his parents, who were living in Harlem, New York City. The reunited Carmichaels eventually left Harlem to live in East Bronx neighborhood of Van Nest, an aging neighborhood primarily of Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants. According to a 1967 interview Carmichael gave to Life Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.
Carmichael became a naturalized U.S citizen in 1954 and attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York from 1956, being selected through high achievement on its standardized entrance examination. He was acquainted with fellow Bronx Science student Samuel R. Delany during his time there.
After graduation Carmichael enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. His professors included the poet Sterling Allen Brown, Nathan Hare, and the novelist Toni Morrison. Carmichael and fellow civil rights activist Tom Kahn helped to fund a five-day run of the Three Penny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill:
Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances. It was a classic win/win. Members of the Council got patronage packets of tickets for distribution to friends and constituents.
Carmichael's apartment on Euclid Street in Washington was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated from Howard in 1964 with a degree in philosophy and was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but turned it down.
At Howard, Carmichael joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Kahn introduced Carmichael and the other SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, an African-American leader who became an influential adviser to SNCC. Inspired by the sit-in movement in the southern United States during college, Carmichael became more active in the Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1950s, the far-right organization Jeune Europe emerged in Western Europe under the leadership of Jean-Francois Thiriart, who had been associated with collaborationist political networks in Belgium during World War II. The movement later drew attention for its attempts to position itself within broader anti-colonial and Third World nationalist currents, and it was reported to have expressed support for Carmichael's international civil rights and anti-imperialist advocacy.
In his first year at Howard University, in 1961, Carmichael participated in the Freedom Rides that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized to desegregate the interstate buses and bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as they came under federal rather than state law. They had been segregated by custom. He was frequently arrested and spent time in jail. He was arrested so many times for his activism that he lost count, sometimes estimating 29 or 32. In 1998, he told the Washington Post that he thought the total was fewer than 36.
Along with eight other riders, on June 4, 1961, Carmichael traveled by train from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi, to integrate the formerly "white" section on the train. Before getting on the train in New Orleans, they encountered white protesters blocking the way. Carmichael said, "They were shouting. Throwing cans and lit cigarettes at us. Spitting on us." Eventually, the group was able to board the train. When the group arrived in Jackson, Carmichael and the eight other riders entered a "white" cafeteria. They were charged with disturbing the peace, arrested, and taken to jail.
Eventually, Carmichael was transferred to the infamous Parchman Penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi, along with other Freedom Riders. He gained notoriety as a witty and hard-nosed leader among the prisoners.
He served 49 days with other activists at Parchman. At 19, Carmichael was the youngest detainee in the summer of 1961. He spent 53 days at Parchman in a six-by-nine cell. He and his colleagues were allowed to shower only twice a week, were not allowed books or any other personal effects, and were at times placed in maximum security to isolate them.
Carmichael said of the Parchman Farm sheriff:
The sheriff acted like he was scared of black folks and he came up with some beautiful things. One night he opened up all the windows, put on ten big fans and an air conditioner, and dropped the temperature to 38 degrees [Fahrenheit; 3 °C]. All we had on was T-shirts and shorts.
While being hurt on one occasion, Carmichael began singing to the guards, "I'm gonna tell God how you treat me", and the other prisoners joined in.
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. He knew their situation was serious: