Kwame Ture ( Stokeley
Carmichael ) 1941-1998
Kwame Ture was born of working class parents in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad
on November 15,
1941. When he was seven years old, he migrated to New York City with
his parents, and four
sisters.. Ture was a brilliant student who excelled at the prestigious
Bronx High School of Science,
from which he graduated in 1960.
From 1960-1964 Kwame Ture studied philosophy at Howard University.
At Howard he was
exposed to some of the best minds in the African-American community, studying
with such
authors as the poet and folklorist, Sterling Brown, and the sociologist
and editor, Nathan Hare.
This was period of powerful and creative social activism for African-Americans,
and Howard
University was one of its centers. The university had been the site
of the NAACP's preparations
and moot court arguments for the pivotal Brown v. Topeka Board case before
the Supreme
Court in 1954, and there was a strong human rights tradition among the
faculty and student body.
Howard was the seat of the Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), a militant city-wide
student
protest organization that attacked racism in Washington, DC, rural
Maryland and Delaware,
where it was as virulent as in the deep south. As the leader of NAG,
Ture brought the
organization into an affiliation with SNCC (pronounced "snick,") the Student
Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee. The young people of SNCC had established
their organization as the
most militant of the civil rights groups in the south through such courageous
tactics as the sit-in
which defied the laws of segregation by taking black people into places
that were forbidden to them.
Kwame Ture's theoretical acumen, oratorical gifts and dauntless courage
soon brought him to
the leadership of SNCC. Shortly after leaving Howard in 1964, he
and other NAG members
joined SNCC in a "summer of action" in Mississippi, the state which had
earned the reputation as
the home of the most murderous white supremacists. Ture was then
named regional coordinator
of SNCC projects in the Mississippi delta, where he organized the voter
registration of a people
who had been denied the franchise since the end of Reconstruction.
1964 also was the year of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, (FDP).
The Democratic
Party of Mississippi refused to accept African-American delegates to the
national convention that
year though the FDP candidates had met every legal and procedural standard
impeccably. FDP's
challenge at the
convention was irrefutably sound but the National Democratic Party defied
every parliamentary
rule and seated the all-white Mississippi delegation. The FDP remained
a powerful force
however, registering thousands of black Mississippians.
Kwame Ture was elected Chairman of SNCC in 1966, the year of the great
march in Mississippi
that was in support of James Meredith, who had been turned away from a
court-ordered
admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. The slogan,
"Black Power" was the
rallying cry of that March and Kwame Ture
was its primary exponent.
As the Chairman of SNCC, Ture was frequently asked to speak on campuses
around the nation.
His sharp intellect and persuasive speaking style enabled him to be a major
influence on students
and others who heard him. He also was a featured speaker at the major
peace rallies of time, for
he was an implacable foe of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
A project for which Ture was field organizer was the Lowndes County (Alabama)
Freedom
Organization. It was during this project that the black panther symbol
was first displayed which
inspired Huey Newton and other California activists to organize the Black
Panther Party. Ture
worked closely with the Panthers and briefly served as their Chairman.
Kwame Ture had long been interested in Pan-Africanism, and was a serious
student of the
writings of the movement's leaders, particularly those of the post-colonial
heads of state, Julius
Nyerere of Tanzania, Guinea's Sekou Toure, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.
His name
combines the first name of Nkrumah and the last name of Sekou Toure, both
of whom he had
the honor of working with, serving for a time as Nkrumah's secretary.
In 1968, he married the great South African singer, Miriam Makeeba.
His work with Nkrumah and Toure led him to found the All-African People's
Revolutionary
Party whose chairman he remained until his death. In his unflagging
efforts to forge a diasporan
coalition of African peoples who could stand against imperialism and exploitation,
Ture attempted
to develop unified social and economic ideology. His study of the
writings of the Marxists and of
the principles of African socialism led him to scientific socialism, which
he advocated for the last
thirty years of his life.
Unlike most of the radical activists of the '60's, Kwame Ture never compromised.
His was a
voice that would accept nothing less than true empowerment for his people
even if that meant the
dismantling of the
international order that hoards the world's resources and keeps most of
its people down. He was
especially unforgiving of American capitalism, which he saw as the greatest
oppressor on Earth.
Even after his body weakened under assault of prostate cancer, his spirit
never faltered and his
commitment never flagged. To the end he worked to bring the various
elements of the
African-American community into coalition. To the end he answered the telephone,
"ready for the
revolution."