Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)

Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on the twenty-ninth of June 1941, the son of Adolphus Carmichael, a carpenter, and Mabel Charles Carmichael, a steamship stewardess. At the age of eleven he joined his family in Harlem, and he came of age in New York, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science before entering Howard University, where he took his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1964.

His awakening into the movement came early. In 1961 he joined the Freedom Rides as one of the youngest riders, enduring arrest and forty-nine days in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary. Through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he gave his energy to voter registration in the Deep South, most memorably in Lowndes County, Alabama, where he helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization — whose black-panther ballot symbol the Oakland party would later borrow. In May 1966, at Kingston Springs, Tennessee, he was elected chairman of SNCC, succeeding John Lewis.

That June, at a night rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, during the March Against Fear, he gave voice to a phrase that would echo across a generation, calling for "Black Power." He served afterward as honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. In 1968 he married the South African singer Miriam Makeba, and the following year he left the United States to make his home in Guinea, in West Africa, beside his teachers Kwame Nkrumah and President Ahmed Sékou Touré.

In 1978 he took the name Kwame Ture, honoring those two mentors, and devoted his remaining decades to the All-African People's Revolutionary Party — founded at Conakry in 1968 at Nkrumah's call, with Ture its co-founder and foremost organizer — and to the cause of Pan-African unity. He died in Conakry of prostate cancer on the fifteenth of November 1998, at fifty-seven. May his unbending voice for the dignity of African peoples be forever honored.