Stokely Carmichael

4 Key excerpts on "Stokely Carmichael"

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  Say It Plain

  A Century of Great African American Speeches

  • Catherine Ellis, Stephen Drury Smith(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The New Press

    (Publisher)

  10. Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) Speech at University of California, Berkeley

  October 29, 1966

         

  Stokely Carmichael was the brilliant and impatient young civil rights leader who, in the 1960s, popularized the phrase “black power.” Carmichael was initially an acolyte of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his philosophy of nonviolent protest. Carmichael became a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but was radicalized when he saw peaceful protestors brutalized in the South.

  In the mid 1960s, Carmichael challenged the civil rights leadership by rejecting integration and calling on blacks to oust whites from the freedom movement. Following his arrest during a 1966 protest march in Mississippi, Carmichael angrily demanded a change in the rhetoric and strategy of the civil rights movement. “We’ve been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” Carmichael said. “What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power.’ ” 1

  Historian Adam Fairclough writes that King was “aghast” at Carmichael’s use of a slogan that sounded so aggressive. “Black power” was condemned by whites as a motto for a new form of racism. Some whites feared that black power was a call for race war. King urged Carmichael to drop the phrase but he refused.2 NAACP leader Roy Wilkins condemned the slogan as “the father of hate and the mother of violence,” predicting that black power would mean “black death.” 3

  Fellow civil rights organizer John Lewis, later a Democratic congressman from Georgia, remembered Carmichael as tall, lanky, and up-front. “He didn’t wait to be asked his opinion on anything—he told you and expected you to listen,” Lewis wrote. The two became estranged when Carmichael toppled Lewis from the SNCC chairmanship. 4

  In 1966 and 1967, Carmichael toured college campuses giving increasingly belligerent speeches. He coauthored a radical manifesto titled Black Power, in which he argued that civil rights groups had lost their appeal to increasingly militant young blacks. The movement’s voice, he wrote, had been hopelessly softened for “an audience of middle class whites.” 5

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  Africa in Black Liberation Activism

  Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Walter Rodney

  • Tunde Adeleke(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) Existentialist African Africans today, irrespective of geographical location, have a common enemy and face common problems. We are the victims of imperialism, racism, and we are a landless people. (Stokely Carmichael) The African connection that Malcolm X emphasized and the internationalization that was so crucial to his platform was, in Stokely Carmichael’s conviction, precisely the direction the black struggle should be headed. Malcolm had witnessed, and in fact his ideas had watered the soil of, the sprouting Black Power movement. He had foreseen the deepening crisis and growing disaffection and militancy of the urban youth, and had in fact predicted that 1965 was going to be a critical year that would witness eruption of the simmering conditions. Malcolm did not live to witness the riots in Watts and the “long hot summer” of 1965. Carmichael did. He was very much in the vanguard of the disaffected urban youth rebellion that gripped the nation that summer. 1 Malcolm X had no more dedicated and effective protégé than Carmichael. In fact, it would seem that his entire life was a conscious attempt to follow the footprints of Malcolm: to finish what he had started. Malcolm had no greater admirer in the generation of black student activists (SNCC) that he held in such high regard. Malcolm spoke to their frustrations, their burning desires, and seeming impatience with what they perceived as the slow pace of change, and the failure or inability of the mainstream civil rights movement to confront America. Consequently, when Carmichael subsequently veered in the direction of Africa, he would predicate his turn on precisely the same expansive and colored cosmopolitan rationale adduced by Malcolm and earlier generations of activists

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  The debate on black civil rights in America

  Second edition

  • Kevern Verney(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  47

  Reflecting other developments in African American historiography, several post-millennium studies examined the contribution of women and the role of gender in the black power movement. In Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017) Ashley Farmer highlighted the extent to which they were inspired by women activists of previous generations. Similarly, in analysing representations of masculinity in the black press D’Weston Haywood found that the macho rhetoric of male black power activists had its roots in ‘an influential masculinized discourse constructed in the black press over the course of decades’. In short, just as historians had acknowledged the existence of a ‘long civil rights movement’, there was now recognition that there was also a long black power movement.48

  The nature and importance of African American cultural achievement in the black power movement was a topic that was given rather more attention by scholars by the 1990s. The journalist Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991) provided an authoritative biography of the era's best known sporting icon. King of the World (1999) by David Remnick contributed another well researched and detailed study of Ali, whereas Mike Marqusee, Johnny Smith and Randy Roberts focused on his involvement with the Nation of Islam and his contribution to the African American freedom struggle.49

  In 1992 the historian William L. Van Deburg published New Day in Babylon, a study of the black power movement and American culture between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Five years later, in Black Camelot, he followed this up with an analysis of African American cultural icons of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1999 Komozi Woodard contributed a study on the black power cultural nationalist Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Julius E. Thompson examined the work of Dudley Randall and the black arts movement, and in 2003 Scot Brown provided a much-needed full-length study of Maulenga Karenga and his nationalist-cultural ‘US’ organization.50

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  Black Power Music!

  Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement

  • Reiland Rabaka(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  After all, Carmichael not only issued the call for the formation of “a national Black Panther political party,” but he and his Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) comrades also provided the Black Power Movement with its name. To reiterate, it was Carmichael who popularized the “Black Power” slogan during an impassioned speech delivered in the course of the 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi. 35 However, as Joseph’s judicious research highlights, throughout the Black Power period Carmichael went through great pains to explain that “Black Power” was not about hating White people, but about loving Black people. 36 Whites, to put it plainly, were not the focus of Black Power, and most Black Power proponents believed that Whites’ narrow-minded and knee-jerk reactions to the movement had more to do with their own, whether conscious or unconscious, deep-seated hatred of and historical amnesia concerning African Americans, their history, culture, and post-Civil Rights Movement struggles. What is more, Black Power radicals exclaimed, Whites’ histrionic and hyper-negative reactions to the Black Power Movement also seemed to be symptomatic of their unacknowledged uneasiness about the epoch-making calls for Black solidarity, Black self-love, and Black self-defense coming from African Americans coast to coast. 37 With respect to Carmichael’s conception of Black Power, Joseph astutely observed: For Carmichael, Black Power did indeed promote universalism, but it did so in Black. That is to say, Black Power recognized power’s ability to shape politics, identity, and civilization, and sought to extend these privileges to African Americans – a group that was too often excluded from even the broadest interpretations of whose interests constituted those of humanity

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