Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)

Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on the twenty-ninth of June 1941, and emigrated to New York at the age of eleven. He took his undergraduate degree at Howard University, was active with the Nonviolent Action Group, and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1961 as one of the Freedom Riders.

He was elected SNCC chairman in 1966 at twenty-five. The defining moment of his chairmanship came in June 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi, during the continuation of James Meredith's interrupted March Against Fear. After his arrest there — his twenty-seventh arrest in five years of organizing — he stood before a SNCC rally that evening and said: "What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!" The phrase entered American political vocabulary that night.

He served as SNCC chairman through 1967, as honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party through 1969, and then — at twenty-eight — left the United States for Conakry, Guinea, at the personal invitation of Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré. He took the name Kwame Ture in honor of both men. He lived in Guinea for the remaining twenty-nine years of his life.

He continued to organize and write throughout his exile, founding the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and lecturing across the United States and Europe in successive decades. His memoir Ready for Revolution, completed shortly before his death, is among the foundational documents of the American Black Power generation.

He died of prostate cancer in Conakry on the fifteenth of November 1998, age fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the organizer who gave Black Power its name and lived the second half of his life on the continent it pointed to.