Boy, are we stoked to talk about Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998). We're also carmichaeled, whatever that means. Stokely Carmichael, who later took the name Kwame Ture (that's toor-AY), was a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization run by ballet dancers.

Just kidding. It was run by students.

SNCC ("snick"), which often worked with the SCLC, was a major player in the Civil Rights Movement. SNCC folks participated in campaigns like the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer. Their accomplishments are nothing to snccer at, unlike our puns.

Disillusioned

Carmichael was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and moved to New York, where his parents had immigrated earlier, as a teenager. A smart kid from a tough neighborhood, he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, a mostly all-white school. Looking back on those years, Carmichael felt that his friendships with white students there were fake; he hated himself for it (source).

He saw his father buy into the American Dream and die young because of it:

My old man believed in this work-and-overcome stuff. He was religious, never lied, never cheated or stole. He did carpentry all day and drove taxis all night. The next thing that came to that poor black man was death—from working too hard. And he was only in his 40s. (Source)

When Carmichael was at Bronx Science, he watched a TV news segment about the lunch counter sit-ins in the South, young kids having food thrown at them and being knocked off their stools and getting back up again and again.

It changed his life.

He joined CORE, and participated in protests in New York and sit-ins down South. In college at Howard University (he got accepted to some elite mostly white colleges but wasn't about to do that again), he went on Freedom Rides, crashed a whites-only bus station waiting room in Jackson, Mississippi, and went to jail for it. Right after graduation in 1964, he joined SNCC, registering voters in Alabama and even forming his own political party. Its logo? A black panther.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

SNCC got along with the SCLC for a long time, until they didn't. Around 1965–66, Stokely Carmichael decided that King's nonviolence wasn't doing enough fast enough. He also thought that King's methods felt too much like begging and depended largely on white benevolence, which Carmichael did not trust.

So, influenced by Malcolm X, he started advocating a Black nationalist approach, which meant Black self-determination independent of white help or hindrance. His views were summarized in the phrase "Black Power," which he popularized. Power over to the Glossary for more. He also was the first to use the term "institutional racism" to describe broad social and political trends which subtly kept Blacks segregated and in the underclass.

Black Power Rangers

Whether or not the "power" in Black Power referred to violence was controversial, but some people certainly interpreted it that way. "Some people" included the Invaders, the young folks who made so much trouble for Dr. King during his Memphis sanitation march. Black Power also led to the creation of the Black Panthers, an armed organization that, among other things, served as a civilian watchdog group focused on curbing police brutality in Black communities.

Carmichael and King disagreed on religion and tactics, but they were united in their opposition to the Vietnam War. Carmichael was also not entirely opposed to working with whites, but he emphasized racial solidarity as King moved increasingly toward class solidarity.

Unlike so many people in this list, Stokely Carmichael was not assassinated. He died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 while living in Guinea.

However.

Carmichael (Ture, at the time of his death) claimed that, "In 1967, U.S. imperialism was seriously planning to assassinate me. It still is, this time by an FBI induced cancer, the latest in the white man's arsenal of chemical and biological warfare […]" (source).