Devinn Francis Introduction:Stokely Carmichael was a civil activist and one of the youngest imprisoned for his participation and work with the freedom writers. On October 29th, 1966 he gave a speech called “Black Power”. During this time whites and blacks were segregated so there were many American civil right movements going on. His main purpose for giving the speech was to persuade and encourage blacks to protest against segregation. He wanted whites to understand that it was unfair to be treated differently because of the difference in their skin color. Stokely Carmichael impacted many people's lives by changing their opinions, and showing what it means to have equal rights. Author’s Purpose:In his speech he stated that “If someone wants…show more content…
Bettmann/Corbis Before he became famous — and infamous — for calling on black power for black people, Stokely Carmichael was better known as a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. The tall, handsome philosophy major from Howard University spent summers in the South, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, to get African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi registered to vote in the face of tremendous, often violent resistance from segregationists. Historian Peniel Joseph's new biography of Carmichael, titled Stokely: A Life, shows that for a time, the Trinidad-born New Yorker was everywhere that counted in the South, a real-life Zelig: "He is an organizer who had his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960-1965." Joseph, a professor at Tufts University, says Carmichael was ever-present in what he considers "the second half of the civil rights movement's heroic period." (After the Montgomery Bus Boycott and before the attempts to integrate the North.) Photographs from the time show him walking down dusty highways with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, chatting easily with farmers in Lowndes County, Ala., listening to elderly black ladies who plied him with sweet tea on their front porches while he (often successfully) charmed them into joining him in organizing their neighbors. Joseph says Carmichael had "amazing charisma." A Call For Black Power Carmichael spent the early '60s firmly embracing nonviolent protest: sit-ins, marches, assemblies. But the soaring victories of the late '50s and early '60s seemed to bog down after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Joseph says Carmichael began to wonder if new methods needed to be considered. In 1966, he used the phrase "black power" at a rally in Mississippi. It caught the nation's attention, but it meant different things to different people. Many whites who heard the phrase were uneasy, Joseph says. "They assumed that black power meant being anti-white and really sort of violent, foreboding." Black listeners, on the other hand, heard a call "for cultural political and economic self-determination," Joseph says. The phrase, he adds, resonated powerfully for a people who'd long been measured by arbitrarily set white standards and aesthetics. "We have to stop being ashamed of being black!" was the first point in a four-part manifesto he often used in his speeches. Black, Carmichael told his audiences, was survivor-strong. It was resourceful. And beautiful. Tall and thin, with limpid eyes and a dazzling smile that contrasted with his deeply brown skin, Carmichael walked like he thought he was a good-looking guy — in an era when, for many blacks, lighter was better. "That was really one of his most important legacies," Joseph says. "He was really defiant in declaring 'black is beautiful' well before that became popular in the late '60s." In other words, Carmichael was black and proud years before James Brown turned the concept into a best-selling R&B hit. 'The United States Has No Conscience' He was also rethinking the practicality of nonviolence in an environment where black life was often viewed as disposable.
Lynn Pelham/Time The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner in Neshoba County, Miss., the assassination of Malcolm X and the crushing government response to the unrest that had blazed through several cities by the late '60s caused Carmichael to rethink his beliefs. King (who regarded the younger Carmichael as one of the movement's most promising leaders) believed in the concept of "redemptive suffering" and thought the sight of protesters accepting beatings, dog bites and fire-hosing would soften America's heart and inspire the country to reject segregation. But after seeing so many of his comrades maimed and killed, Carmichael no longer shared that belief. King had gotten a lot right, Carmichael said, but in betting on nonviolence, "he only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience." And it was becoming increasingly hard for him to live in the United States. Hounded by the FBI at home, tracked by the CIA when he went abroad, Carmichael had had enough. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in homage to two African heroes — his friend Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of independent Ghana), and Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, the country that had welcomed the former civil rights worker as an honored citizen. Ture would live for another three decades, visiting the United States frequently as he traveled the globe preaching the merits of pan-Africanism and scientific socialism. People listened — but not in the same numbers as they had in the early days. Ture, with his modest lifestyle and reminders of communal responsibility seemed ... quaint. "It's interesting," biographer Joseph notes: "Times changed, but Stokely didn't." The former civil rights warrior died in Guinea in 1998 at age 57, of prostate cancer. And while he's no longer a household name in most places, Peniel Joseph says, Stokely Carmichael's legacy is the very notion of black power, "which was enormously successful in redefining the contours of African-American identity but also race relations in the United States — and globally." 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 Carmichael didn't shrink from these views when he addressed mostly white audiences in places like Berkeley. He spoke with a dry sense of humor, a jagged edge of anger, and a confidence described as strutting while standing still. "He became the personification of raw militancy," Lewis said.6 In 1967, SNCC severed ties with Carmichael. He became honorary prime minister of the Black Panthers but soon left that group over disagreements on seeking support from whites. Carmichael moved to the West African nation of Guinea in 1969. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of Sekou Ture, the Marxist leader of Guinea, and Kwame Nkrumah, the deposed independence leader of Ghana. Kwame Ture lived in self-imposed exile for thirty years but returned to the U.S. for speeches and political activity. In 1996, he sought treatment in New York for prostate cancer, still answering the phone, "Ready for the Revolution!" He died two years later at his home in Africa.7
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