“Stokley, A Life” – Stokely Carmichael, Controversial Black Activist Called For “Black Power”

by 12/20/2017

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for “Black Power” during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed that night. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century.

During the heroic early years of the civil rights movement, Carmichael and other civil rights activists advocated nonviolent measures, leading sit-ins, demonstrations, and voter registration efforts in the South that culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Still, Carmichael chafed at the slow progress of the civil rights movement and responded with Black Power, a movement that urged blacks to turn the rhetoric of freedom into a reality through whatever means necessary. Marked by the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., a wave of urban race riots, and the rise of the anti-war movement, the late 1960s heralded a dramatic shift in the tone of civil rights. Carmichael became the revolutionary icon for this new racial and political landscape, helping to organize the original Black Panther Party in Alabama and joining the iconic Black Panther Party for Self Defense that would galvanize frustrated African Americans and ignite a backlash among white Americans and the mainstream media. Yet at the age of twenty-seven, Carmichael made the abrupt decision to leave the United States, embracing a pan-African ideology and adopting the name of Kwame Ture, a move that baffled his supporters and made him something of an enigma until his death in 1998.

A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.

‘Stokely: A Life’ by Peniel E. Joseph

 March 7, 2014, Washington Post

A “Jeopardy” answer might be: “He was the most famous civil rights activist not to attend the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The correct question to that answer is “Who was Stokely Carmichael?” Another such answer might be: “He invented the slogan ‘Black Power’ and married famed South African singer Miriam Makeba.” The question again is “Who was Stokely Carmichael?”

I asked my oldest sister, who was a member of the Philadelphia branch of the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which Carmichael was a member and eventually chaired) why she with several others started the Black Student League at Temple University in 1966. “It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “At a meeting at Lincoln University in 1966, Stokely Carmichael encouraged black students to start them.” Ever the political organizer, this Carmichael. Yet Peniel E. Joseph’s biography provides various answers to the question of who Carmichael really was and how he acquired so much influence over his peers.

Carmichael was born in the Caribbean, lived in the United States and died in Africa. The Pan-Africanism he was to advocate in his later life was a philosophical and political attempt to tie this sense of black diaspora together.

Born in 1941 in Trinidad, Carmichael grew up in the United States, attending a largely Jewish high school in New York City. He came not from a communist background — that would have made him a red-diaper baby — but from a progressive Jewish and intensely liberal Christian milieu that shaped his intellectual and political beliefs, making him a kind of pink-diaper baby. He went to college at historically black Howard University. His engagement with the civil rights movement — inspired by peace activist Bayard Rustin — led to long organizing sojourns in Alabama (the attempt in Lowndes County to create an independent black political party) and Mississippi (Freedom Summer Schools and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to unseat the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention) and a deep familiarity with rural black Southern life, for which he retained a lifelong fondness. He was arrested dozens of times for his civil rights activism, and his heroism in the face of fierce racial violence is both undeniable and admirable.

He became a truly committed leftist (his opposition to the Vietnam War split the civil rights movement and moved Martin Luther King to oppose the war, too) and a black nationalist, positions that he discovered were not easily compatible with each other during his “flirtation” (Carmichael’s term) with the Black Panther Party in California. He traveled the ultra-radical circuit of the day: Cuba, North Vietnam, Algeria, Egypt and the leftist salons of Europe. He disavowed nonviolence and touted violent revolution to overturn the American empire. The irony that he was feted in countries that were less free than the United States and less tolerant of dissent did not seem to have struck him‘Stokely: A Life’ by Peniel E. Joseph (Basic )

Ultimately, he wound up in sub-Saharan Africa, a guest of Sékou Touré, the head of Guinea, who was a student of the exiled Kwame Nkrumah. The first president of Ghana, a founding member of the Organization of African Unity and a Pan-Africanist, Nkrumah was seen for a time as the face of African liberation by blacks worldwide, and he imagined that he could unify the continent under his rule. But Nkrumah was ousted from power in 1966 and dreamed of and schemed at achieving it again until his death in 1972.

Carmichael encountered all this revolutionary, history-making glory before he was 30. Like many others in the American 1960s, he lived an accelerated youth and young adulthood, which explains why this biography devotes 14 of its 16 chapters to him in the 1960s. Only one chapter covers the last 30 years of his life (he died in 1998), when he seemed to be simply spinning his wheels intellectually. He tried, as an activist, to organize something that refused to be organized, something that existed in the minds of black people: their idealized unity and their perfected liberation, a desire that fed and exhausted itself on black people’s contradictory beliefs in the deserved yet stern majesty of their fate and in their failure to be worthy of it. He wrapped up all of these experiences of blackness with the word “African,” which simplified matters without clarifying very much. What, after all, is an African on a continent positively riven by the awesome complexities of multiple identities? But the virtue of being African was that it was clearly not European, and for many black people that was more than enough.

Joseph’s account of Carmichael’s life is well-written and well-researched, providing persuasive explanations for his appeal. Carmichael was handsome, articulate, brilliant at times, young, reckless yet disciplined. Joseph also adeptly chronicles his subject’s transformation into a revolutionary, driven by U.S. government harassment and the trauma of seeing several friends die at the hands of hard-core segregationists. But he was, too, a product of the 1960s zeitgeist of liberation begetting liberation, the youthfully immature combination of cynicism and utopianism that characterized the radical politics of the time.

Malcolm X (“black America’s district attorney,” Joseph calls him), the firebrand minister of the Nation of Islam who became a Pan-Africanist revolutionary, looms large over this book. Carmichael was entranced by Malcolm, as were many young blacks of the 1960s. In fact, once Carmichael professed Black Power in 1966 and black control of black communities, he became, for the press, Malcolm’s replacement as the black enfant terrible of the civil rights movement. When Mad magazine parodied the movement in its special race issue in June 1967, Carmichael — not the late Malcolm X — was presented as King’s chief ideological rival.

But Malcolm’s mythologizing of the black criminal in his famous autobiography led to a romanticizing of the black prisoner. This belief that the prisoner was inherently a political revolutionary led to the thuggish excesses of the Black Panthers, the Black Mafia offshoot of the Nation of Islam that afflicted the South Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up, and the Ford Foundation’s funding of Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers. There was a strange, white-liberal-leftist belief that the criminal class was the truly authentic element of everyday black America.

Carmichael knew that his arrest record gave him “street cred,” but he was skeptical of revolutionary thugs, even as he ignored, even promoted, the authoritarian nature of a good deal of international black political leadership, denouncing “the superior role of the individual,” the only true safeguard against authoritarianism and majority tyranny, as “bourgeoisie garbage.” It’s a common belief among the persecuted that iron, dictatorial leadership will make them strong because it will give them harsh discipline.

Joseph’s biography fills a huge void and is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on the civil rights movement.

Gerald Early is a professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book is “A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports.”

STOKELY

A Life

By Peniel E. Joseph

Basic Civitas. 399 pp. $29.99

Click here to watch the video:

Dr. Peniel Joseph at the LBJ Library in conjunction with HBO and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the LBJ Library held a special preview screening and discussion of the new HBO film “All the Way” starring Bryan Cranston in his Tony Award-winning role as Lyndon Johnson and Anthony Mackie as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peniel E. Joseph (born 1973) is an American historian, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. He is the founder of the “Black Power Studies” subfield of American History and American Civil Rights History. He is a frequent commentator on CSPANNPR, and PBS’s NewsHour. He has also appeared on NBC’s Morning Joe, and the Colbert Report. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships, and most recently at the Hutchins Center at the W.E.B. du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University.

Joseph has served on the faculties of the University of Rhode IslandSUNY—Stony Brook, and Brandeis University. In 2009, together with ASU Foundation Professor Matthew C. Whitaker at Arizona State University, Joseph founded the Barack Obama Conference on American Democracy (BOAD), this spring celebrating its fifth year. In the fall of 2013, he founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) at Tufts University. Currently, Joseph is the director of the CSRD and a Professor of History at Tufts. He lives in SomervilleMassachusetts.

Early years

Joseph was born and raised in New York. His mother, a Haitian immigrant to the United States, was a major influence on his current work. Because of her, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and other like leaders were household names during Joseph’s upbringing. Also because of her, he was raised speaking and remains fluent in Haitian Creole.

Joseph finished high school at age 16, and attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Africana Studies and European History. He received a Ph. D. from Temple University in 2000 with a thesis titled “Waiting ’till the midnight hour : black political and intellectual radicalism, 1960-1975”[1]

Publications

  • Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2006. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 1530 libraries.[2] It was reviewed in The American Historical Review,[3] Journal of African American History [4] Contemporary Sociology,[5]
  • Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. New York, NY: BasicCivitas Books, 2010. According to WorldCat, held in 1120 libraries [2]
  • Stokely: A Life. , 2014. (a biography of Stokely Carmichael.)
  • The Black Power Movement : Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era New York : Routledge, 2006. Reviewed in Journal of American History [6]
  • Neighborhood Rebels : Black Power at the Local Level New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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