“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

“Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation’s out of breath. We ain’t running no more.”

Stokely Carmichael was one of the most important figures in the US Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar campaign in the 1960s, who was best known for creating the phrase "Black Power", his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), his involvement in the original Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, his fiery speeches, and his fierce intellect. He was widely viewed as the successor to Malcolm X after his assassination in 1965, and although he was publicly critical of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent movement he maintained a close friendship with him, other moderate civil rights activists, and well meaning people of other races who supported the cause of freedom and equality for all mankind. He was arguably one of the most influential and most feared black Americans during the peak of his activity in the latter half of the 1960s, until he moved to Africa with his new wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, where he lived until his death from cancer in 1998.

Carmichael was born in Port of Prince, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago in 1941. His mother, a cabin line stewardess, left their crowded family home for New York City when Stokely was three, and his father, a skilled carpenter, followed two years later. He would not see either of them until he reached the age of 11, when he flew to NYC to move in with them in the Bronx. Port of Prince was a majority black city with blacks in all positions of power, and growing up there was essential to his view that black people were capable of governing themselves effectively without the aid of other races, including whites. He was loved by his grandmother and aunts, and he thrived under their care while he simultaneously developed an independent streak.

The British based education he received in Trinidad and Tobago served him well when he moved to the US, as he excelled in his studies at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and at Howard University. His classmates and neighbors included numerous Jewish and Italian families, including one who introduced him to the vibrant left wing intellectual subculture that existed in the city in the 1950s. He attended talks and meetings, which became the origin of his political activities at Bronx Science and Howard.

The beginnings of the student civil rights movement coincided with Carmichael's matriculation at Howard in 1960, as college students from North Carolina A&T began the first of a series of nonviolent sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the city of Greensboro. These sit-ins spread to other cities in the South, in stores and restaurants where blacks were not allowed to dine, and these protests led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) later that year. Carmichael formally joined the movement later that year, participating in sit-ins in Virginia and other civil rights protests in Maryland, and his intellect and commitment to the cause led him to become a leader on campus and the following year, when he served as one of the Freedom Riders that sought to integrate buses and their terminals throughout the Deep South.

Through his participation in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) at Howard and SNCC, Carmichael was introduced to and became familiar with civil rights leader that included Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, John Lewis (who he later succeeded as the head of SNCC), and Tom Hayden, a white student at the University of Michigan who gained fame as one of the founding fathers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Carmichael's coming of age came about when he participated in voter registration movements, freedom marches and protests in Alabama and Mississippi, which began during the summers between his studies at Howard and continued after he received his bachelor's degree in 1964. He ingratiated himself with local community leaders, and his tireless efforts, frequent influential speeches and ebullient personality led to his recognition as one of the young faces of the Civil Rights Movement. By 1966 he was elected as president of SNCC, and during that year he become known to the country at large, particularly due to his famous "Black Power" speech in June of that year, in which he proclaimed that black autonomy and solidarity rather than alignment with liberal whites and members of other races was essential to the advancement of the race. He adopted this position after civil rights groups failed to get representatives from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seated to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, as party leaders chose segregationist delegates instead, and due to persistent failures of the US government under President Johnson to protect civil rights activists in the Deep South from abuse by local officials, along with Johnson's escalation of the War in Vietnam.

Carmichael became a frequently sought after speaker on college campuses and abroad, which provided SNCC which the necessary funds it needed to continue its activity. However, Stokely's ego and independence fell afoul of the committee's leadership, and his increasingly more extreme statements and positions led to his isolation and ultimate replacement, particularly after he traveled to Europe and Cuba and incurred the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, President Johnson, and moderate civil rights leaders who disagreed with his tactics and rejection of nonviolence as a tool to achieve racial equality. His travels abroad ultimately led to his disillusionment with the United States, and in 1968, not long after Dr. King's assassination, he moved to Guinea in West Africa. He adopted the name Kwame Turé, taken from the names of two of Africa's most prominent leaders, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, and Sekou Touré, the first president of Guinea. Unfortunately these two men and others like them became oppressive dictators shortly after their installation as the heads of government, and Carmichael became a marginalized and ineffective civil rights leader during the remainder of his life.

Carmichael was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996, which claimed his life two years later at the age of 56.

In Stokely: A Life, the noted Haitian American historian Peniel E. Joseph has done a masterful job in detailing the life of this legendary but often misunderstood man, who was an energetic and influential civil rights leader and the key figure in the Black Power movement, but also ostracized white liberals and moderate civil rights activists by his increasingly more extreme positions and statements during his most active years. This book is a valuable contribution to American history and the history of the movement, and it is a compelling, readable and detailed biography, with excellent and even analysis and criticism of the man throughout. It focuses on Carmichael's activity in the US far more than his participation after he moved to Guinea in 1968, though, which is a notable but minor weakness that kept me from giving it a full five stars.

This short YouTube video is an excerpt of one of Carmichael's more fiery speeches, which provides a valuable look at his power and intellect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxrzTsfpPfM. ( )

This detailed and comprehensive biography of the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) founder who became the first face of the Black Power movement in the U.S. is not particularly easy reading (chock full of details and footnotes, as befits its history professor author), but it does offer a coherent description of the middle ground that existed between the images of “peaceful” Martin Luther King, Jr., and “radical” Malcolm X.

In reality, the same urge to justice that drove Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidadian immigrant, from voter registration to an embrace of Pan-Africanism, was already no doubt working on his slightly elder peers, as witnessed by their later works.

Joseph, a professor at Tufts, has documented Carmichael’s public life exceptionally well, though those who wish more personal revelation should probably look elsewhere. Instead, we get a very clear history of Carmichael’s evolution from civil rights to black nationalism, in a way that makes sense of his decisions.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/86781822406/stokely-a-life-by-peniel-e-joseph-bas... ( )