Stokely Carmichael

Carmichael married famous South-African singer and civil rights activist ‘Miriam Makeba’ in 1968. Their marriage ended in divorce.

In 1980, he married Marlyatou Barry, a doctor from Guinea and fathered a son, Bokar Carmichael. The couple divorced after two years.

He died of prostate cancer in Guinea at the age of fifty-seven. He had been receiving treatment for two years before his death.

Stokely Carmichael was born to Adolphus and Mabel R. Carmichael in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His father was a carpenter and taxi-driver and his mother was a stewardess.

When he was two years old, his parents immigrated to New York and left him in the care of his grandmother and his two aunts. He studied in ‘Tranquility School’ in Trinidad. At the age of eleven, he moved to New York to stay with his parents.

In 1954, his family moved to Van Nest neighbourhood in East Bronx. Here, he joined a gang called ‘Morris Park Dukes’, a youth gang that indulged in theft.

In 1956, he got admission to ‘Bronx High School of Science’, an elite and selective school, after qualifying through an admissions test. His classmates here were the children of New York’s rich upper-class white residents and Carmichael faced discrimination on account of his race.

He graduated from high school in 1960 and received scholarships to many esteemed Universities, but joined the historically black ‘Howard University’, the same year. He studied philosophy there and his teachers here included some very eminent people, like Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare and Toni Morrison.

Carmichael soon joined the ‘Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’ (SNCC), an ‘American Civil Rights Movement’ organization. In 1961, he joined ‘Freedom Riders’, a group that defied discrimination in interstate buses by boarding them. He went on many freedom rides and on one such trip he was arrested and jailed for forty-nine days in Mississippi.

He remained active in the civil rights movement throughout his college years and graduated from the University in 1964, after which he began his work for the SNCC.

As a part of SNCC’s campaign to register black voters, he was chosen to be the field organizer for Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965. Under his leadership, the number of registered black voters in Alabama grew from 70 to 2600.

He founded the political organization ‘Lowndes County Freedom Organization’ in 1965 and chose the ‘Black Panther’ as its mascot, to symbolically oppose the ‘White Rooster’ mascot of the ‘Democratic Party’, dominated by white people. The party lost the elections, but garnered a lot support in the region.

He was elected chairman of SNCC in 1966. Initially, Carmichael was a promoter of non-violent resistance, a philosophy advocated by Martin Luther King Jr. But by 1966, he got disillusioned by the sluggish progress and repeated brutalities by white police officers. From here on, he veered towards more radical measures, which included not recruiting white members to SNCC.

Stokely Carmichael was responsible for increasing number of black registered voters in Lowndes County from 70 to 2600. Not content with the response of major parties, he then founded ‘Lowndes County Freedom Organization’, his own political party with the ‘Black Panther’ as its symbol.

In 1966, after activist James Meredith was wounded in his ‘March Against Fear’, Carmichael continued the march along with other notable activists, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Floyd McKissick. Upon his arrest and subsequent release, he gave his most famous speech expounding ‘Black Power’.