Black Power... Remembering Stokely Carmichael

• published: 21 Sep 2014
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Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers. He disagreed with them about whether white activists should be allowed to help them. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael had come to agree with Malcolm X, and said that the white activists should organize their own communities first. In 1968, he married Miriam Makeba, a noted singer from South Africa, and they left the US for Guinea the next year. Carmichael became an aide to the Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré, and a student of the exiled Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the United Nations. Three months after his arrival in Guinea, in July 1969, Carmichael published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning them for not being separatist enough and for their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals". Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture, to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré, who had become his patrons. At the end of his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by both names, "and he doesn't seem to mind." In 2007, the publication of previously secret Central Intelligence Agency documents revealed that the agency had tracked Carmichael from 1968 as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad. The surveillance continued for years. Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak in support of international leftist movements. In 1971 he collected his essays in a second book, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing, "Ready for the revolution!" While in Guinea, he was arrested one more time. Two years after Sékou Touré's death in 1984, the military regime that took his place arrested Carmichael and jailed him for three days on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the government. Despite the common knowledge that Touré had ordered torture of his political opponents, Carmichael never criticized his namesake.