Black History Month Spotlight: STOKELY CARMICHAEL

Mabel R. Carmichael, a stewardess, and Adolphus Carmichael, a taxi driver, gave birth to Stokely Carmichael in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on June 29, 1941. Stokely Carmichael attended Tranquility School in Port of Spain before moving to Harlem, New York, in 1952 at the age of 11. His family eventually left Harlem to live in Van Nest in the East Bronx. The East Bronx was a neighborhood with residents who were primarily Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants. Carmichael was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang.

He attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, a school with selective admission based on a standardized entrance examination. While at Bronx Science, he

participated in a boycott of a local White Castle restaurant. Then, on student recognition Sunday, he gave an eye opening student sermon to the almost totally white congregation of his church.

After graduation in 1960, Carmichael enrolled at Howard University. Carmichael was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University but turned it down. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in philosophy.

In his first year at the university, in 1961, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to desegregate the bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and spent time in jail as he was frequently arrested. He was arrested so many times for his activism that he lost count, sometimes estimating at least 29 or 32. In 1998, he told the Washington Post that he thought the total was fewer than 36.

Along with eight other riders, on June 4, 1961, Carmichael traveled by train from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi, to integrate the formerly "white" section on the train. Before getting on the train in New Orleans, they encountered white protesters blocking the way. Carmichael says:

"They were shouting. throwing cans and lit cigarettes at us. Spitting on us."

Eventually, they were able to board the train. When they arrived in Jackson, Carmichael and the eight other riders entered a "white" cafeteria. They were charged with disturbing the peace, arrested, and taken to jail. He served 49 days at the Parchman State Prison Farm.

At 19, Carmichael was the youngest person in custody in the summer of 1961. He spent 53 days at Parchman Farm. He described his experience in "a six-by-nine cell. Twice a week to shower. No books, nothing to do. They would isolate us. Maximum security. The sheriff acted like he was scared of black folks and he came up with some beautiful things. One night he opened up all the windows, put on ten big fans and an air conditioner and dropped the temperature to 38.

All we had on was T-shirts and shorts.”

Carmichael became chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper during the solitary March Against Fear. Carmichael joined Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers and others to continue Meredith's march. He was arrested during the march and, upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence:

“It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.”

While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech brought it into the spotlight. It became a rallying cry for young African Americans across the country who were frustrated about slow progress in civil rights.

Everywhere that Black Power spread, if accepted, credit was given to the prominent Carmichael. If the concept was condemned, he was held responsible and blamed. According to Carmichael: "Black Power meant black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak

their needs."

Carmichael considered nonviolence to be a tactic as opposed to an underlying principle, which separated him from civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Carmichael criticized civil rights leaders who called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle-class mainstream. In one of Carmichael’s many speeches, he explains what was wrong with integration:

“Now, several people have been upset because we've said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a ‘thalidomide drug of integration,’ and that some Negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem; that when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark; we went to get them out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss

the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they're born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom.

They never gave it to anyone.”

Stokely Carmichael is strength. He is power. He is intelligent. He is a beautiful black liberated man.