An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 2/23/2021
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"There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience."
Civil rights trailblazer Stokely Carmichael was born in 1941 Spain, and came to New York with his family at the age of eleven. He graduated from Howard University and was an early participant in the SNCC and the Freedom Rides of the early 1960's. But significantly for the time, Carmichael didn't necessarily agree with the SNCC's guiding premise of nonviolent social reform, and also resented what he saw as an over-reliance on "guilty white liberals." When the Democratic Party refused to seat the members of Ella Baker's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at their 1964 convention in Atlantic City (see Lesson #53 in this series), that was a bridge too far for Carmichael. Agreeing with Baker's warning about when organizations rally too closely around a personality rather than around fixed principles, that they dilute the message, Carmichael set the SNCC on a different trajectory when he took over as chairman from John Lewis in 1965.
Perhaps most famously, in 1965, while being interviewed by local media during a march in Mississippi, Carmichael invoked the phrase "Black Power," which instantly caught on. Much like the contemporary phrase Black Lives Matter, the mere mention of this slogan was sufficient to both incense AND galvanize. Intended or not, "Black Power" was now inextricably linked to Carmichael, and --in part due to his celebrity status-- he would later be named honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party.
The fragmenting of the civil rights coalition in the late 1960's has been the subject of much historical scrutiny (and doubtless hand-wringing), but for his part Carmichael mostly departed the scene after the "Black Power" flashpoint. He emigrated to Conakry, Guinea and changed his legal name to Kwame Ture, continuing to denounce racism even as he had a hand in building the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (which just celebrated its 40th anniversary): https://aaprp-intl.org/
Next page - Lesson 72: Horace Julian Bond