Stokely Carmichael spent five years as a field organizer in the Deep South — jailed as a Freedom Rider, registering voters in Mississippi, and building an independent Black political party in Lowndes County, Alabama — before a single speech in June 1966 made him the national voice of Black Power. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he pushed the movement from integration toward Black political and economic self-determination. He later settled in Guinea, took the name Kwame Ture, and devoted three decades to revolutionary Pan-Africanism.
At a Glance
- Born
- 29 June 1941, Port of Spain, Trinidad
- Died
- 15 November 1998, Conakry, Guinea
- Known for
- 1961 Freedom Rides; Lowndes County Freedom Organization (1965–1966); “Black Power” speech, Greenwood, Mississippi (16 June 1966); Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967)
- HBCU ties
- Howard University (Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, 1964; member of the Nonviolent Action Group)
- Fields
- Organizing · Civil Rights · Politics
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on 29 June 1941. His parents emigrated to New York while he was a small child, leaving him with relatives, and he joined them in 1952, at age eleven. The family lived in Harlem and then in the Morris Park section of the Bronx, where Carmichael was one of few Black residents; he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954.
Admitted to the selective Bronx High School of Science in 1956, he moved among the children of white leftists and encountered socialist ideas. The Greensboro sit-ins of February 1960 drew him into picketing and protest while still in high school. That fall he entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he joined the Nonviolent Action Group, a campus affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). With the group he joined sit-ins and pickets against segregated restaurants and public accommodations in Maryland and Virginia, and he began to study the writings of anticolonial thinkers alongside his coursework. He graduated from Howard with a degree in philosophy in 1964.
Life and Work
In 1961, at nineteen, Carmichael joined the Freedom Rides. Arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for entering a whites-only waiting room, he served about seven weeks, much of it in the state penitentiary at Parchman Farm. He returned to Mississippi each summer as a SNCC organizer, and during the 1964 Freedom Summer project he directed voter-registration work in the Second Congressional District in the Delta, based in Greenwood.
In 1965 he moved to Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority-Black county where virtually no Black residents were registered to vote. Working with local leaders such as John Hulett, he helped build the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent political party that chose a black panther as its ballot symbol. By 1966 Black voters were a majority of the county’s registered electorate, and the party ran its own slate of candidates for county offices that November. All of them lost, amid economic pressure on Black tenant farmers and fear of reprisal, but the organization demonstrated that Black voters in the rural South could build independent political power rather than seek places within a white-controlled Democratic Party.
In May 1966 SNCC members elected Carmichael chairman, replacing John Lewis. That June, when James Meredith was shot on his solo “March Against Fear” through Mississippi, civil rights organizations continued the march. On the night of 16 June 1966, after being released from jail in Greenwood, Carmichael told a rally of about 1,500 people that it was time to demand “Black Power.” The phrase had appeared in print before, but his use of it split the movement in public: Martin Luther King Jr. declined to adopt the slogan, while it became a rallying cry for younger activists. With the political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, Carmichael set out the idea in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967), arguing that Black Americans had to close ranks and build independent institutions before entering coalitions. He stepped down as SNCC chairman in 1967, succeeded by H. Rap Brown, and traveled widely abroad; the FBI kept him under surveillance through its counterintelligence program. In 1967 he spoke in London, Havana, Hanoi, and Conakry, denouncing the Vietnam War and linking Black Americans’ struggle to anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; federal authorities confiscated his passport when he returned to the United States that December.
In 1968 the Black Panther Party named him its honorary prime minister, and that year he married the South African singer Miriam Makeba. In 1969 he broke with the Panthers over their alliances with white radicals and moved to Conakry, Guinea, where he worked with the exiled Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s president, Ahmed Sékou Touré. He adopted the name Kwame Ture in their honor; sources date the change variously from 1969 to 1978. For the rest of his life he organized for the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, lecturing on U.S. college campuses and around the world on behalf of a unified socialist Africa.
Legacy
Ture died of prostate cancer in Conakry on 15 November 1998, at 57. His autobiography, Ready for Revolution, completed with his friend Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, was published in 2003. Historians, notably Peniel E. Joseph, have since recast him less as a firebrand who broke the civil rights movement than as a disciplined grassroots organizer whose Black Power politics grew directly out of his years in Mississippi and Alabama.
The Lowndes County Freedom Organization’s panther emblem was adopted by the Black Panther Party founded in Oakland in 1966, and the framework of Black political self-determination he articulated shaped Black studies programs, Black elected officials’ caucuses, and later arguments about institutional racism, a term he and Hamilton helped bring into common use. His career traced, in one life, the movement’s path from nonviolent integrationism to Black nationalism and international Pan-Africanism.
Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power grew out of years of grassroots organizing in Mississippi and Alabama, and it reframed the movement’s goal from integration toward Black political and economic self-determination. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 29 June 1941 Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
- 1952 Joins his parents in New York City.
- 1961 Freedom Rider; jailed in Mississippi, including at Parchman Farm.
- 1964 Graduates from Howard University; directs Freedom Summer work in the Mississippi Delta.
- 1965 Begins organizing in Lowndes County, Alabama; helps found the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
- May 1966 Elected chairman of SNCC.
- 16 June 1966 Calls for “Black Power” at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi.
- 1967 Publishes Black Power with Charles V. Hamilton; leaves the SNCC chairmanship.
- 1969 Breaks with the Black Panther Party and settles in Conakry, Guinea.
- 15 November 1998 Dies in Conakry, Guinea.
Sources and Further Reading
- Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967).
- Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003).
- Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014).
- SNCC Digital Gateway, “Stokely Carmichael.” Link
- History.com, “Stokely Carmichael.” Link
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Stokely Carmichael.” Link
Related on Black-History.com
Cite this page
- MLA
- “Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture).” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/people/stokely-carmichael/.
- APA
- Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/stokely-carmichael/
- Chicago
- Black-History.com Editors. “Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture).” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/stokely-carmichael/.
By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.