Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. His last words !Organize! Organize! Organizer,
We know that one of the greatest crimes an individual can commit is that of being ungrateful.
I have made many errors, but of one thing I am certain, my ability to continue serving in the African and World Revolution is greatly attributed to a number of contributions that I have received from the masses of African and other Oppressed Peoples worldwide. We cite here, just a few examples.
In 1966, when I had just been elected Chairperson of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, my first official act, was to visit the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. It is then that he ordered all members of the Fruit of Islam to protect me wherever I traveled, anywhere in the world. I am still under that umbrella of protection today, here in Africa, in Guinea. I could never be ungrateful to the Nation of Islam, to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, nor to his incarnation - Minister Louis Farrakhan.
In 1967, U.S. imperialism was seriously planning to assassinate me. It still is, this time by an FBI induced cancer, the latest in the white man´s arsenal of chemical and biological warfare, as I am more determined to destroy it today than in 1967. It was Fidel Castro who before the OLAS Conference said "if imperialism touches one grain of hair on his head, we shall not let the fact pass without retaliation." It was he, who on his own behalf, asked them all to stay in contact with me when I returned to the United States to offer me protection. I could never be ungrateful to the People of Cuba nor to Cuba´s incarnation - Fidel Castro.
In 1967, Presidents Ahmed Seku Ture and Kwame Nkrumah, through the intercession of Shirley Graham DuBois, invited me to attend the 8th Congress of the Democratic Party of Guinea (RDA). They invited me to live, work, study and struggle here in Guinea, an invitation which I readily accepted, despite tremendous criticism from almost every quarter. Thirty years later, I still live in Guinea, working, studying and struggling for the African Revolution. And I will continue to do so until the last second, of the last minute, of the last hour, of the last day. And it is my wish to sleep here in Guinea, eternally. I could never be ungrateful to the People of Guinea, nor Guinea´s and Africa´s incarnations - Ahmed Seku Ture and Kwame Nkrumah.
Today, on behalf of the All-African People´s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), I am honored to accept an invitation that has been extended by Brother Muammar Al Qathafi and the People of the Libyan Jamiriyha to travel to Tripoli, which is in Africa, so that they might assist me in my eternal fight, against an unyielding enemy. It would be ungrateful, and unAfrican for me to refuse.
We wish to thank Brother Muammar and the People of the Libyan Jamiriyha for sending us this hospital plane which I, and members of my biological and ideological family now board. This act is just one more act of an infinite number of Brother Muammar´s and the Libyan People´s contributions to African and World Humanity. I am sure I will never be ungrateful to the revolutionary People of the Libyan Jamahiriyat as long as I live, as I shall remain eternally steadfast and faithful to revolutionary principles. And I know that my biological and ideological family will remain steadfast and faithful as well.
Sisters and Brother, Comrades, we know that the Cuban and Libyan Revolutions have a base of solid support among the Africans in United States and around the world. Imperialism also knows this. This support has been earned by Cuba and Libya, at great sacrifice. All Africans in the United States know anytime imperialism is hunting an African Revolutionary, if they make it to Cuba, as in baseball, they are home safe. From Robert Williams to Assata Shakur, Cuba has paid a heavy price as a haven for Revolutionaries throughout the world. We also know, first hand, Libya´s contributions to, and protection of African and other Revolutionaries worldwide. U.S. imperialism is doing everything possible to corrode Cuba´s and Libya´s support among the Africans in the United States and the world.
Today, we board a hospital plane to travel nonstop from Conakry to Tripoli, Libya, a revolutionary country, an African country. All of our Brother, Sister and Allied Organizations, worldwide, have been requested by our Party, the All-African People´s Revolutionary Party, to join us in Tripoli; and on our return from Tripoli to Conakry. Travel to a revolutionary country, especially one in Africa, must lead to concrete action to advance the African and World Revolution. We have a heightened responsibility to help protect Cuba and Libya at this time. We must move before U.S. imperialism is strengthened and attacks, not after, by strengthening our people ideologically and practically now. We must cement Cuba and Libya to Africa, and to African People worldwide, and vice versa.
We must make it clear, that an embargo and travel ban against Cuba and Libya, is an embargo and travel ban against Africa and against 1 billion African People who are scattered, suffering and struggling in every corner of the world. We must make it crystal clear that if you attack Cuba and Libya, you attack all African People worldwide, and we must break U.S. imperialism´s hands off Cuba and Libya. We must end this illegal and immoral embargo and travel ban now. And with this act, by our example of boarding this hospital plane, we declare an end, once and for all, to this illegal and immoral embargo and travel ban, an end to this latest crime against African and World Humanity.
As children, we joined the Freedom Rides, to break the back of segregation and apartheid in interstate transportation in the United States. Today, we ride on the front of the bus, we charter buses to take one million men, women and children to marches in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta. And we will never turn back.
In the 1960´s, we said "Hell No, we won´t go" to Vietnam, to fight against a people who never called us a nigger, and we didn´t go. We said that they would defeat U.S. imperialism, and the heroic Vietnamese People, under the sterling example and leadership of the eternal Ho Chi Minh did.
Today, we say "Hell yes, we are going to Libya." We are traveling nonstop, all the way, from Conakry to Tripoli, and we warn the U.S. government not to interfere. We are certain today, that the people of Cuba and Libya, under the steadfast leadership of Fidel Castro and Muammar Quadafhi will be victorious.
The embargo and travel ban against Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iraq and Iran is finished, as of this day. The All-African People´s Revolutionary Party is honored to make our humble contribution towards this end. We thank the you. As African youth worldwide say, "the beat goes on."
As always, we remain Ready for Revolution!
Kwame Ture
Central Committee Member of the
All-African People´s Revolutionary Party and the
Democratic Party of Guinea
Conakry, Guinea
Statement by Kwame Ture
____________________
From Wikipedia.
Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael (June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements.[1]
Personal life
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Carmichael moved to Harlem,New York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents,[2] who had left him with his grandmother and two aunts to emigrate when he was two. He attended the elite[3]Tranquility School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for him.[4]
His mother, Mabel F. Carmichael,[3] was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father Adolphus was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver.[2] The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, at that time an aging Jewish and Italian neighborhood. According to a 1967 interview he gave to LIFE Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.[2]
He attended the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school for gifted students with a rigorous entrance exam, from which he graduated in 1960.[5] His experience with the intellectual riches of the high school convinced him to drop his friends from the Dukes gang.[2]
In 1960, Carmichael went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C., rejecting scholarship offers from several white universities. At Howard his professors included Sterling Brown and Nathan Hare. His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates.[3] He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964. [2]
He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of SNCC.[1] He was inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days at the infamous Parchman Farm of Mississippi.[2] He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at least 29 or 32, and telling the Washington Post in 1998 he believed the total number was fewer than 36.[3]
Black Power
Carmichael participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, serving as a regional director for SNCC workers and helping to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He was deeply disillusioned with the national Democratic Party when the party refused to seat the multi-racial MFDP delegation in place of the official all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party during the the 1964 Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. [6] This incident led him to seek alternative means for the political empowerment of African-Americans and to become increasingly influenced by the ideologies of Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah.
In 1966 Carmichael journeyed to Lowndes County, Alabama, where he brought together the county´s African-American residents to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The organization was an effort to form a political party that would bring black residents of Lowndes — who were a majority in the county, but held no elected offices and were locked out of local politics — into power. The organization chose a black panther as its emblem, ostensibly in response to the Alabama Democratic Party´s use of a White Rooster. In the press the LCFO became known as the "Black Panther Party" -- a moniker that would eventually provide inspiration for the more-well known Black Panther Party later founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.[7]
While he was in Lowndes, he raised the number of registered black voters from seventy to 2,600 — 300 more than the number of registered white voters.[2]
Carmichael became chairman of SNCC later in 1966, taking over from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot by a sniper during his solitary "March Against Fear". Carmichael joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers and others to continue Meredith´s march. He was arrested once again 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 and it became a rallying cry for young African Americans across the country. Heavily influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book Wretched of the Earth, along with others such as Malcolm X, under Carmichael´s leadership SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology. This became most evident during the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966. SNCC, under the local leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote the candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State Legislature in an Atlanta district. However, unlike previous SNCC activities — like the 1961 Freedom Rides or the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer — Ware excluded Northern white SNCC members from the drive. Initially, Carmichael opposed this move and voted it down, but he eventually changed his mind - expelling whites from prominent positions and focusing SNCC entirely on Black Power.[8]
Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream. Carmichael believed that in order to genuinely integrate, Blacks first had to unite in solidarity and become self-reliant.
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 given 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 give it to anyone. [9]
According to Bearing the Cross (1986), David J. Garrow´s Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Civil Rights movement, a few days after Carmichael used the "Black Power" slogan at the "Meredith March Against Fear," he reportedly told King, "Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum and force you to take a stand for Black Power." King responded, "I have been used before. One more time won´t hurt."
In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. The SNCC, which was a collective and, in keeping with the spirit of the times, worked by group consensus rather than hierarchically, was displeased with Carmichael´s celebrity status. SNCC leaders had begun to refer to him as "Stokely Starmichael" and criticize his habit of making policy announcements independently, before achieving internal agreement, and gave him a formal letter of expulsion in 1967.[3]
After his time with the SNCC, Carmichael attempted to clarify his politics by writing the book Black Power (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic of the Vietnam War. During this period he traveled and lectured extensively throughout the world; visiting Guinea, North Vietnam, China, and Cuba. As a part of the short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful 1968 attempt at merging the Black Panthers and SNCC, Carmichael was made an honorary prime minister of the Black Panthers.[10] After his expulsion from the SNCC, Carmichael became more clearly identified with the Black Panther Party.[3]
Exile
However, Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers. In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. [5] She was appointed Guinea´s official delegate to the United Nations.[11] Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July of 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not being separatist enough and their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals".[2]
It was at this stage in his life that 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."[3]
Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements and in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970´s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing "Ready for the revolution!"[2]
While in Guinea, he was arrested one more time. Two years after Touré´s death in 1984, the military regime which took his place arrested Carmichael and jailed him for three days on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the government. Despite common knowledge that President Touré engaged in torture of his political opponents, Carmichael had never criticized his namesake.[2]
Carmichael and Makeba separated in 1973. After they divorced, he entered a second marriage with Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor whom he also divorced. By 1998, his second wife and their son, Bokar, born in 1982, were living in Arlington, Virginia. Relying on a statement from the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, his 1998 obituary in the New York Times referenced two sons, three sisters, and his mother as survivors but without further details.[2]
Death & Legacy
After two years of treatment at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea. He claimed that his cancer "was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them."[2] He claimed that the FBI had introduced the cancer to his body as an attempt at assassination.[12] After his diagnosis in 1996, benefits were held in Denver, New York, Atlanta[4] and Washington, D.C.[3] to help defray his medical expenses, and the government of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose.[4]
In 2007, the publication of previously-secret Central Intelligence Agency documents revealed that Carmichael had been tracked by the CIA as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad, which began in 1968 and continued for years.[13]
In a final interview given to the Washington Post, he spoke with contempt for the economic and electoral progress made during the past thirty years. He acknowledged that blacks had won election to major mayorships, but stated that the power of mayoralty had been diminished and that such progress was essentially meaningless. A devout Marxist, he was disgusted rather than pleased by the growth of the black middle class.[3]
Stokely Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase "institutional racism", which is defined as a form of racism that occurs in institutions such as public bodies and corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s Carmichael defined "institutional racism" as "the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin".[14]
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gave a speech celebrating Ture´s life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down". [15]
References
^ a b Stokely Carmichael, King Encyclopedia, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Accessed 20 November 2006.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Stokely Carmichael, Rights Leader Who Coined ´Black Power,´ Dies at 57" November 16, 1998, New York Times. Accessed via paid archive June 27, 2007.
^ a b c d e f g h i "The Undying Revolutionary: As Stokely Carmichael, He Fought for Black Power. Now Kwame Ture´s Fighting For His Life," by Paula Spahn, April 8, 1998, Washington Post p. D 1. Accessed via online cache June 27, 2007.
^ a b c "Stokely Carmichael Biography" Accessed June 27, 2007.
^ a b [1], NY Times "Ready for Revolution" Book review. Accessed 17 March 2007.
^ [2], Britannica on "Black Power". Accessed 24 February 2007.
^ [3], H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive. Accessed 24 February 2007.
^ http://www.atlantahighered.org/civilrights/essay_detail.asp?phase=4
^ [4], Stokely Carmichael, "Black Power" speech. Accessed 17 March 2007.
^ [5], Charlie Cobb, From Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Ture. Accessed 17 March 2007.
^ "Miriam Makeba" undated biography at Answers.Com. Accessed June 27, 2007.
^ Statement of Kwame Ture undated between 1996 diagnosis and 1998 death. Accessed June 27, 2007.
^ "Some Examples of CIA Misconduct", June 26, 2007 Associated Press report published in the Washington Post. AP report also published same date here in the New York Times. Accessed June 27, 2007.
^ Richard W. Race, Analysing ethnic education policy-making in England and Wales (PDF), Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research, University of Sheffield, p.12. Accessed 20 June 2006.
^ Black Panther Leader Dies, BBC, November 16, 1998. Accessed 20 June 2006.
