Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and prime minister of the Black Panther Party, was a major black militant figure of the 1960s and a prominent advocate of Pan-Africanism. While Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr. shared a close personal relationship, they had ideological differences regarding the use of nonviolent direct action and white allies during the later parts of the 1960s.
Carmichael was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on 29 June 1941. At the age of eleven, he moved with his family to Harlem and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954. After moving to an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, Carmichael won admission to the selective Bronx High School of Science, where he graduated in 1960. While attending the school, he became a friend of the son of Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis and was introduced to several veteran black radicals. Active in socialist youth politics, Carmichael joined a Marxist discussion group and participated in demonstrations against the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
After enrolling at Howard University, where he received a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) scholarship given to students arrested while demonstrating, Carmichael joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) and participated in student protests against segregated facilities around Washington, D.C. In 1961, he joined a Freedom Ride to Jackson, Mississippi, where he was arrested after entering a waiting room reserved for whites. While in jail, he strengthened his ties with other movement activists and briefly considered dropping out of school to work full-time with SNCC, which had been formed the previous year. Although his parents convinced him to return to Howard, Carmichael remained active in the protest movement. As a NAG representative at SNCC meetings, he stressed economic concerns rather than simply a focus on desegregation. While continuing his studies at Howard, he participated in freedom rides in Maryland, mass demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, and a hospital workers strike in New York.
After graduating in 1964 with a degree in philosophy, Carmichael joined SNCC's staff as director of a summer voter registration project in the second Congressional district of Mississippi. He and other black activists became increasingly militant, especially after Democratic Party leaders at the 1964 convention refused to unseat the regular, all-white delegation in favor of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation. While he maintained close relations with white radicals in SNCC, Carmichael became skeptical of the prospects of interracial activism within the existing political structure. He left Mississippi in the winter of 1965 to help Alabama blacks form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent political group that became known as the Black Panther Party. (Activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton would later borrow the Black Panther symbol when forming the Black Panther Party in Oakland in October 1966.)
In May 1966, Carmichael was elected chairman of SNCC, ousting John Lewis. This leadership shift marked SNCC's divergence from King's ideals of inclusive, faith-based nonviolent direct action. One month later, in June 1966, the James Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi brought Carmichael's SNCC into direct contact with King and SCLC. Though organized as a joint statement of support for Meredith, who had been injured by a sniper on the second day of his planned 220-mile walk from Memphis to Jackson, the march exposed the growing rift between SNCC and SCLC. During one of the march's rallies, Carmichael called for "Black Power,” a term King resisted because of its violent connotations. "[We] had one simple definition that separated us," Carmichael later recalled. "He saw nonviolence as a principle, which means it had to be used at all times, under all conditions. I saw it as a tactic. If it was working, I would use it; if it wasn't working, I'm picking up guns because I want my freedom by any means necessary." By 1966, Carmichael believed that nonviolence was no longer a useful tactic.
Despite their ideological differences, King and Carmichael respected each other and shared a close personal relationship. Carmichael differed with those in SNCC, such as James Foreman, who advocated a direct challenge to King's leadership of the movement. Carmichael, who realized King's importance in local communities, recalled, "People loved King . . . I've seen people in the South climb over each other just to say, 'I touched him! I touched him!' . . . They even saw him like God. These were the people we were working with and I had to follow in his footsteps when I went in there. The people didn't know what SNCC was. They just said, 'You one of King's men?' 'Yes. Ma'am, I am.’"
During his tenure as SNCC chairman, Carmichael delivered hundreds of speeches advocating black unity and a redefinition of the relationship between blacks and white liberal allies. Although he opposed the decision to expel whites from SNCC, he joined with black nationalists in stressing racial unity over class unity as a basis for future black struggles. After relinquishing the SNCC chairmanship in 1967, Carmichael made a controversial trip to Cuba, China, North Vietnam, and finally to Guinea, where he conferred with exiled Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, who became his Pan-Africanist mentor. Returning to the United States with the intention of forming Black United Front groups throughout the nation, he accepted an invitation to become prime minister of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party.
As a follower of Kwame Nkrumah, Carmichael helped to form the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in 1972, which called for "the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism." On subsequent speaking tours in the United States, he argued against black alliances with white leftists and for a redirection of the energies of Afro-American radicals toward the goal of African liberation. During the 1970s, Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Toure (after Nkrumah and Guinean leader Sekou Toure). Carmichael died of cancer in Guinea on 15 November 1998 at the age of 57.