Born and credited in much of his early work as Stokely Carmichael, was a prominent civil rights campaigner, revolutionary socialist, and Pan-Africanist. Born in what was then the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, Ture moved to Harlem at the age of 11, and became involved in political activism in high school, helping to boycott a local White Castle which refused to hire Black employees. In the 1960s, Ture became known as a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement, working with CORE in the Freedom Rides and organizing with SNCC. He grew dissatisfied with working with the Democratic Party through his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, and turned to more radical politics. Influenced by the writings of Frantz Fanon and Malcom X, Ture came to embrace Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism as chairman of SNCC. Ture popularized the slogan “Black Power,” and moved SNCC away from nonviolence as a central organizing principle. His activism made him a target of the FBI, which spread false information about Ture to tarnish his reputation and prevent a merger of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Ture became an internationally-recognized figure, and he moved to Guinea in the late 1960s, where he became a student of Kwame Nkrumah and advisor to Ahmed Sekou Toure, renaming himself after them. The final decades of Ture’s life were dedicated to organizing with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party globally, and traveled frequently to speak in favor of Pan-Africanism and socialism. He died in 1998 of prostate cancer.
“The job of a revolutionary is, of course, to overthrow unjust systems and replace them with just systems because a revolutionary understands this can only be done by the masses of the people. So, the task of the revolutionary is to organize the masses of the people, given the conditions of the Africans around the world who are disorganized, consequently, all my efforts are going to organizing people.”
