Kwame Toure (Stokley Carmichael)

Kwame Toure (Stokley Carmichael)

June 29 1941 - November 15 1998
Stokley changed his name at a later point in life, so I will refer to him as Kwame in my biography of him.

Kwame was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, June 29 of 1941.
His parents immigrated to New York when he was a chile, so he was left in the care of his
grandmother until he was 11. When he was 13, he became a naturalized American citizen and moved to a predominantly Italian and Jewish part of town in the Bronx.

It wasn't until one night he saw footage of a sit-in on television that he felt compelled to join the struggle.
He quotes "When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down south, I thought they were just a bunch of
publicity hounds. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them,
sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair�"well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning." He joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
and traveled to sit-ins in Virginia and South Carolina.

In 1960, he graduated high school. He then went to Howard University in WA D.C. He went on his first of many Freedom Rides. He was arrested in Jackson Mississippi
for entering the "whites only" bus stop and jailed for 49 days. He graduated from Howard University with honors in 1964.

Kwame joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1965, and he worked to make African Americans the majority of registered voters in Lowndes County Alabama,
raising the number of black voters from 70 to 2600, all in one year! That's 300 more than the number of registered white voters in the county.
Kwame founded his own political party in Lowndes County, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and chose a black panther for his official logo, which would later inspire the Black Panther Party.

At first, he adhered to the thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, with nonviolence resistance. As time went on, he grew tired with the snail-like pace of progress.
June of 1966, James Meredith, civil rights activist and first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot and wounded when embarking of a "Walk Against Fear" from Memphis to Mississippi. Kwame, enraged, after this moment, is best known for saying "We been saying 'freedom' for six years. What we are going to start saying now is Black Power."

On Black Power, Kwame says "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."

In 1967, he took it upon himself to go on a journey to Cuba, North Vietnam, China and Guinea, to visit revolutionary leaders. He became the prime minister in the Black Panther Party.

In 1969, he left the BPP to move to Guinea to further strengthen his Pan African Unity. He believed America was not for the black man. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the president of Guinea, Sekou Toure.

In 1985, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and on November 15, 1998 he passed away.