ON JUNE 29, 1941, STOKELY STANDIFORD CHURCHILL CARMICHAEL WAS born in the family home at 54 Oxford Street in Port of Spain, the capital of the island of Trinidad. The centrally located house in Port of Spain’s Belmont neighborhood rested at the bottom of a set of forty-two government-built steps that were a local landmark. The intricately designed house dazzled Stokely’s young imagination. The porch and roof rested on five levels that gave the entire structure an imposing heft that belied the inhabitants’ working-class origins. Adults were impressed, too, especially by the series of movable walls that, properly shifted, turned several rooms into one large space perfect for hosting the kinds of fêtes that native Trinidadians enjoy. Stokely was the middle child, bookended by sisters Umilta and Lynette, of master carpenter Adolphus Carmichael and the former Mabel Florence Charles, known by all as May Charles. A jewel of the British West Indies, Port of Spain, like Stokely’s ancestry, reflected the diasporic nature of African migration to the New World. May Charles was born in the US Canal Zone in Panama; her mother and father came from Montserrat and Antigua, respectively. Adolphus traced his paternal roots to Barbados; his mother, Cecilia Harris, was born in Tobago. Stokely inherited his father’s bronze color and his mother’s fiery temperament. As a child of the English-speaking Caribbean, he claimed a heritage marked by both voluntary and forced relocation. This pan-Caribbean background made him a citizen of the world who, for the rest of his life, would feel equally at home in Port of Spain, the Bronx and Harlem, Washington, DC, Mississippi, and Conakry.
Living in a home crowded with in-laws proved to be suffocating for May Charles. She left Trinidad bound for relatives in the Bronx when Stokely was three. Adolphus followed, arriving in New York in 1946. Stokely would not see either of his parents again until he was almost eleven. His extended family became surrogate parents to him, and Stokely pragmatically adapted to these less than ideal circumstances. In his parents’ absence, he cultivated an independent streak that he would carry with him for the rest of his life.1
His earliest childhood memories centered on the elegant family home that Adolphus had meticulously built but scarcely enjoyed. The relatively idyllic environment included a local steel band, Casa Blanca, which practiced at the top of the forty-two steps. Cecilia Harris Carmichael, Stokely’s paternal grandmother, became the dominant maternal force during his early years, aided by three willful daughters—dubbed Tante Elaine, Tante Louise, and Mummy Olga—whose clashes with May Charles had accelerated her departure.
Grandma Carmichael doted on Stokely, who suffered from childhood asthma. Tante Elaine was the disciplinarian that the more carefree Mummy Olga could never be. Stokely and his older cousin Austin, Elaine’s son, were inseparable, two small boys in a house dominated by strong women. Weekend trips to Point Fortin, twenty miles from Belmont, exposed Stokely to Trinidad’s lush beauty, with its tropical forests, deep blue seas, and vast sugarcane fields. As an adult, he would call the Botanic Gardens he traipsed through as a child “perhaps the only completely unambiguous good produced by colonialism.” Such bucolic sights coexisted uneasily against Port of Spain’s wartime landscape. American military personnel stationed in nearby Chaguaramas filled the bustling city, as did European sailors whose merchant ships docked in the harbor. Yankee dollars flowed into Port of Spain through means legal and illegal, setting up a short-lived boomtown. Calypso songs surged through the downtown’s thriving nightlife interrupted periodically by blackouts in anticipation of enemy air raids. Eastern Boys School, a British colonial entity free to locals, facilitated Stokely’s unambiguous admiration for Western civilization, European history, and Anglophone culture. The form, if not substance, of this colonial education would prove critical to his future.2
Stokely’s relatively privileged childhood shielded him from the harsh living conditions faced by the typical Trinidadian family. The Carmichaels owned their own home, and their lifestyle was supplemented by incomes from Stokely’s three gainfully employed aunts. They also received regular care packages from the States in the form of clothes and American dollars courtesy of May Charles and Adolphus. Stokely was a precocious student, and his encounters with fellow classmates who trekked to school barefoot reinforced his natural sympathy for underdogs. This inclination dovetailed into his early religious training, where Sundays included visits to Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist services. On such occasions, Stokely donned a wide-lapelled suit, accented by a bowtie and handkerchief that earned him the nickname “Little Man” from neighbors who delighted in his dapper attire.3
Stokely came of age in a colonial port city, a dominion of the once sprawling British empire whose darker citizens proudly retained vestiges of their unique Anglophone heritage as exhibited by Carmichael’s middle name Churchill. Port of Spain was, like many parts of the British Caribbean, a place where a hybrid culture flourished, with a predominantly black population cultivating an appreciation for both African and Anglophone roots. Trinidad’s annual Empire Day introduced Stokely to anthems such as “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen” and the pageantry of a decaying empire. In such rare instances, fleeting images of whites penetrated Stokely’s largely all-black community. Empire Day made for a bracing juxtaposition—a world where the white heroes of history books and poetry contrasted with the black teachers, bus drivers, nurses, and laborers who populated Stokely’s neighborhood. Stokely was reared in a majority black city, which made him comfortable from an early age with the idea of black power.
When Princess Margaret paid a visit to the island, ten-year-old Stokely, armed like hundreds of others with tiny Union Jack flags, lined the procession route and waited for hours for an unrequited glimpse of Her Royal Highness. By this time, Stokely was enrolled at Tranquillity Boys’ Intermediate School, where, in addition to his academic studies, he enjoyed playing cricket and soccer. In Trinidad, Calypso songs, steel bands, and carnivals existed comfortably alongside colonial schools, British literature, and Empire Day. But the comfort of this existence soon vanished for Stokely.4
Stokely’s paternal grandmother, Cecilia, died on January 16, 1952, setting off a chain of events that would reunite him with his parents. Adolphus Carmichael returned soon after his mother’s funeral for a brief reunion with the son he had not seen in six years. By the time Adolphus departed back to America, it had been decided that his children would permanently relocate to New York to live with their parents. Adolphus and May Charles had settled into a cramped three-bedroom apartment on Stebbins Avenue in the South Bronx. It was, as she later described it, a “mixed neighborhood kind of on the run-down side.” They identified themselves as forward-thinking West Indian pioneers determined to claim a piece of the American Dream. On May 26, 1952, Stokely applied for an immigration visa at the American Consulate General in Port of Spain, a request granted that very day. His visa application listed his height at four feet, seven inches, his complexion as “dark” with no distinguishing marks, and his occupation as “student.” Stokely, Mummy Olga, Umilta, and Lynette now joined May Charles, Adolphus, and two new siblings, Janeth and Judith, born in the States, swelling the American wing of the Carmichael clan to eight.5
On June 15, 1952, two weeks before his eleventh birthday, Carmichael arrived in New York City. The entire trip to the United States mesmerized Stokely, who, in short order, experienced his first airplane trip, took in the sights and sounds of New York City, and wondered if the speeding cars hurtling down expressways like missiles would arrive home safely. He spent that first summer getting reacquainted with his parents. May Charles would prove to be a diminutive firecracker of a woman in contrast to the more idealistic Adolphus, with his immigrant faith in the possibilities of New York City and America. Adolphus toiled at multiple jobs, including driving a cab, to provide for his growing family. Life as a West Indian carpenter meant seasonal work, “two weeks on and four weeks off,” stretches exacerbated by racial discrimination in the city’s trade unions. Life in New York meant readjusting to parents he loved but hardly remembered. Stokely immediately gravitated toward the outspoken and chatty May Charles over a father whom he remembered as “submissive, quiet, and obedient,” traits that he found more puzzling than endearing. May Charles, on the other hand, projected an air of combative assertiveness, humor, and passion, characteristics that were amplified in her only son.6
Stokely’s arrival in New York City began the process of becoming African-American. The Bronx introduced Carmichael to black America’s cultural rhythms and idioms. There were technological wonders as well, including a black-and-white television unlike anything he had seen in Port of Spain. By mid-August, Stokely found temperatures cold enough to wear a winter coat, a practice he continued despite ridicule from neighbors. Carmichael enrolled in PS 39 in Longwood that September, anticipating, as his parents had assured him, that America’s educational system would prove more advanced than Trinidad’s. Instead, the school turned out to be socially chaotic and absent the academic rigor of his schools in Port of Spain. The new boy from Trinidad easily outshone his fellow fifth graders with an academic focus distinguished by his love for reading and a pronounced writing ability. He befriended the black students, but their scholastic ineptitude made a bad first impression, leading him to privately conclude that “American kids were stupid.” In New York, Stokely fell in love with his mother for the second time. “Mabel Charles Carmichael would become—and remains—a major influence in the lives of me and my sisters,” he would much later write. “This little dynamo of a woman was the stable moral presence, the fixed center around which the domestic life of this migrant African family revolved.”7
The Carmichaels soon departed their overcrowded South Bronx apartment for a house in the predominantly white Morris Park neighborhood. They were the first black family to move into a part of the Bronx still dominated by Italian immigrants. Irish and Jewish neighbors added to the community’s ethnic stew. It was January 1953, the middle of the school year, which forced Stokely to get acclimated to a new school and new neighborhood for the second time in less than a year. Adolphus immediately began renovations on the run-down house on 1810 Amethyst Street, a process that would continue over the next decade in the form of small and large construction projects. Adolphus and May Charles’ thirst for better opportunities for their children marked Carmichael’s entrée into a world that would be filled with interracial contact.
Stokely’s enrollment at PS 34 to finish the fifth grade made him the school’s second black student. He quickly befriended the Italian kids in the neighborhood and traipsed around the surrounding blocks with his best friend, John DiMilio. A self-described miniature “paisano in blackface,” Stokely came to appreciate Italian cooking and the culture’s dramatic flair for self-expression. His friends called him “Sichie,” a play on the word “Siciliano” to describe their new dark-skinned playmate. For a time, Carmichael’s friendship with the local kids drifted into small acts of petty theft and juvenile delinquency. He ran with a neighborhood gang, the Morris Park Dukes, but quit after a half-hearted participation in a minor burglary. The most important event that happened to Stokely that first year came courtesy of his father. On April 27, 1953, Adolphus, who had entered the United States illegally on July 15, 1946, became a naturalized citizen. Thus ended legal proceedings that had threatened to split the Carmichael family apart. Adolphus had secured the intervention of a government immigration agent sympathetic to his plea that his deportation would economically harm May Charles. That Monday, under the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and most likely while attending classes at PS 34, Stokely Carmichael became an American citizen.8
Carmichael’s citizenship arrived on the cusp of revolutionary transformations on America’s civil rights front. In the fall of 1954, less than four months after the Supreme Court’s historic May 17th Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, Stokely enrolled at PS 83, a school for junior high school students that drew a relatively diverse mix of ethnic students (although he was one of only two blacks in the entire school). Placed on the high-achieving academic track with white classmates who excelled in their studies, Stokely thrived. In the eighth grade, he was elected vice president of the student council. Despite his popularity among local neighborhood toughs, ease in acclimating to his academic surroundings, and acceptance by his peers as a chocolate-hued paisano, Stokely’s family stood apart from his predominantly Italian neighborhood. Black Methodists from Trinidad living in a largely Italian Catholic community, the Carmichaels kept to themselves, rarely socializing with neighbors. Stokely’s process of assimilation proved more complete than his parents’. He attended Sunday school nearby at Westchester Methodist Church in the Bronx, where he played piano and became a Boy Scout.9
Harlem, where Stokely accompanied his father to a barbershop on 145th Street, became a personal sanctuary and political classroom. From 1953, until departing for college seven years later, Stokely traveled to Harlem to get a haircut every few weeks. It was a world away from his Amethyst Street home. It was a world where black culture flourished in the routine activities of passersby, in barbershop conversations (sometime political, sometimes humorous, and always interesting), and in the photos of black heroes that lined the walls of restaurants and businesses. Two subjects of political debate made their way inside the barbershop during Stokely’s junior high years. The Brown decision triggered fierce discussions about the probability of integrating public schools in the South and whether or not the reverberations, both good and ill, would reach north.
And then a terrible event reminded everyone how dangerous racism was. Emmett Till was the same age as Stokely, fourteen. He was from Chicago and visiting relatives in Mississippi, when his summer vacation turned tragic. He had talked to a local white woman, and that simple act suddenly snowballed. Some white men seized and tortured him, shot him fatally in the head, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. Jet magazine placed Till’s mutilated corpse on its cover, instantly turning the murdered teenager into a civil rights martyr for Stokely’s generation and beyond.10
Stokely was coming of age in a world where race shaped hope and opportunity, and where life chances made the ability to adapt a necessary survival skill. His charisma and intuitive gift for observation augmented a keen intelligence. For Stokely, the worlds of Morris Park and Harlem became social and political laboratories where he fashioned distinct identities for separate audiences. He did more than just blend into the black and white worlds he inhabited; he became among their most popular representatives.
This talent served him well upon enrolling at one of New York’s best public schools. Stokely entered the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in September 1956, joining a small group of black students at the academically intensive school. Stokely’s acceptance into Science kept pace with Adolphus’ dream of his son becoming a physician and returning to Port of Spain to work in a family-run medical clinic.
Bronx Science’s promise of intellectual excellence and educational rigor, however, masked political and racial minefields. On the surface, the student body accepted the few black students without complaint. Some liberal students went out of their way to openly embrace their darker classmates, who reveled in the attention, invitations, and friendships crafted along the way. But social acceptance carried a steep cost. Assimilation into the school’s politically liberal social and intellectual culture cast the precocious Stokely as an exceptional Negro, talented enough to consort with the scions of liberal Jewish New Yorkers, but, however remarkable, an outlier destined to be one of the few brown faces at Bronx Science and its surrounding political and social milieu. A short-lived romance with a white classmate hastened the discovery of this paradox. Stokely overcame his initial reluctance to ask her to a school dance only to be overwhelmed by the harsh stares on the subway they received and disappointed by the response of Bronx Science’s liberal faculty to the budding interracial romance. The disapproving “looks of my teachers” coupled with his self-consciousness about violating “this real taboo” led to the relationship’s abrupt end. Stokely’s closest friends at school were Jewish students, although he had cordial relations with several black and Puerto Rican students.11
Initially, Bronx Science’s competitively rigorous intellectual environment knocked the preternaturally confident Stokely off balance. His new classmates were already well versed in the works of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck while Stokely had been poring over detective mysteries and Reader’s Digest. When on his first day of classes, a teacher asked about their summer reading, one student confidently announced he was reading Karl Marx’s Capital, a book Stokely added to an ad hoc reading list that he would use to catch up to his peers. Gene Dennis, who on the first day of school claimed to be reading both Steinbeck and Marx, became one of Stokely’s best friends. Gene’s reading list was no accident. Eugene Dennis Sr. served as a high-ranking Communist Party official, and young Gene belonged to the Young Communist League. Stokely and Gene bonded as soccer teammates and over a love of books and intellectual debates. Shared subway rides to soccer practice cemented a deep friendship, and Gene became a frequent dinner guest at the Carmichaels’. Gene soon invited Stokely to a party at his house in Harlem, where the sight of interracial revelers surprised Stokely, by now used to being the lone Negro at the soirées hosted by liberal classmates. Stokely, Gene, and several other scholar-athletes formed a social club, Kokista, to discuss personal and political issues, organize parties, and provide self-defense against neighborhood bullies.12
Gene Dennis introduced Stokely to New York City’s left-wing political subculture. As their relationship grew, Stokely discovered Gene’s political background, which included Eugene Sr.’s political affiliation. The revelation made Carmichael’s parents nervous, but the friendship remained intact. The Dennises’ apartment on West 151st Street in Harlem became a second home for Stokely, where he witnessed the interracial bonhomie between high-ranking Communist Party officials, freelance radicals, and independent agitators gathered to discuss politics, plan demonstrations, and debate the prospect for revolution. The discovery that Gene’s father was a communist drew Carmichael deeper into the orbit of New York’s left-wing Jewish intellectual culture—a community steeped in the struggle for social justice and dripping with Ivy League–credentialed doctors, lawyers, and professors. Emboldened by Adolphus and May Charles yet slightly intimidated in comparison to his new peers, Stokely set out to “beat everybody” at Bronx Science.13
In short order, he began attending Young Communist League meetings, study sessions that grappled with the economic roots of social and political oppression, and rallies. In essence, association with Gene offered the intellectually curious Stokely an opportunity to develop a more systematic political worldview. But while these new relationships broadened Stokely’s political vision, he remained firmly rooted in the black experience, especially on religious matters. The casual atheism of his friends initially shocked him and over time, even as his own personal religious beliefs waned, struck him as counterproductive to the black community, which regarded the church as its personal and political headquarters. “I did not want to be alienated from my people,” Stokely ruefully noted, “because of Marxist atheism.” Carmichael would spend much of the next several years negotiating what he perceived to be a tension between the religious faith that enveloped the black community and more secular Marxist strivings.14
As a student at Bronx Science, Stokely became a fixture at radical meetings, youth marches, and rallies sponsored by groups whose various campaigns revolved around issues of poverty, nuclear proliferation, civil liberties, education, and civil rights. Bronx Science’s rich intellectual milieu of socially conscious students and precocious young activists provided a model of active engagement. Carmichael studiously explored a parallel curriculum that took place at suburban political camps, Harlem rallies, and New York City house parties. Long days of discussion turned into parties, which ended in “singing ‘Hava Nagila’ and dancing the hora.” After Carmichael’s youthful support for Israel switched to an unbending advocacy for Palestinian rights, these episodes would provide defensive comfort against charges of anti-Semitism that critics routinely hurled at him.15
Carmichael quickly discovered that leftist politics was not merely the terrain of white radicals; he became immersed in the rich tradition of black socialism. Bayard Rustin, perhaps the nation’s most well-known black socialist, stood out as a leading figure of New York City’s Left. A former disciple of the white pacifist A.J. Muste, Rustin briefly joined the Young Communist League in the 1930s before hitting his stride in the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—two groundbreaking civil rights organizations that combined nonviolent activism and civil disobedience during the Second World War. As a young organizer, Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph, the legendary labor leader (and former socialist) whose March on Washington Movement (MOWM) leveraged the threat of massive disruption in the nation’s capital to compel President Franklin Roosevelt into signing an executive order banning racial discrimination in the nation’s wartime plants and factories. Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, and grew up there, but his elegant style of speech led people to believe he was from the Caribbean, an erroneous assumption he chose to cultivate rather than correct. He continually reinvented aspects of his biography to friends, reporters, and the general public, giving him an air of mystery that only added to his gifts as an organizer, political strategist, and raconteur. A talented student at Wilberforce University in Ohio, Rustin left school in 1934 in the wake of what would prove to be the first of many scandals related to his homosexuality. After a brief membership in the Communist Party, Rustin aligned himself with Randolph’s MOWM and then Muste’s FOR. He served a three-year prison sentence for refusing to register for the Selective Service in the mid-1940s. After his release in 1946, he spent the next five years as an increasingly well-known peace activist. He accepted invitations to speak in India, where he worked with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He also visited West Africa, where he tutored Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe (who would become in the early 1960s the first presidents of, respectively, Ghana and Nigeria) on the finer points of nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. Publicity surrounding Rustin’s 1953 arrest for lewd conduct found him struggling to separate his personal life from his political ambitions. By 1956, Rustin had refashioned himself again, this time as a middle-aged adviser who swooped in clandestinely to school a young Martin Luther King in nonviolence at a pivotal moment of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.16
Stokely was blissfully unaware of Rustin’s biography when he first heard him speak at a Young People’s Socialist League meeting. Rustin’s typically masterful and highly theatrical speaking style was on display, including his pinched, vaguely British accent, which lent him an air of sophistication. Mesmerized as much by Rustin’s showmanship as his political manner, Stokely asked Gene Dennis who the speaker was. Informed that it was “Bayard Rustin, the socialist,” Stokely replied, “That’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.” Rustin’s race impressed Stokely as much as his politics. Memories of predominantly black Trinidad still stirred within Stokely, despite his increasing forays into the overwhelmingly white cultural and political milieu of New York’s radical circles. Carmichael encountered the tiny coterie of high-ranking black communists at Gene’s house, but none struck him as politically engaged and attuned to the everyday rhythms of black life as Rustin, whom he befriended while in high school. Their relationship drew Stokely closer to Rustin’s social-democratic politics and gave him access to one of the most brilliant organizing minds of the era.17
Carmichael imbibed black America’s customs, traditions, and rhythms through popular culture. A naturally gifted mimic and perceptive observer, he absorbed black language, idiom, and vernacular through a set of personal experiences that shaped his political outlook. Through his family’s shortwave radio, which he commandeered, Stokely enjoyed gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz, classical, and African music. Adolphus’ prodigious personal collection of Caribbean calypso records supplemented his growing musical appetite. He noticed the difference between white disc jockey Symphony Sid’s sophisticated music editorials and black deejay Jocko’s entertaining, but intellectually unsatisfying, raps.
Sid’s biggest impact on Stokely came through the introduction of South African singer Miriam Makeba, whose voice Carmichael fell in love with while still in high school. Makeba’s African name, “Zenzi,” was a play on the word “Uzenzile,” which roughly translated into “This is your own stubborn fault.” Makeba’s maternal grandmother had repeated this word during her daughter’s difficult, almost fatal, delivery of Miriam. Zenzi’s outwardly calm demeanor masked a stubborn and independent will that matched Stokely’s.18
The South African singer had burst onto the American music scene in 1959. A chance meeting in London with Harry Belafonte had set her on course to becoming an international star. Her appearance on national television, on The Steve Allen Show, announced her as a beguiling new musical sensation. When Makeba played the legendary Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City, Belafonte arranged for a line-up of special guests in the audience—Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Diahann Carroll, and Sidney Poitier—that left her almost speechless. The enamored teen-aged Stokely predicted (correctly) to his sister Janeth that he would one day marry the singer. Meanwhile, summers spent running his Uncle Stephen’s Atlantic City record store turned Stokely into an amateur sociologist. He observed the growth of a burgeoning youth market aided by the increasing popularity of 45 rpm singles, which he convinced his uncle to play on Friday and Saturday nights as a successful marketing tool.19
On visits to his cousin Inez in Harlem, Carmichael encountered the neighborhood’s radical street-speaking tradition. It dated back to Hubert Harrison, the intellectual powerhouse who helped facilitate the rise of Marcus Garvey—the Jamaica-born Pan-Africanist whose Back-to-Africa movement galvanized millions of blacks in the years after World War I. They were New Negroes, proudly defiant and visionary black leaders who promised to usher in a new era of militant intellectual, political, and social struggle. On Harlem’s famous 125th Street corridor, Stokely encountered Richard Moore, Lewis Michaux, and Eddie “Porkchop” Davis, all of whom offered rich historical insights not found among young communists or at dinner parties hosted by Gene Dennis’ family. These griots rejected a “scientific” solution to black misery. Instead, like intellectual and political provocateurs, they highlighted revolutions taking place throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the larger Third World. In a remarkable burst of freedom twenty-five African nations had declared independence between 1957 and 1962. On stepladders draped with the black nationalist colors of red, black, and green on one side and the American flag on the other, speakers introduced Carmichael to contemporary African revolutionaries. Improbably, two of the leaders most often mentioned, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sékou Touré, would become Carmichael’s political mentors within a decade.20
In Harlem, racial matters anchored political affairs, and activists reveled in exposing American lies. They substituted narratives of forward national progress with a starker political reality that portrayed America as a modern-day empire whose foreign and domestic policies imperiled dreams of black liberation at home and abroad. The political revolution that Carmichael’s white friends discussed frequently relegated blacks to a supporting, rather than a central, role. Practically, he recognized that their talk of interracial class solidarity failed to acknowledge the entrenched racism in labor unions that he overheard his father privately rail against.
Carmichael’s activism progressed to include attending youth marches organized by Rustin, where he first heard Martin Luther King speak. Socialism shaped Carmichael’s political and organizing sensibilities, and for a time he organized black paint-factory workers on Rustin’s behalf. Through the eyes of the teenaged Stokely, Rustin managed the improbable feat of connecting radical theory to practice in service of civil rights agitation. He never formally joined any particular group, preferring instead to rally with black nationalists, socialists, and young communists as an independent political activist. Conversations with Benjamin Davis, a black communist and former New York City councilman imprisoned for over three years for his political beliefs, exposed Carmichael to the political cost associated with radical politics. Stokely idolized Paul Robeson, the black Marxist singer-actor-activist who, during the 1940s, could bring tens of thousands of Americans together for concerts that were as much about politics as art. Robeson’s defiant support of the Soviet Union had turned him, virtually overnight, from an American hero to a pariah. The State Department stripped him of his passport and, in the process, curtailed his financial opportunities and almost broke his spirit. The 1958 publication of his autobiography, Here I Stand, marked a small comeback for Robeson, who mentored a generation of black cultural activists, including the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and Harry Belafonte. In a few short years, Stokely would embrace what Robeson, “one of my early heroes,” had characterized as “Negro power,” the collective and unified political strength of black Americans, in a fashion that would thrust him onto the world stage.21
Frequent visits to Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore opened up new intellectual worlds. Diminutive, agile, and outspoken, Michaux was a mentor to Malcolm X, the dynamic Nation of Islam national spokesman who frequently held large rallies outside the bookstore. Nicknamed the “House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda,” African National Memorial served as a headquarters for black radicals during the 1950s and 1960s, a living testament to Garvey’s legacy and the New Negro. Michaux introduced Stokely to a classic text, Pan-Africanism or Communism?, written by George Padmore, a writer, organizer, and adviser to African revolutionaries and a principal founder of postwar Pan-Africanism. Though Padmore was dismissed as a traitor in Marxist circles for his embrace of African nationalism, Carmichael came to admire him as a fellow Trinidadian who had grown up near his old neighborhood. Padmore was not the only black radical conspicuously absent from the reading lists of Carmichael’s study groups. C.L.R. James, another Trinidadian, remained marginalized as a Trotskyite, despite his renown as one of the most important and innovative radical thinkers of his generation. James’ The Black Jacobins, an eloquent and moving history of the Haitian Revolution, would lead Carmichael to a further exploration of black history at one of Harlem’s most famous institutions, the Schomburg Center, perhaps the most important repository of black history in the country.22
Carmichael’s intellectual curiosity made him aware of the significance of global events that paralleled domestic civil rights struggles. In Harlem, the name Kwame Nkrumah rolled off the tongues of street speakers and newspapers announcing Ghanaian independence in 1957. Carmichael found himself transformed that summer, following his freshman year at Bronx Science. “Sichie,” the honorary black Italian, part-time neighborhood tough, and exotic became Stokely, the cosmopolitan black teenager who played tennis and enjoyed swimming with friends from Bronx Science. Carmichael’s old crowd responded by calling him a “fag,” but by his sophomore year he had severed old neighborhood ties for good. Handsome, intelligent, and charismatic, Stokely became the most popular student at Bronx Science, and teachers and students predicted great things for his future. “I thought I was going to be brilliant, I was going to solve the race problem,” Carmichael recalled years later.23
He increasingly occupied dual social worlds, careening between Bronx Science’s formal parties and Harlem’s grittier pleasures. These divergent realities seemed to converge in Greenwich Village, where white beatniks adopted black vernacular, listened to jazz, and romanticized ghetto life in hopes of “becoming completely Negrofied.” The racial complexities of class politics momentarily jarred the senses of the sixteen-year-old Carmichael, who offended black sensibilities each time he lapsed into the Lindy Hop in Harlem and sparked enthusiasm by dancing the Slop around whites. During his sophomore year, he found himself “being ashamed of being a Negro” and temporarily stopped listening to gospel music. The white kids at Bronx Science considered Carmichael their “chocolate Fred Astaire.” Already a budding maverick, he simply decided against choosing sides. “I resolved the problem by just going wherever I wanted to go,” he recalled. “If I felt like going to Harlem, I’d go to Harlem, if I felt like going down to the Village, I’d go down to do whatever I wanted to do.” This decision proved an important turning point for Stokely, one that allowed him to shed whatever anxieties remained over his immigrant background, intellectual sophistication, racial identity, and comfort around whites. Carmichael adamantly resisted narrowly focusing on a singular part of his multifaceted personality. His outward exterior of cool repose hid his ambition to make a political mark on the world, one that events in North Carolina would soon make possible.24