STOKELY CARMICHAEL’S VOICE BROKE THROUGH THE HUMID MISSISSIPPI night. He thrived in the heat—especially in the Delta, an area he considered to be a second home.
It was Thursday, June 16, 1966. Less than a year before, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act into law, and thirteen months before that had ushered in the Civil Rights Act. They were watershed laws designed to conclude the nation’s unfinished work begun after the Civil War. Carmichael was now in Mississippi to ensure that the federal laws passed with pomp and circumstance in Washington would apply to black sharecroppers living in plantation communities that harkened back to the antebellum South’s bullwhip days. Released from his latest stay in jail, Carmichael immediately returned to Greenwood, where he had first cut his teeth as an organizer. Carmichael intuitively possessed an orator’s gift of speech and a showman’s sense of timing, with inflections of his West Indian heritage, New York upbringing, and recent years in the South. His most obvious asset was his good looks—proverbially tall, dark, and handsome, with wide eyes that conveyed mischief. His long arms sliced through the muggy air to punctuate his words. Carmichael’s mannerisms resembled the loose-limbed energy of Malcolm X, a speaker he had studied up close while still in college.
Stokely Carmichael brought an outsider’s perspective to America’s racial landscape. He was born in 1941 on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and spent his first ten years there. In 1952, he moved to the Bronx to join his family. He had graduated from Howard University in Washington, DC, but it was in rural Mississippi that he found his calling as an organizer. He fell in love with the South’s impoverished black community. Friends noticed he began speaking with more than a hint of a southern accent.
That June night in 1966, as the twenty-four-year-old Carmichael gazed upon the sweat-soaked crowd gathered under the night sky, he spoke out of frustration, anxiety, even anger. But most of all, he spoke from a sense of combative hope. His latest arrest, which took place shortly after the fifth anniversary of his first, completed a circle that had begun in Mississippi.
“This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested,” he shouted, “and I ain’t going to jail no more!” With words that echoed through the night, Carmichael urged the crowd to take control of their destiny. “We want black power!” he shouted. A thunderous reply of “Black Power!” emanated from the crowd, sparking a call-and-response chant that gave the event the feel of an outdoor religious revival.1
Like a prosecutor before a surging jury of six hundred, Carmichael made a case for political revolution. “We have begged the president. We’ve begged the federal government—that’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging.” Racial and economic oppression in the South required something more: “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell ’em.”
“Black Power,” was the response. “Black Power!”
The speech that night introduced Stokely Carmichael not just to the six hundred people before him but also to the nation and the world. His life changed that night, and so did America’s civil rights movement. Black Power provoked a national reckoning on questions of civil rights, race, and democracy. Carmichael, whose charisma was matched by his ambition, stood at the center of this storm deploying boldly provocative rhetoric with passion and eloquence. He instantly commanded the space previously occupied by Malcolm X, assassinated sixteen months earlier.
IN THE PUBLIC’S IMAGINATION, Stokely Carmichael stood distant from civil rights. But in fact, that very movement had shaped and nurtured him. Martin Luther King, as much as Malcolm X, influenced Carmichael’s political vision. He cultivated a well-earned reputation as a radical but counted King as a personal friend and a professional mentor. Although he greatly admired Malcolm X, Carmichael spent far more personal time with King, whom he credited with teaching him to confront racial violence with grace and dignity. The two survived disagreements over strategies and tactics to find common ground in connecting black protest to antiwar and anti-poverty campaigns. If King’s regal bearing and biblical rhetoric drew comparisons to Moses, Carmichael’s pugnacious energy resembled that of John the Baptist, an itinerant evangelist whose teachings challenged received wisdom.
Like many in his generation, Carmichael found himself drawn to the power and charisma of Malcolm X. He watched Malcolm speak at Howard University and occasionally bumped into him when he visited Washington. After Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965, Carmichael, both consciously and unconsciously, followed aspects of his political trajectory. Beyond superficial physical similarities in height, weight, and speaking style, Carmichael and Malcolm shared reputations as troublemakers who hid boundless political and intellectual ambitions. Both men took life-altering pilgrimages to Africa, adopted revolutionary Pan-African politics, and changed their names.
In the 1960s, the now largely forgotten name of Stokely Carmichael easily rolled off of the tongues of American presidents, the head and agents of the FBI, college students, ministers, and soldiers. National magazine profiles, television appearances, and hundreds of speeches around the country made Carmichael a revolutionary icon. But three years after unleashing Black Power upon an unsuspecting nation and world, Carmichael seemed to vanish. Considered the heir to Malcolm X at twenty-five, he became by the age of thirty a political nomad operating out of the tiny West African country of Guinea.
By the time an undergraduate named Barack Obama, who would become a community organizer in Chicago a few short years later, heard him speak at Columbia University in the early 1980s, Kwame Ture was promoting plans “to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem that would circumvent white capitalist imperialism.” Ture’s unabashed critiques of Reagan-era capitalism and embrace of a style of black radicalism out of vogue since the 1960s perplexed Obama, who found more comforting inspiration in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), the group of which Carmichael had been elected chairman just before chanting Black Power into the Mississippi night. “His eyes glowed inward as he spoke,” wrote Obama in his memoir Dreams from My Father, “the eyes of a madman or a saint.”2