Forty years ago, on June 17, 1966—twelve days before his twenty-fifth birthday—Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, was catapulted by the masses of African people in Greenwood, Mississippi, onto the world’s political stage when he reechoed their centuries-old demand for Black Power. It was at that fateful rally in Greenwood that Kwame deployed, for the first time before the world’s media, the full range and power of his organizing capacity, his oratory and charisma. And thanks (no thanks) to the miscalculation of the United States government and media, a refreshingly new, young, black, and revolutionary voice and image was heard and seen for the first time, in every corner of the world.
That “Black Power Rally” boldly announced to the world, especially to African and oppressed youth, that a new generation had come of political age and had seized control of the world’s political stage, even if only for one brief and shining moment. Kwame’s words and demeanor, and the crowd’s response to them and him, signified that a new wave of resistance, rebellion, and revolution had reached critical mass, and that it would take a radically different form. The effect was catalytic.
Five years later, in 1971, Random House published Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism, thanks to the intervention of Toni Morrison, who had been Kwame’s English professor at Howard University and was at the time an editor at the press, and to the editorship of Ethel Minor, Kwame’s secretary and advisor in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Democratic Party of Guinea (DPG), and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). This seminal collection of Kwame’s speeches and writings from 1965 to 1971 was published, according to Ethel, in order to document Kwame’s “consistent growth and development as a revolutionary activist and theoretician.” But, Ethel offered, “perhaps more important than summarizing the ideological history of a controversial black leader, this book also serves to some extent as the history of the ‘Black Movement’ during that [period].”
For six years—from 1965 when he founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, the first Black Panther Party, to the publication of Stokely Speaks in 1971—Kwame, like the bold, “bad,” black panther he symbolized, prowled the length and breadth of the United States and the world, wherever he was invited and permitted by hostile governments to visit.3 He traveled a political path similar to and earned a place among other advocates of Pan-Africanism and socialism, including: Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, and Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe; Shirley Graham and W.E.B. DuBois; George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and Claudia Jones; Marcus, Amy Ashwood, and Amy Jacques Garvey; Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X; Ho Chi Minh, Kim il Sung, and Che Guevara; and a host of others.
Through experience and study, Kwame Ture came to understand that true freedom for African people is vested in self-reliance and self-determination, which is achievable only through appropriately scaled national unity. For him, that scale of national unity was continental and all-African. He believed, as Kwame Nkrumah correctly defined, that Pan-Africanism is the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism and that it is the only objective which, when achieved, will solve the problems that people of African descent face in every corner of the world. Kwame spent the last forty years of his life teaching about and organizing to achieve Pan-Africanism.
It was through his oratory and organizing that Kwame made his greatest and most enduring public impact. Unknown, however, to most, he was one of the most prolific writers of his generation. Spanning more than three decades, his speeches, interviews, articles, correspondence, reports, memorandums, proposals, and other materials number in the thousands. Through Stokely Speaks, Ethel ensured the publication of the fifteen speeches and articles preserved in this little book that without her dedication would still remain in file cabinets and boxes, and on old reels of tape.
Thirty-five years after its initial publication, Stokely Speaks has been republished thanks to the unyielding work of Mrs. Mabel Carmichael, Kwame’s mother; Nagib Malik, his sister; Lawrence Hill Books and Yuval Taylor, its senior editor; Michael Thelwell, the coauthor with Kwame of Ready for Revolution: The Life and Times of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), who introduced us to Yuval; and the unyielding efforts of the A-APRP Due to production considerations, the name Stokely Carmichael continues to be used instead of Kwame Ture.
I met Kwame in the summer of 1966 when he came to Chicago to help found the Organizing Committee for Black Power, speak at the University of Chicago, and attend the Nation of Islam’s Saviors Day Program at the invitation of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. From 1967 to his transition in 1998, I had the honor and privilege to work, study, and struggle with him in SNCC, the Illinois Chapter of the BPP, the A-APRP, the PDG, and a host of other organizations, movements, programs, and events. I currently have the honor and privilege to serve, with Nagib Malik as codirector of the Kwame Ture Work-Study Institute and Library, which is based in Conakry, Guinea.
I am honored and privileged to continue the work that Ethel began. I am also honored and privileged to share the responsibility of relaunching this classic with Mumia Abu-Jamal. His humility and honesty, as displayed in his foreword, is refreshing and was entirely expected. I also thank Pam Afrika for helping us make contact with Mumia, and Dr. Will Jones for his encouragement and editorial advice. Much respect!
Stokely Speaks is a time capsule, a blast from the past. It is also an educational tool, an organizational weapon for the future. It will enable and empower a new generation of youth and scholars, activists and organizers to begin to know and understand Kwame Ture as a man of thought and action, of work and study, of organization and struggle. It also affords an opportunity to intensify the struggle to challenge the historical and continuing efforts to “white” Kwame out of the history of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Pan-African Movements, and to correct the myths, distortions, and deformations which encumber our understanding of him, his contributions, and his achievements. We hope that additional volumes of his speeches and writings will be published that document his continuing and consistent growth and development from 1971 to his transition in Conakry, Guinea, on November 15, 1998.
This book is Kwame’s gift to African and oppressed youth worldwide. We hope they will read and study it, and that it will inspire, enable, and empower them to accomplish their historic task, as so many similar books inspired, enabled, and empowered Kwame and his generation to accomplish theirs. Who knows? Perhaps the new Kwame Ture, among our daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons, already exists, waiting for that historical moment when he or she too will be called upon to make a contribution to the forward march of progress and history. We trust that they will be “Ready for the Revolution!” whenever and wherever they are called.
—Bob Brown
Codirector, Kwame Ture Work-Study Institute and
Library Organizer, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party
Conakry, Guinea, and Washington, DC
June 5, 2006