By Karolina Castro, ’16
Stokely Carmichael was a Trinidadian-American revolutionary of the Civil Right era known for popularizing the term “Black Power.” Carmichael started his activist career as a student at Howard University in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He later became the prime minister of the Black Panther Party before moving in 1969 to Guinea and advocating for Pan Africanism as a member of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. By this time, Carmichael had changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of Ghanaian and Guinean leaders, Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure. Ture is known for his powerful speeches which he frequently delivered at colleges and universities throughout the United States, at both predominantly white and historically black institutions. Ture was just one of many in the Black Power movement who looked to inspire students to enact social change. In targeting college campuses, Ture attempted to challenge white supremacy and encourage students to spread the Black Power movement to their respective communities. Ultimately, focusing on college campuses was relatively ineffective in bringing about the revolutionary change the Black Power movement desired.
First, we must understand what Black Power was, and Kwame Ture’s role in it as a Pan Africanist. The Black Power movement was radicalized with the rise of the Black Panther Party which advocated for Black Americans to practice self-defense to combat police brutality. The Black Panther Party also believed that since the institutions at hand were not created to benefit Black Americans that they should create and control their own systems. Martha Biondi argues that these new institutions should celebrate Black American culture while using it for political and ideological change. By creating new institutions, the Black Power movement was interested in empowering Black people by helping them achieve the right to govern themselves and to define themselves. Moreover, the movement encouraged Black people to see themselves as part of the African diaspora as a way to unify their struggle with those across the globe. This perspective is one of the main components of Pan Africanism. In a speech at Whittier College in 1971, Ture discussed the components of Pan Africanism, which he viewed as an evolved theory from Marx-Leninism Ture argued that Pan Africanism soughts to rebuild Africa as a world power so that members of the African Diaspora have a supportive foundation that will prevent their oppression. Black people were oppressed in capitalist systems, because black people did not own or control the means of production. However, Black people shouldn’t have to conform to an economic structure that oppressed them and thus, Pan Africanism offered an alternative. According to this ideology, the oppression of Black people is grounded in landlessness, capitalist exploitation, and racism. These were the basic components of the Black Power movement and Pan Africanism that Ture advocated for on his college tours.
During the 1960s and 1970s, college students became an integral part of the Black Power movement. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized the freedom rides, registered Black Southerners to vote, and spearheaded the lunch counter sit-ins throughout the South. By 1968, college campuses throughout the nation were convulsed with student protests against the Vietnam War. At the same time, with the expansion of affirmative action, the enrollment of Black students in U.S. colleges increased by 56 percent between 1970 and 1974, a lot of whom were of working class and migrant family backgrounds. Thus, college and universities were becoming richer with young Black intellectuals. In addition, historian Peniel Joseph suggested that the university setting was increasingly considered a site for revolutionary struggle https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Black_Power_Movement.html?id=jnuI5c9lUEwC . because it was seen as the place for the production and orientation of ideology, education and labor. Especially as youth who could not be drafted to the Vietnam War, activists like Ture, saw college students as a great pool of people to educate and inspire revolutionary change.
While many people thought that the Black Power movement was anti-white, Kwame Ture was known for speaking to students at both predominantly white and historically black institutions. http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/stokely-speaks-products-9781556526497.php . His message would vary depending on the students in the audience but overall he gave these speeches because he believed that American youth were politically naive. While students and young people had historically been at the forefront of many movements internationally, that has not been the case in the United States. In a speech at UC Berkeley in 1966, while still a member of SNCC, Ture talked to white students about white supremacy, saying that Black students shouldn’t have to prove their humanity to them simply because of the belief that darker skin is inferior or bad. Ture pushed white students to move their activism outside of the college campus, arguing that the anti-war movement had failed because it was limited to college campuses. He encouraged and challenged white students to organize and advocate for the Black Power movement in their own white communities. This is a strong strategy because white privilege allows for the voices of white activists to at least be heard more in white communities.
Ture also spoke at Morgan State in Baltimore in 1967, encouraging black students to define themselves outside of the white gaze and to spread the movement to the ghettos. In this speech, he encouraged black students to mobilize, to unite as a people, and to embrace their blackness with pride. He reminded them they were indeed still slaves to the American political system. He challenged Black students to think about power and who had the power to define them, exhorting them to define themselves and to redefine freedom and democracy. Again, he pushed Black students to expand the movement from the college campus to the ghetto because as Black folk they had a duty to help other Black people instead of trying to imitate white hegemonic culture. Ture spoke to students because they had to become politically aware and as college students they had the opportunity to engage in political change. While college might serve as a site for ideological production and orientation, Ture emphasized to the students in both predominantly white and historically black universities that their primary duty was to expand their political activism to their respective communities, white students could go to white communities and Black student should advocate in Black communities.
The effort to target colleges to advance the goals of the Black Power movement ultimately produced not a movement of students, but rather an examination of the Black experience from within the University. The last legacy of the Black Power movement on American campuses was the Black Studies program. While they revolutionized U.S. higher education by bringing Black people into the curriculum and the professoriate, that was not the kind of revolutionary change that the movement wanted. As historian Martha Biondi has shown, Black Studies was envisioned as young Black students achieving Black Power in Black American ghettos. Black Studies was centered on strengthening consciousness and awareness around the African liberation movements happening in the 1960s and 1970s. As Peniel Joseph has shown, Pan Africanism gives Black radicals the agency to redefine culture, class and colonialism through a global perspective. Thus, Pan Africanism was a major component behind Black Studies because it strove to build community among the African Diaspora to reclaim power. Scholars like Joseph and Biondi argue that although the Black Studies program was not revolutionary, that it paved the way for more revolutionary ideas. The fact that Black students, especially poor Black students, were asserting their right to shape institutions was, in and of itself, revolutionary. However, revolutionary change of the kind Ture advocated did not come out of universities. Ultimately, Black Studies constituted a reformist approach, rather than a revolutionary one. As Ture argued , Black people needed to create their own institutions, and they must not imitate white hegemony. Colleges and universities were white, Western institutions, thus, Black people will not find liberation within institutions and structures where white supremacy reigned. Black Studies was limited to higher education, which was still very inaccessible to many Black people in the 1970s. Thus, the program was bound to fail on Ture’s terms, because of its reformist approach to bettering the university conditions for Black college students.
Kwame Ture wanted students to be politically aware, to embrace their blackness and to expand the movement to helping poor Black folk. However, the college movement’s lasting legacy was the Black Studies Program. While the Black Power movement wanted Black people to create their own institutions, Black students were seeking to reform their own colleges.. Today, there are approximately 1,777 programs or departments http://www.afro.illinois.edu/documents/BlackStudiesSurvey.pdf of Black Studies or African-American Studies at universities, colleges, or community colleges in the United States. Black Studies may not have reflected the revolutionary goals of the Black Power movement but it still helped reshape university culture. But are we satisfied with that?
Further Readings
Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas, 2014.
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt and, 2006.