Kwame Ture, the flamboyant civil rights leader known to most Americans as Stokely Carmichael, died Sunday in Conakry, Guinea. He was 57 and is best remembered for his use of the phrase "black power," which in the mid-1960s ignited a white backlash and alarmed an older generation of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The cause of death was prostate cancer. Ture once said his cancer "was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them."Though his active participation in the struggle for civil rights lasted barely a decade, Stokely Carmichael was a charismatic figure in a turbulent time, when real violence and rhetoric escalated on both sides of the color line.
Graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Howard in 1964, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was "Freedom Summer" in the year that SNCC (popularly pronounced "snick") was sending hundreds of black and white volunteers to the South to teach, set up clinics and register disenfranchised black Southerners.
The young Carmichael - tall, slim, handsome and a dynamic speaker - was radicalized by his experiences working in the segregated South, where peaceful protesters were beaten, brutalized and sometimes killed for seeking the ordinary rights of citizens.
His growing impatience with the tactics of passive resistance was gaining support, and at only 25, he raised the call for black power, which he described as a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."
"Black power!" signaled a crossroads in the civil rights struggle and was soon echoed in communities from Oakland, Calif., to Newark, N.J. But if Carmichael's call galvanized many young blacks, it troubled others, who thought it sounded anti-white, provocative and violent. And it struck fear into many whites.
In 1966 and 1967, Carmichael lectured at campuses around the United States and traveled to countries including North Vietnam, China and Cuba.
In 1967, a declining SNCC severed all ties with him. He moved to Guinea, in West Africa, in 1969.