Tall and thin, with limpid eyes and a dazzling smile that contrasted with his deeply brown skin, Carmichael walked like he thought he was a good-looking guy - in an era when, for many blacks, lighter was better. Black, Carmichael told his audiences, was survivor-strong. 'We have to stop being ashamed of being black!' was the first point in a four-part manifesto he often used in his speeches. The phrase, he adds, resonated powerfully for a people who'd long been measured by arbitrarily set white standards and aesthetics. 'They assumed that black power meant being anti-white and really sort of violent, foreboding.'īlack listeners, on the other hand, heard a call 'for cultural political and economic self-determination,' Joseph says. Many whites who heard the phrase were uneasy, Joseph says. It caught the nation's attention, but it meant different things to different people. In 1966, he used the phrase 'black power' at a rally in Mississippi.

Joseph says Carmichael began to wonder if new methods needed to be considered. But the soaring victories of the late '50s and early '60s seemed to bog down after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Joseph says Carmichael had 'amazing charisma.'Ĭarmichael spent the early '60s firmly embracing nonviolent protest: sit-ins, marches, assemblies. in Mississippi, chatting easily with farmers in Lowndes County, Ala., listening to elderly black ladies who plied him with sweet tea on their front porches while he (often successfully) charmed them into joining him in organizing their neighbors. Photographs from the time show him walking down dusty highways with Martin Luther King Jr. Joseph, a professor at Tufts University, says Carmichael was ever-present in what he considers 'the second half of the civil rights movement's heroic period.' (After the Montgomery Bus Boycott and before the attempts to integrate the North.) Historian Peniel Joseph's new biography of Carmichael, titled Stokely: A Life, shows that for a time, the Trinidad-born New Yorker was everywhere that counted in the South, a real-life Zelig: 'He is an organizer who had his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960-1965.' The tall, handsome philosophy major from Howard University spent summers in the South, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, to get African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi registered to vote in the face of tremendous, often violent resistance from segregationists. That year, his use of the phrase 'black power' at a rally in Mississippi grabbed the nation's attention.īefore he became famous - and infamous - for calling on black power for black people, Stokely Carmichael was better known as a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, speaks to reporters in Atlanta in May 1966.

Stokely carmichael mfah