Primary Sources: People - The 1960s: Carmichael, Stokely

"This video shows Stokley Carmichael giving a speech on civil rights."

"Filmed interview with Stokely Carmichael conducted for Eyes on the Prize. Discussion centers on the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and includes Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Article from The New York Review of Books, Vol. 7 (September 22, 1966), pp. 5-6, 8.

To see the article in the original format please see the microfilm for the New York Review of Books available in the periodicals room.

"In June 1966, the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, first voiced the slogan “Black Power” during a march in Mississippi. James Meredith initiated the march to protest white resistance, in defiance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to black voter registration. Meredith was shot and wounded, but other black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Carmichael, continued the march. In conflict with King’s nonviolent philosophy, Carmichael told marchers in Greenwood, Mississippi, “We have got to get us some black power.” He later explained that the slogan was “a call for black people in this country to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” Carmichael’s rhetoric, influenced by Malcolm X, signified a growing divide in the civil rights movement between those who encouraged interracial collaboration and those who advocated black separatism. Carmichael himself left SNCC in 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party. The following testimony by Carmichael before a Senate subcommittee investigating internal security includes an interview Carmichael recorded during a visit to Cuba in 1967. Although he advocated an international struggle to end capitalism, the following year Carmichael announced that “Communism is not an ideology suited for black people.” Carmichael moved to Guinea in 1969, where he changed his name to Kwame Ture and formed the Pan-Africanist All-African People’s Party. He died in 1998." GMU History Matters