#BlackLivesMatter Meet Stokely Carmichael

IN AN UNDISTINGUISHED apartment around the corner from my house in Columbia Heights, the Black Power revolutionary Stokely Carmichael honed his forceful, insistent rhetoric and organizing genius. His apartment effectively served as the Washington, D.C. headquarters for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Historian Peniel E. Joseph’s recently released Carmichael biography, Stokely: A Life, traces this complicated American revolutionary with nuance and freshness critical in our era of resurging black youth-led movements. Regarding Carmichael’s D.C. years, Joseph describes the intellectual crucible that was Howard University at the time.

The Caribbean-born, Harlem-raised Carmichael lived in D.C. from 1960, when he enrolled at Howard as a philosophy major, to 1965, when he relocated to Lowndes County, Ala., as a fulltime organizer for the black freedom struggle. For five critical years, Carmichael—who was raised Methodist and would later found the Black Panthers and become a leading anti-colonial, pan-Africanist living in Guinea (changing his name to Kwame Touré)—honed his organizing skills and revolutionary perspective from his student apartment on Euclid Street.

The fall of 1960 followed the culmination of the first wave of sit-ins sparked by the North Carolina A&T students in Greensboro. Ella Baker had encouraged students to break from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and form their own youth-led organization, which became SNCC. Black campuses, including Howard, were on fire with possibility. Carmichael’s freshman English teacher was future Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Poet Sterling Brown, called “the dean of Negro literature,” mentored Carmichael, urging him to pay “attention to the voices of not just the dignified but also the damned.”

During Carmichael’s sophomore year, Howard hosted Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X for their famous debate, “Integration or Separation.” Between classes, Carmichael helped lead a contingent of 200 Howard students to desegregate restaurants and public facilities along Route 40, between D.C. and Baltimore. During “vacations,” Carmichael registered black voters in Mississippi and Alabama, habitually spending his late June birthday in jail.

It was from Alabama that Carmichael’s voice definitively broke through to the national level. After the march from Selma to Montgomery and the Klan murder of Viola Liuzzo, Carmichael stayed on in Lowndes County to organize in the churches. He formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which chose a black panther as its symbol, “noting the animal’s color and ability to defend itself,” writes Joseph.

“Stokely Carmichael’s belief that black political power resided in the will and political self-determination of local people helped to create the original Black Panther Party ... for promoting radical democracy in Alabama,” says Joseph. When black voters successfully got a Black Panther candidate on the Lowndes County ballot in November 1966, a major political victory had been won. Carmichael, with his calls for more and greater and consolidated “black power,” had broken the white Democratic electoral machine in the South: An independent black political party had been formed.

In James Cone’s 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power, he defines black power as “complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary.” Elsewhere he defines black liberation theology as an attempt “to teach people how to be unapologetically black and Christian at the same time.” Cone goes on to say “the main difficulty which most whites have with Black Power and its relationship to the Christian gospel stems from their own inability to translate traditional theological language into the life situation of black people.” The national uprisings in Florida, Missouri, and New York are part of an ongoing black liberation narrative.

In the distorted racialized imagination of America, white Christians must confront the notion that our salvation comes through a black Jesus. Will we stand at the foot of the cross and the lynching tree, as Cone puts it, and ponder their power, accepting the profound discomfort we find there? Will white Christians who say #BlackLivesMatter also embrace #BlackPowerNow?