Carmichael Timeline: 1960-1969

1960

College students in Greensboro, North Carolina stage a sit-in at Woolworth’s Lunch counter on February 1, 1960. Throughout the next few days hundreds more would participate in what would come to be known as the Greensboro sit-ins. Following the arrest and charge of some of these protesters for “trespassing” came boycott of all the segregated lunch counters in Greensboro until the first four students who originally sat in were served at that same lunch counter at Woolworth’s.

In response to what she saw as the potential of these student-lead demonstrations to spark the large-scale incorporation of young activists into the mainstream civil rights movement,  Ella Baker coordinated a meeting at Shaw University (Raleigh, NC) in April between the student activists in Greensboro and a handful of the leading figures of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which Baker was the director and of which Martin Luther King Jr. was the de facto spokesman at that point in 1960. Also present at the meeting were representatives from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship for Reconciliation (FOR), the National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society, along with 126 delegates from 58 sit-in centers across 12 states and 19 northern colleges (Stokely Camrmichael was also present). The meeting would establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which designated James Forman, Bob Moses, and Marion Barry as its original leaders.

1961

 Thirteen freedom riders board a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. on May 4 in response to the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, which declared it unconstitutional to segregate interstate transportation facilities. On May 14 (Mother’s Day of that year) a white mob in Anniston, Alabama attacked the freedom riders’ bus, throwing a bomb into it. After negotiations between Attorney General Robert. F. Kennedy and Alabama Governor John Patterson, the Riders continued on May 20, but  they were deserted by the police and then attacked in Montgomery. After a phone call from Martin Luther King. Jr., the Attorney General sent federal marshals there. Stokely Camrmichael participated in the freedom rides as a freshman at Howard University and was jailed for forty-nine days in Jackson, Mississippi.

1963

A Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rusin, and Martin Luther King. Jr. organize the March on Washington, where King would give the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Discussed far less often, though, was the July 1963 march on a segregated movie theatre coordinated in part by the SNCC in Americus, Georgia. More than thirty-three high school girls were arrested, and after forty-five days of imprisonment they would come to be known as the “Stolen Girls.”

1964

More than 700 volunteers organized by CORE and the SNCC arrive in Mississippi for the voter registration drive now known as Freedom Summer. Though only 1,200 of the 17,000 black mississippians who attempted to register to vote succeeded, many accounts claim that it was largely this effort that persuaded Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. This was the same year, however, that Stokely Carmichael and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would push for Black delegates to be represented at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where none of them would be seated or recognized. This turn of events is understood by several biographers and historians to have resulted in Carmichael’s disaffection from the SNCC.

1965

600+ protesters embark on the Selma to Montgomery march that culminated in Bloody Sunday on the Edmund pettus Bridge March 7, 1965. Stokely Carmichael migrates to Lowndes County, Alabama, in which African-Americans made up a majority of the population but were incredibly underrepresented in government. After one year of Carmichael’s participation, the number of registered black voters skyrocketed from 70 to 2600, which was 300 more than the total number of registered white voters.

But as the Alabama Democratic Party was headed by segregationist George Wallace, and because the party backed its “White Supremacy” slogan with the adoption of the image of the White Rooster, Carmichael and other members of the SNCC founded the Lowndes County Freedom Party, also termed the Black Panther Party, after its members chose the Black Panther as the party logo. 1965 was also the year of the Malcolm X assassination (February 21).

1966

Carmichael and other members of the SNCC grow impatient with the mainstream Civil Rights commitment to nonviolence--this is the year where we might place Stokely Carmichael’s radical turn, which resulted in the simultaneous radical redirection of the SNCC after Carmichael was elected national chairman in May. Carmichael gives his most famous “Black Power” speech in June after James Meredith is shot while enacting his March Against Freedom from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.  Martin Luther King Jr. Would Call Carmichael’s “Black Power” an “unfortunate choice of words.”

1967

Carmichael resigns from the chairmanship of the SNCC and begins traveling around the world to meet with leaders of various anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements and to speak at several conferences organized around these themes. He travels first to the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse Theatre in London (held from July 15 to July 30). On July 18 Carmichael speaks about rioting in Newark, New Jersey, and on July 22 he participates in an “Open Forum” with poet Allen Ginsberg, who is said to have “sparred” with Carmichael while they both fielded exchanges with the audience.

From London Carmichael travels to the Organization of Latin American Solidarity Conference in Cuba on July 25. On July 26 Carmichael attends a Cuban Independence Celebration, after which he rides  in Fidel Castro’s Jeep while the rest of the SNCC members ride in a motorcade (by this time Carmichael has formerly stepped down from all leadership roles in the SNCC and is individually recognized by the conference organizers as an honorary delegate). The conference begins on July 31, and Carmichael gives a speech in which he discusses the international appeal of “Black Power” to oppressed peoples throughout the globe.

From Cuba Stokely Carmichael boards a plane to Vietnam that would stop over in Madrid, but Cuban intelligence has learned that U.S. authorities planned to confiscate his passport there. The plane returns and Carmichael then travels with the Soviet delegation back to Moscow, where he stays for two days before flying to Beijing. There, Shirley Graham DuBois maintains a group of Black expatriates, and Carmichael spends some time convening with them. Shortly thereafter, Carmichael finally makes it to northern Vietnam, where he privately convenes with President Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. On September 6 Carmichael would travel to Algeria, where he would convene with the leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN). On September 26 he would travel to Guinea, where he spends time with Kwamwe Nkrumah and Shirley Graham DuBois, who are said to have been largely influential in Carmichael’s transformative decision to permanently leave the United States. He traveled to Cairo on October 20, Tanzania on October 27, and then he  finally returned to the United States on December 11.

Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life. pp 210-229

Sarah Seidman. “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba.” Journal of Transnational American Studies. UC Santa Barbara. 2012.

(Also important to note that this was the year that Black students at UNC Chapel Hill elected to disband the Campus NAACP chapter in favor of establishing a Black Student Movement, of which a majority of the Black students on campus would become members by fall of 1968. This event might help to register the  growing unrest, at least among younger African Americans, with the mainstream civil rights movement, which UNC student activist Preston Dobbins described as “antique”).

1968

Carmichael marries Miriam Makeba.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated within months of each other on April 4 and June 5, respectively. In response to King’s death riots break out in Washing, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City in addition to other major cities.

On April 23 hundreds of Columbia students protest the Vietnam War, occupying several buildings on campus for over a week. This action was followed by student protests in Poland, West Germany, Mexico City, Paris, Italy, and other major cities across the world. Students and other anti-war activists, including members of the Student Democratic Society as well as the Black Panthers, also travel to Chicago to protest at the Democratic National Convention. Olympic runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos also raise their fists in salute to Black Power at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Stokely Carmichael gives speeches at the Organization of Arab Students  Convention in Ann Arbor on August 25 and at North Carolina A&T on December 9. Nixon is elected to the White House in November, and Apollo 8 orbits the moon in December, a major technological feat scored for the American side of the Cold War. 

1969

Carmichael’s passport is confiscated for a period of 10 months when he returns from Africa in 1968. In 1969 he emigrated with his wife, South African Singer Miriam Makeba, to Guinea, West Africa, and he changed his name to Kwame Toure (after Guinean Pan-Africanist proponents Kwame Nkrumah and  and Sekou Toure). Here, Ture would serve as an aide to Guinean president Ahmed Sekou Toure while his wife would serve as Guinea’s official delegate to the United Nations. In October Carmichael published an official denouncement of the Black Panther Party, which he castigated for their collaboration with “white radicals.” The next (and final) three decades of Ture’s life would be dedicated to the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, which Kwame Nkrumah had advocated for in his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare  but was  officially launched by Kwame Ture (he only took titles “Organizer” and “Central Committee member”). From this point onward Ture worked alongside multiple African and non-African organizations, and he frequently returned to the U.S. for speaking engagements, many of which were given at university campuses.

1973

Carmichael and his first wife Miriam divorce

1980

Carmichael marries Marlyatou Barry;

1981

Bakar Carmichael is born

Carmichael and Marlyatou divorce

1995

Carmichael diagnosed with prostate cancer.

In September Stokely’s mother insists that he come visit her in Miami (she intuits that he isn’t well; doesn’t yet know that he has cancer). He goes to visit with her in December.

1996

 In January Carmichael goes to Cuba for the 30th Organization of Latin American solidarity conference.

 In December Carmichael is diagnosed with cancer.

1997

Carmichael travels to Cuba, where he has been invited to receive cancer treatment. Assatur Shakur visits with him for all 14 days that he stays in the clinic there.

Carmichael then returns to Trinidad  in June for the first time in thirty years at the invitation of the Emancipation  Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago  (he had previously been banned for much of his adult life). He visits with his aunts Olga and Elaine during this time.

1998

Carmichael does his last interview in April with the Washington Post: he debunks sentiments of racial progress in economics and electoral politics, siting the diminished power of mayorships after a number of major U.S. cities had elected Black mayors