Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Stokely Carmichael (later, Kwame Turé) was born into a working-class family on June 29, 1941 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Carmichael remained in Trinidad with his grandparents when his parents left for the United States in search of work, and was eventually reunited with his parents in 1952, moving with them to the South Bronx in New York City. The family later moved to the working-class Italian American, Morris Park-White Plains neighborhood in the Bronx. As a young man, Carmichael frequented Michaux's African Bookstore on 125th Street and the Schomburg Museum on 141st Street. It was in Harlem, on 125th Street especially, where Carmichael became familiar with the passionate oratory of numerous “stepladder” speakers, as well as elder Trinidadian activists C. L. R. James (1901–89) and George Padmore (1902–59). Carmichael's interest in social activism took hold while he was a senior at Bronx High School of Science, where he met some young communists and was deeply influenced by their radical analysis of history and capitalism. Early on, he supported the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) pickets of New York area department stores that discriminated against blacks in their Southern stores. Later, Carmichael organized students at Bronx Science for one of Bayard Rustin's Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in Washington, DC. It was in DC that he met students from the Nonviolent Action ... log in or subscribe to read full text