Though he had been aware of the civil rights movement for years, it was not until one night toward the end of high school, when he saw footage of a sit-in on television, that Carmichael felt compelled to join the struggle. They were still white, and I was Black.'' Being liberal was an intellectual game with these cats. Carmichael later recalled his high school friendships in harsh terms: 'Now that I realize how phony they all were, how I hate myself for it. However, even at that age, he was highly conscious of the racial differences that divided him from his classmates. In 1956, Carmichael passed the admissions test to get into the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, where he was introduced to an entirely different social set-the children of New York City's rich white liberal elite.Ĭarmichael was popular among his new classmates he attended parties frequently and dated white girls. Soon Carmichael became the only Black member of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. In 1954, at the age of 13, Stokely Carmichael became a naturalized American citizen and his family moved to a predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx called Morris Park. The next thing that came to that poor Black man was death-from working too hard. He did carpentry all day and drove taxis all night. 'He was religious, never lied, never cheated or stole. 'My old man believed in this work-and-overcome stuff,' recalled Carmichael. An industrious and optimistic immigrant, Adolphus Carmichael chased a version of the American Dream that his son would later criticize as an instrument of racist economic oppression. His mother, Mabel, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, worked as a carpenter by day and a taxi driver by night. Carmichael's parents immigrated to New York when he was a toddler, leaving him in the care of his grandmother until the age of 11 when he followed his parents to the United States. Early LifeĬarmichael was born on June 29, 1941, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Renaming himself Kwame Ture, he spent most of his later years in Guinea, where he died in 1998.

Carmichael later lost faith in the tactic of nonviolence, promoting 'Black Power' and allying himself with the militant Black Panther Party. and other Southern leaders to stage protests. Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence as a member and later the chairman of the SNCC, working with Martin Luther King Jr.

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