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Revolution in Babylon: Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s Peniel E. Joseph Version of record first published: 18 Dec 2007.

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Revolution in Babylon Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s1

Peniel E. Joseph

Stokely Carmichael fundamentally transformed American race relations in the 1960s as a local organizer, national political mobilizer, and international icon. In doing so Carmichael both scandalized and helped to reshape American democracy, first as a local organizer in Washington, D.C.; the Mississippi Delta; and Lowndes County, Alabama and then as SNCC chairman and a Black Power advocate. This essay argues that the boundaries between the civil rights and Black Power eras have been too sharply drawn at the expense of a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of both periods. Civil rights and Black Power are rooted in distinct, yet overlapping origins that share a common history. Carmichael’s evolution from a civil rights militant to Black Power revolutionary uncovers buried intimacies between the two eras while providing eye-opening new details about radical efforts to transform American democracy in the 1960s.

Keywords: Black Power, black radicalism, democracy, internationalism, Pan- Africanism, Stokely Carmichael

Introduction: In Search of an Icon

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) is one of the most important political leaders of the postwar era, yet remains one of the most obscure icons of his generation. A civil rights militant turned Black Power revolutionary, Carmichael’s call for ‘‘Black Power’’ in Greenwood, Mississippi during a late spring heat-wave in 1966 sent shockwaves through- out the United States and beyond. Black Power represents one of the most controversial, enduring, and pivotal stories of the twentieth century. Individuals and groups that played major and minor roles in this movement—which range from Malcolm X, William Worthy, Lorraine Hansberry, The Black Panthers, Lyndon Johnson, Black Muslims, FBI, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Huey P. Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, Fidel Castro, and the New Left

Souls 9 (4): 281–301, 2007 / Copyright # 2007 The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999940701703745

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to name a few—make this period nothing less than a historical epoch that encompasses the tragic and heroic character of the postwar global era. Spanning continents and crossing oceans, Black Power’s reach was global, stretching from urban projects in Harlem to rural hamlets in Lowndes County, Alabama, to poor Black neighborhoods in West Oakland out to the revolutionary cities of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Conakry, Guinea, Algiers, Algeria, and the cosmopolitan internationalism of London, Stockholm, and Paris.2

Stokely Carmichael possessed a nuanced appreciation for the everyday struggles of poor African Americans in the rural south through shared experiences in civil rights strug- gles and personally witnessed the soul crushing poverty that contoured the lives of too many northern Blacks. Travels to Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, which included intimate moments with icons such as Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Kwame Nkrumah, allowed Carmichael to imagine the world as a global stage wherein political leaders—no less than Black sharecroppers—played pivotal roles in determining the course of history. Carmichael’s unusual biography as a Caribbean born, Bronx raised, and Howard University–educated activist who traveled down south to register Black sharecroppers to vote only to unexpectedly emerge as a mainstream leader, world traveler, and international icon, allows for a panoramic view of postwar freedom struggles. Unglamorous everyday people—ranging from men and women, teenagers, schoolchildren and trade unionists—participated alongside of preachers and street speakers, politicians, and political leaders, intellectuals, and artists comprising a freedom surge that ranged from gritty Harlem neighborhoods to Detroit’s industrial shop-floors to Dixie’s cradle, Birmingham, Alabama, and out west to Oakland’s postwar boom town. Internationally, events in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean turned much of the postwar era into a global age of decolonization where millions staked humanity’s future on the spreading of unprecedented freedoms to far corners of the world.

Black Power would scandalize American society and the national media quickly turned the slogan into a national Rorschach test: One wherein Blacks viewed Black Power as righteous and whites interpreted the term to be filled with violent foreboding. Newspapers brooded over Carmichael’s words, quickly forming a consensus that judged the slogan to be at best intemperate and, at worst, a blatant call for anti-white violence and reverse racism.

For the next decade Black Power would reverberate around the world, galvanizing Blacks, outraging whites, and inspiring a cross-section of ethnic and racial minorities. A civil rights militant turned Black Power revolutionary, by 1969 Carmichael abandoned the United States for Conakry, Guinea, and claimed Pan-Africanism as the highest stage of Black political radicalism. For the next thirty years, Carmichael remained a diligent political activist, a throwback to the heady years of the 1960s who remained defiant in his belief that a worldwide revolution was still possible if not imminent. Yet Carmichael’s iconography obscures as much as it reveals. Carmichael’s role as an advocate of radical democracy and tireless civil rights organizer during the 1960s remains too often buried beneath the celebrity that would engulf him by the summer of 1966.

Carmichael belonged to the small fraternity who literally bled for American democracy during the early 1960s. By Carmichael’s own recollection, between June 1961 and June 1966, he was arrested twenty-seven times while participating in civil rights activities. For Carmichael, the decision to endure physical violence, personal discomfort, and economic uncertainty was part of a disciplined commitment to radical democracy in service of racial equality, economic justice, and Black community empowerment. As a young student activist at Howard University, Carmichael helped transform American democracy by participating on the front lines of social and