stokely carmichael stokely speaks black power back to pan africanism

When you're trained that way in your youth, then in your elderly days it just becomes habitual.'Īt 56, Ture is not really elderly. So sustaining myself in this period is not difficult. 'We were aware of the fact that death walks hand in hand with struggle. 'We are revolutionaries,' he lectures, slipping into the plural as leaders and royals sometimes do. He was chased, beaten, gassed, surveilled he expected a bullet. More than 29, he thinks, but fewer than 36. well, he's unsure of the precise number of times. During his years as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as the firebrand who shouted the then-incendiary phrase 'Black Power,' as the Pan-Africanist who moved to Guinea and changed his name, he was arrested. Yet there is a connection that earlier experience, he explains, helped prepare him for this one. He's not referring, directly, to the prostate cancer that was diagnosed more than two years ago. 'You just wipe it out.' He's talking about another time and a different threat, about registering black voters in such near-war zones as the Mississippi Delta and rural Alabama in the 1960s, when he was still known as Stokely Carmichael.

'The secret of life is to have no fear it's the only way to function,' Ture is saying. He sounds as if he's on a podium lecturing college students, or at a news conference issuing denunciations and exhortations, instead of where he is: lying wearily in a hospital bed at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, with fluids dripping intravenously into his thin left arm.

When Kwame Ture talks about politics, his voice gains strength.

Stokely carmichael stokely speaks black power back to pan africanism