• Anti-Semitic, anti-white, black separatist
• Leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
• Author of the slogan “Black Power”
• Friend of the Marxist dictator Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea
• “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”

Stokely Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. When he was two years old, his parents emigrated to Harlem, New York, leaving the boy in the care of his grandmother and two aunts. When Stokely was 11, he rejoined his parents in New York. The family then relocated to Morris Park in the East Bronx -- a mostly white, middle class, liberal neighborhood where the youngster attended the Bronx High School of Science.

Carmichael thereafter enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC, where he joined the civil rights movement as a leader of the school's Non-Violent Action Group. He participated in Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961, and in a number of anti-segregation demonstrations in the Deep South.

In 1966 Carmichael became Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On June 5 of that year, an African American named James Meredith initiated a solitary "March Against Fear," a voter-registration-awareness campaign that was scheduled to take him from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. Soon after starting his sojourn, however, Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper. When Carmichael learned of the shooting, he joined such civil rights activists as Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, and others in continuing the march in Meredith's name. When the marchers arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, some of them -- including Carmichael -- were taken into police custody This marked the 27th time that Carmichael had been arrested.

Upon his release from jail on June 16, 1966, Carmichael made an impassioned speech on the topic of Black Power, railing against advocates of integration and calling instead for black rage and militancy:

"The advocates of Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless rhetoric of previous years in the civil rights struggle. The language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence, integration, fear of 'white backlash,' ... One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to this point there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghettos and the black-belt South. There has been only a 'civil rights' movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of middle-class whites.... We had only the old language of love and suffering. And in most places -- that is, from the liberals and middle class -- we got back the old language of patience and progress.... There is no black man in the country who can live 'simply as a man.' His blackness is an ever-present fact of this racist society, whether he recognizes it or not.... 'Integration' as a goal today speaks to the problem of blackness not only in an unrealistic way but also in a despicable way.... 'integration' is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy."

By this time, Carmichael had clearly rejected nonviolent civil disobedience as a vehicle for black progress. His desire instead was to burn all bridges between black and white America. Establishing himself as a committed black separatist, he denounced the integrationist Martin Luther King, Jr. as an "Uncle Tom" and began advocating armed violence as the favored means of promoting civil rights.

Carmichael exhorted African Americans to embrace the concept of Black Power, which he candidly defined as "a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created." He coined the slogan "Black is Beautiful," advocating a rejection of "white" values. He also coined the word "Honky" as a derogatory term for whites, to parallel the epithet "Nigger." In 1966 Carmichael and SNCC expelled all of the organization's white staff and volunteers, and they denounced those whites who had supported their cause in the past.

Also in 1966, Carmichael helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which put him in contact with future members of the Black Panthers (who had appropriated his organizational symbol, a black panther). The following year Carmichael collaborated with Charles Hamilton to write the book Black Power. Some leaders of civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference rejected Carmichael's radical ideas and accused him of black racism.

Carmichael was frequently outspoken about his contempt for Jews and the State of Israel. In 1967, for instance, when Israel was attacked by the armies of several Arab nations, Carmichael publicly proclaimed that "the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist."

In 1968 Carmichael began a campaign to promote armed warfare in American cities and was briefly made prime minister of the Black Panther Party for his efforts. He tried to persuade the Panthers to sever all their alliances with whites but failed. This led to his expulsion from the party and a ritual beating by his former comrades.

The following year, Carmichael moved (with his wife, Miriam Makeba) to the West African nation of Guinea, where he changed his name to Kwame Ture, in honor of Ghana's former dictator Kwame Nkrumah, and Guinea's then-President Ahmed Sekou Toure -- both of whom were Marxists whose tyrannies had brought great suffering to their nations' respective populations. While in Guinea, Carmichael (i.e., Kwame Ture) became dictator Toure's aide and personal guest, living like a prince among the nation's impoverished masses, and lavishing the Guinean ruler with praise.

Ture's high regard for political tyrants extended as well to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and to the Marxist rulers of North Vietnam and other Communist governments.

In 1971 Ture published the book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. After the death of President Toure in 1984, Ture was arrested by the new military regime and was charged with trying to overthrow the government. He spent three days in prison before being released.

Ture returned to the U.S. in the late 1980s to travel the country and lecture to college audiences on the allegedly ineradicable evils of whites, Jews, and American society at large. During this period, he rekindled his friendly affiliation with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

While boarding a plane from Guinea to Libya in 1998, willfully violating the United Nations travel embargo against that terrorist-sponsoring state, Ture said:

"In the 1960s, we said 'Hell No, we won't go' to Vietnam, to fight against a people who never called us a nigger, and we didn't go. We said that they would defeat U.S. imperialism, and the heroic Vietnamese People, under the sterling example and leadership of the eternal Ho Chi Minh, did. Today we say 'Hell yes, we are going to Libya' ... and we warn the U.S. government not to interfere. We are certain today, that the people of Cuba and Libya, under the steadfast leadership of Fidel Castro and [Libyan President] Muammar Qadhafi, will be victorious."

Soon thereafter, Ture was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer -- an illness whose genesis he attributed to a white racist plot. "In 1967," said Ture, "U.S. imperialism was seriously planning to assassinate me. It still is, this time by an FBI-induced cancer, the latest in the white man's arsenal of chemical and biological warfare, as I am more determined to destroy it today than in 1967."

Ture died on November 15, 1998 at the age of 57. He was mourned by many American leftists, including Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson. "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa," Jackson eulogized; "he rang the freedom bell in this century."