An African Tree Branches:
Kwame Ture Shares His Roots
by Frederick B. Hudson
The die was cast in 1960. A skilled Trinidadian carpenter, forced by
economics to ship out on a freighter, returned to his Bronx home with tales of
having seen Africa.
He told his young son about seeing the newly elected president of Ghana
come forward to introduce his cabinet to the Parliament. The president and all
the cabinet members were not wearing the formal clothes of the British
colonial rulers, or the regal African robes of their village status. They wore the
misshapen prison garb of the imprisonment they had endured for their nation's
liberation.
"Boy, you hear me, those black men marched right out of prison and into
power," the exuberant sailor told his son in the Bronx home he renovated with
his own hands. That son was Stokely Carmichael who later met Kwame Nkrumah, the
Ghanaian president, and took on the president's first name in respect when he
became Kwame Ture.
Stokely took on much more than the name. He appreciated the African
leader's willingness to suffer imprisonment and the treat of death for a noble
cause. Carmichael was arrested so many times in Alabama, Mississippi, South
Carolina as leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
support of voter registration campaigns that his coworkers often joked that if you
got too close to him on his birthday you might end up going to jail yourself.
Michael Thelwell & Stokely Carmichael
Photo courtesy of the Author |
Carmichael learned from African leaders like Nkrumah and Sekou Ture of
Guinea (who inspired his new last name) and from his mentors in his native
Trinidad the importance of land as an operational and organizational tool for
organizers. He observed in his Southern organizing forays that counties where
blacks owned their own farms were much less captive to intimidation by a racist
establishment.
He developed a heart like an ear which could absorb the wisdom of local
leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer. This unlettered woman told the National
Democratic Party when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party asked for
representation at the 1964 National Convention: "We didn't come here for no two seats, for
all of us is tired."
Kwame Ture got tired sometimes too. Tired of the infighting among his own
comrades at times, tired of seeing good people burned out from exhaustion,
killed, misused, confused, and frustrated. But the memory of Nkrumah's prison
garb stood him well and help to support him in almost 40 years of sustained
struggle for African peoples' liberation.
This convoluted journey, fraught with detours and U-turns, of missing
directions and fabricated Stop signs, is chronicled in Ture's autobiography,
Ready for Revolution, which he prepared before his death with a former SNCC
colleague, Michael Thelwell.
On that journey, Ture linked arms with Martin Luther King, invited Malcolm X
to join Howard University students in a demonstration in Bobby Kennedy's
office ,and studied English with Nobel award-winning author Toni Morrison. He later
had tete-a-tetes with Fidel Castro, married his adolescent fantasy love,
singer Marian Makeba, and approved the use of the black panther symbol by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale.
But what was the price of this life? A friend in Guinea told Ture a parable about the savannah tree which
grows in the hot sun with nothing around it. The branches start about twenty feet
above the roots, they extend for many feet before leaves appear. Thus, to get
shade there a traveler must stand many feet from the trunk. The Guinean
businessman told Ture that revolutionaries supply shade most readily to those who
are far from them, but those closest to them must often endure the sun.
Ture's personal life suffered during his years of transcontinental
expeditions. Both of his marriages ended in divorce and his biological family
endured years of separation from him. Never concerned with material possesions, he
had no health insurance. Yet when he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer in
1996, blacks and whites all around the globe formed a "circle of trust."-an
expression formed in the old SNCC days that took charge of his personal needs with
a fervor that dated back to energized marches on courthouses, picket signs in
hand.
Although he died in his beloved Guinea, he left mighty footsteps to
admire, perhaps to fill, or to follow. His most acclaimed slogan, "black power,"
often misunderstood as a call to terrorism, was a simple realization that
organizers must "always seek a way for a large number of people to join the
struggle."
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