STOKELY: A Life

Stokely Carmichael changed and adapted over time, from a grassroots social-democratic organizer in the American South using nonviolence to usher in the beloved community to a national icon of Black Power sharply attacking the U.S. war in Vietnam to an antiimperialist pan-Africanist living in Guinea emphasizing land as the basis of power and the validity of scientific socialism. Carmichael's Black Power, in part, established "black political thought as a mainstream topic of historical and intellectual interest" (232) and helped bring the term institutional racism into common understanding and usage. [...]Carmichael gave hundreds of speeches focused on the key question, "How can white society move to see black people as human beings?" (159).