[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 46 (Friday, March 29, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E512]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO STOKELY CARMICHAEL

                                 ______


                        HON. WILLIAM (BILL) CLAY

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, March 29, 1996

  Mr. CLAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to a civil rights icon, 
Stokely Carmichael--also known as Kwame Ture. I had the pleasure of 
developing a close personal relationship with Stokely during the civil 
rights movement and have for years admired his strength and fortitude. 
He is a national hero who might have antagonized whites but rallied 
blacks when a large dose of both was badly needed. His powerful words 
unified blacks and helped to instill pride in our race.
  Although Stokely is now battling cancer, he has not retired from the 
battle. He continues to be an active and forceful voice in the eternal 
struggle for civil rights and equality. I submit his story as recorded 
by columnist Lee Payne in a commentary entitled ``Ready for the 
Revolution'' in the March 21, 1996, edition of the St. Louis American. 
It is my hope that my colleagues will join me in wishing Stokely well.
Ready For The Revolution
       With the familiar flame burning in his dark eyes. Stokely 
     Carmichael still holds forth in the mellifluous voice that 
     once put dread in white America and high resolve in black 
     youth.
       His old comrades are trekking to a Harlem apartment more to 
     console him than to reminisce. ``Now that I have cancer, I 
     get to see friends I haven't seen in years,'' he said 
     Thursday with an impervious smile. Under the eyes of his 
     doctor and his mother, he is coping with prostate cancer, 
     gathering strength to head off next month to Cuba and then 
     back home to Guinea, where years ago President Sekou Toure 
     renamed him Kwame Ture.
       As Stokely Carmichael, he was the most eloquent and 
     incendiary of the street speakers of the civil rights 
     movement. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating 
     Committee, he helped wage a dangerous struggle to get Negroes 
     the vote in the Black Belt states of Alabama, Georgia and 
     Mississippi. At the end of a speech in May 1966, he issued a 
     clarion call for black liberation with a phrase explosive for 
     the times: ``Black power!''
       These two simple words rocked the foundation of race 
     relations in the republic. Carmichael didn't invent ``black 
     power'' Richard Wright in 1954 had written a book by that 
     title and Harlem's Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, with some 
     justification, later claimed that he coined the expression a 
     generation earlier.
       Carmichael had polished the phrase among black focus groups 
     before springing it on the media. ``It's time we stand up and 
     take over,'' Carmichael warned both older Negro leaders and 
     the whites he decided as ``honkies,'' ``Move on over or we'll 
     move on over you.''
       ``Dr. (Martin Luther) King told me that he wouldn't use the 
     term. He even tried to get me to use ``black consciousness,'' 
     which came out later in South Africa.'' But, adds Carmichael, 
     ``he never denounced it.''
       An unyielding J. Edgar Hoover unleashed the monstrous 
     powers of the state against the proponents of black power, 
     using the FBI's counter intelligence program, known as 
     COINTELPRO.
       Carmichael, along with H. Rap Brown and countless other 
     civil rights participants, was jailed and beaten dozens of 
     times. In one of his closer brushes with death, the sheriff 
     of Liberty, Miss., held a pistol to Carmichael's head. ``The 
     enraged old man was shaking the gun, shaking, shaking. I was 
     thinking that he might shoot me by accident, so I'd decided 
     to go for the gun.'' But Carmichael hesitated, and the 
     incident was defused without violence. ``I've forgotten the 
     sheriff's name,'' he said. ``So many of them have whupped on 
     my head that I can't remember their names.''
       After King's assassination in 1968, Carmichael, with 
     Hoover's COINTELPRO working full-blast, moved to Guinea. 
     There, Kwame Nkrumah, the deposed as president of Ghana, 
     invited him to help organize the Pan-African movement.
       Ture, who considers himself a ``Pan-Africanist 
     revolutionary,'' acknowledges that the civil rights struggle 
     won the black vote in the South, which led to the 
     proliferation of black elected officials. However, he admits 
     to no fundamental change in American racism.
       ``Racism is a question of power,'' he said. ``If I sit next 
     to a white man on a bus and he doesn't like it, that's his 
     problem. If he has the power to remove me, that's my problem. 
     You have to have (state) power to impose racism. Since whites 
     still have the power (and) we don't have the power, nothing 
     has changed. There's some little cosmetic changes: `Let them 
     have a mayor here, a mayor there; let them have whatever 
     (rank) in the army to confuse them.' ''
       ``There are some changes in attitude, but racism is not a 
     question of attitude. It's a question of power.''
       At the end of our chat, a hoarse Ture limped painfully to 
     the door and uttered his patented greeting and salutation: 
     ``Ready for the revolution.''

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