Stokely Carmichael's Life: Black Power Activist

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Carmichael‘s Life Stokely Carmichael was a Black Power activist, a civil rights leader and a pan-African revolutionary. His ideologies are the reflection of African-Americans’ disillusionment over political, social and economic power. He was born in Trinidad, in 1941, but raised in New-York. He moved to the United States at the age of 11 years old. His life in the British colony Trinidad triggered his anger for racial injustice. He accomplished academic achievements at an early age because (Wepman) and he got accepted to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science as well as several Universities offered him scholarships. He decided to go to Howard University, predominantly black, in Washington D.C., because he wanted to be in the center of…show more content…
He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which was “a student desegregation and civil rights group” (Wepman). Carmichael was in the first interracial bus trips called “Freedom Rides” in 1961 and their goal was to defy segregated public transportation in the South (Wepman). Carmichael was arrested when the bus reached Mississippi, but being the inexorable activist that he was, the first arrestation did not stop him from joining other Freedom Rides and being frequently jailed (Wepman). In conclusion, Carmichael’s determination represents all resolute people who fought for racial equality in the…show more content…
Black Power leaders like Carmichael, Seale and Newton advocated that African-American, as an oppressed colony, should fight for the control of the Black Community. Only if they determine their own destiny they would be free. They demand full employment, decent housing, education, to be exempt from military service because ‘‘black people should not be forced to defend a racist government’’, black self-defence group to end police brutality and murder of black people, fair and impartial trials (Chafe, 148). Carmichael radicalization mirrors the anger many African-American felt towards slow improvement in Black Communities because the real changes meant new taxes, mixed composition of the neighborhood or competition for jobs (Litwack, 8). Consequently, pan-Africanism was born because racial separatism seemed to be the solution for the oppression of Black people around the
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    Stokely Carmichael has been described as one of the youngest and liveliest activist of the Civil Rights Movement. Born on June 29 of 1941 in the Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he remained there while his parents immigrated to America. Being immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, his mother worked as a stewardess for a steamship line while his father worked as a carpenter by day and a taxi driver by night. Carmichael decided to join his parents in 1952 and by 1954 he and his family moved to an

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