After his release from Parchman, Carmichael returned to Howard but came back to the Mississippi Delta every summer to work with SNCC organizing local voter registration efforts.Īfter the national Democratic Party refused to seat Mississippi’s MFDP at its 1964 national convention, Carmichael, then a veteran organizer, concluded that meaningful change could only come through Black political power. At 19-years-old, Carmichael was the youngest person to participate in the 1961 Freedom Rides, and he served fifty-three days in Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary. The sit-ins convinced him that young people could and should do something about the violence and racism that plagued the United States. When he started at Howard University, he believed that civil rights was something that adults did. He was born in Trinidad but came to the United States as a child and grew up in in Harlem. Nothing passive in that.”Ībove all else, Stokely Carmichael was a grassroots organizer. It offered a way for a large number of to join the struggle. “It gave our generation–particularly in the South–the means by which to confront and entrenched and violent racism. Yet he credited nonviolent activism as leading him and other young Black people like himself into the Movement. Stokely Carmichael canvassing in Lowndes County, Alabama, undated, īecause of his call for “Black Power” during the June 1966 Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael is often remembered as confrontational in style and far removed from nonviolence.

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