Stokely Carmichael
Inventor of the Black Power slogan and concept

Continuation of “Stokely Carmichael’s Youth – From Port of Spain to New York City”.

… In 1956 Stokely Carmichael broke with the past. Being an “[...] intellectually precocious child, he [had] found American education a breeze compared with the British-based rigors he’d experienced in the Trinidadian school system”. Passing a tough entrance test he was admitted to the elitist Bronx High School of Science. Here Stokely soon had to find out that his intellectual background could not compete with that of his fellow students. In his biography Carmichael reports that “[his] parents never finished school, we had no intellectual background. All these students’ fathers had been at Harvard, Yale, doctors, dentists, PHDs. They had what I didn’t have”. As opposed to the others at Bronx Science, Stokely did not know anything about Karl Marx nor was he familiar with notions such as “dialectical materialism“. Competition was tough and Stokely thought about quitting school during his freshman year, but his parents, especially his mother, believing firmly in the american dream “wouldn’t accept it though. She wanted me to go to Science and she would have it no other way. No questions asked. ‘Remember one thing,’ she would say, ‘they’re white, they’ll make it. You won’t unless you’re on the top‘“.

Carmichael listened to his parents and started to read voraciously all the books his fellow students had already read and were discussing during lunch break: in this way he became familiar with Marx and got to know Darwin’s theories and Camus’ philosophy. Stokely “tried to develop [his] own [intellectual background] just beginning to read as quickly as [he] could, anything that anybody mentioned”.

Stokely Carmichael frequented the highly competitive Bronx High School of Science

With the new school Carmichael’s interest and friends changed. His Morris Park buddies stemming from the white working-class were exchanged with new friends from the white upper middle-class. These guys were about to attend elité universities such as Harvard, Columbia or Brandeis. Among them was the son of Eugene Dennis who introduced him to New York’s left-wing social world and consequently to the European revolutinary theories, this is how Stokely recalled the impact:

For the first time I encountered a systematic radical analysis, a critical context and vocabulary that explained and made sense of history. It explained the inequities and injustice I’d long been conscious of in the society around me and prescribed (even predicted) revolutionary solutions.

Nevertheless, Stokely Carmichael never joined any socialist organization because American socialism did not ascribe importance to the solution of the black problem inside the American society, quite the contrary, “[...] they didn’t want any discussion of black nationalism“. Ivanhoe Donaldson, another young New Yorker and fellow SNCC activist, underlined Carmichael’s point clarifying the reason why the socialist organizations were not able to attract black people:

“Race drove us first. We recognized class but placed it differently. Everybody in our generation did. Even the white folks in SNCC had a little bit of black nationalism in them”.