[4] The reunited Carmichaels eventually left Harlem to live in Van Nest in the East Bronx, at that time an aging neighborhood primarily of Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants.
According to a 1967 interview Carmichael gave to Life Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.
In his first year at Howard, in 1961, Carmichael participated in the Freedom Rides that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized to desegregate the interstate buses and bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as they came under federal rather than state law.
[23] Throughout Freedom Summer, he worked with grassroots African American activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer, whom Carmichael named as one of his personal heroes.
Carmichael, along with many SNCC staff members, left the convention with a profound sense of disillusionment in the American political system, and what he later called "totalitarian liberal opinion".
There was still tremendous resistance from wary residents, but an important breakthrough occurred when, while he was handing out voter registration material at a local school, two policemen confronted Carmichael and ordered him to leave.
Since federal protection from violent voter suppression by the Ku Klux Klan and other white opponents was sporadic, most Lowndes County activists openly carried arms.
Despite Carmichael's role in forming the LCFO, Hulett served as the group's chairperson and became one of the first two African Americans whose voter registration was successfully processed in Lowndes County.
[41][42] In August 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee elected as its chairman John Lewis, one of the "Big Six" activists who organized the March on Washington.
[43] One of his first actions was to call upon all fellow black activists to continue writer and Air Force veteran James Meredith's solitary March Against Fear.
It became a rallying cry for young African Americans across the country who were frustrated by slow progress in civil rights, even after federal legislation had been passed to strengthen the effort.
At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement.
[51] For a time in 1967, he considered an alliance with Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, and generally supported IAF's work in Rochester's and Buffalo's black communities.
[57][58] Carmichael joined King in New York on April 15, 1967, to share his views with protesters on race related to the Vietnam War: The draft exemplifies as much as racism the totalitarianism which prevails in this nation in the disguise of consensus democracy.
SNCC leaders had begun to refer to him as "Stokely Starmichael" and criticized his habit of making policy announcements independently, before achieving internal agreement.
Declassified documents show he launched a plan to undermine the SNCC-Panther merger, as well as to "bad-jacket" Carmichael as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent.
Throughout the work he directly and indirectly criticizes the established leadership of the SCLC and NAACP for their tactics and results, often claiming that they were accepting symbols instead of change.
Influenced by Fanon's ideas in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein two groups were not "complementary" (could have no overlap) until they were mutually exclusive (were on an equal power footing economically, socially, politically, etc.
[72] In August 1967, a Cuban government magazine reported that Carmichael met with Fidel Castro for three days and called it "the most educational, most interesting, and the best apprenticeship of [my] public life."
Due to his reputation as a provocateur, the news media blamed Carmichael for the ensuing violence as mobs rioted along U Street and other areas of black commercial development.
[77] Three months after his arrival in Guinea, in July 1969 Carmichael published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning them for not being separatist enough and for their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals".
In the last quarter of the 20th century, he became the world's most active and prominent exponent of pan-Africanism, defined by Nkrumah and the A-APRP as "The Liberation and Unification of Africa Under Scientific Socialism".
He formed the A-APRP with the initial goal of putting "Africa" on the lips of Black people throughout the diaspora, knowing that many did not consciously or positively relate to their ancestral homeland.
In Ture's final letter, he wrote: It was Fidel Castro who before the OLAS (Organization of Latin American States) Conference said "if imperialism touches one grain of hair on his head, we shall not let the fact pass without retaliation."
[86] A small group of student leaders from Howard and a former Party member traveled to Harlem (Sugar Hill) in New York City to bid Ture farewell shortly before his final return to Guinea.
[4] In a final interview given in April 1998 to The Washington Post, Ture criticized the limited economic and electoral progress made by African Americans in the U.S. during the previous 30 years.
In the late 1960s Ture defined "institutional racism" as "the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin".
[94] SNCC's final chair, Phil Hutchings, who expelled Ture over a dispute about the Black Panther Party, wrote: "Even though we kidded and called him 'Starmichael', he could sublimate his ego to get done what was needed to be done....He would say what he thought, and you could disagree with it but you wouldn't cease being a human being and someone with whom he wanted to be in relationship.
In a 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education article, historian Peniel E. Joseph later wrote: While the remark was made in jest during a 1964 conference, Carmichael and black-power activists did embrace an aggressive vision of manhood—one centered on black men's ability to deploy authority, punishment, and power.
"[94] In her memoir, Mary E. King wrote that Carmichael was "poking fun at his own attitudes" and that "Casey and I felt, and continue to feel, that Stokely was one of the most responsive men at the time that our anonymous paper appeared in 1964.