The new play “Stokely: The Unfinished Revolution,” receiving its world premiere at the Court Theatre, represents a bold effort to revivify the legacy of an essential, and highly controversial, figure in the Civil Rights movement. Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture, started participating in the Freedom Rides in 1961, when he was a student at Howard University. After he graduated, he returned to the South to continue registering Black voters.
Arrested and beaten dozens of times — once spending a month in jail for nothing more than using a whites-only bathroom — he took over the leadership of the colleges-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966. He also became a leader in the Black Panther Party and coined, or at least popularized, the phrase “Black Power,” renouncing nonviolence as a tactic. In that regard, he separated himself from Martin Luther King Jr.
’s approach, but the two unquestionably respected each other, and Carmichael influenced King in speaking out against the Vietnam War. Under intense surveillance as well as a target of a massive misinformation campaign by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and receiving regular death threats, Carmichael moved to Africa in 1968 to create a Pan-African movement.
A revolutionary to the end, he died of prostate cancer 30 years later, at the age of 57. The timing of reconsidering Carmichael’s legacy seems right, following the movements spurred by the killing of George Floyd. And .