An African Tree Branches: Kwame Ture Shares His Roots
(06 December 2003 10:59)
Written by Frederick B. Hudson
The die was cast in 1960. A skilled Trinidadian
carpenter, forced by economics to ship out on a
freighter, returned to his Bronx home with tales of
having seen Africa.
He told his young son about seeing the newly elected
president of Ghana come forward to introduce his
cabinet to the Parliament. The president and all the
cabinet members were not wearing the formal clothes of
the British colonial rulers, or the regal African
robes of their village status. They wore the misshapen
prison garb of the imprisonment they had endured for
their nation's liberation.
"Boy, you hear me, those black men marched right out
of prison and into power," the exuberant sailor told
his son in the Bronx home he renovated with his own
hands. That son was Stokely Carmichael who later met
Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian president, and took on the
president's first name in respect when he became Kwame
Ture.
Stokely took on much more than the name. He
appreciated the African leader's willingness to suffer
imprisonment and the threat of death for a noble
cause. Carmichael was arrested so many times in
Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina as leader of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
support of voter registration campaigns that his
coworkers often joked that if you got too close to him
on his birthday you might end up going to jail
yourself.
Carmichael learned from African leaders like Nkrumah
and Sekou Toure of Guinea (who inspired his new last
name) and from his mentors in his native Trinidad the
importance of land as an operational and
organizational tool for organizers. He observed in his
Southern organizing forays that counties where blacks
owned their own farms were much less captive to
intimidation by a racist establishment.
He developed a heart like an ear which could absorb
the wisdom of local leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer.
This unlettered woman told the National
Democratic Party when the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party asked for representation at the 1964
National Convention: "We didn't come here for no two
seats, for all of us is tired."
Kwame Ture got tired sometimes too. Tired of the
infighting among his own comrades at times, tired of
seeing good people burned out from exhaustion, killed,
misused, confused, and frustrated. But the memory of
Nkrumah's prison garb stood him well and help to
support him in almost 40 years of sustained struggle
for African peoples' liberation.
This convoluted journey, fraught with detours and
U-turns, of missing directions and fabricated Stop
signs, is chronicled in Ture's autobiography,
Ready for Revolution, which he prepared before his
death with a former SNCC colleague, Michael Thelwell.
On that journey, Ture linked arms with Martin Luther
King, invited Malcolm X to join Howard University
students in a demonstration in Bobby Kennedy's
office ,and studied English with Nobel award-winning
author Toni Morrison. He later had tete-a-tetes with
Fidel Castro, married his adolescent fantasy love,
singer Marian Makeba, and approved the use of the
Black Panther symbol by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
But what was the price of this life?
A friend in Guinea told Ture a parable about the
savannah tree which grows in the hot sun with nothing
around it. The branches start about twenty feet above
the roots, they extend for many feet before leaves
appear. Thus, to get shade there a traveler must stand
many feet from the trunk. The Guinean businessman told
Ture that revolutionaries supply shade most readily to
those who are far from them, but those closest to them
must often endure the sun.
Ture's personal life suffered during his years of
transcontinental expeditions. Both of his marriages
ended in divorce and his biological family endured
years of separation from him. Never concerned with
material possessions, he had no health insurance. Yet
when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996,
blacks and whites all around the globe formed a
"circle of trust"--an expression formed in the old
SNCC days that took charge of his personal needs with
a fervor that dated back to energized marches on
courthouses, picket signs in hand.
Although he died in his beloved Guinea, he left mighty
footsteps to admire, perhaps to fill, or to follow.
His most acclaimed slogan, "black power," often
misunderstood as a call to terrorism, was a simple
realization that organizers must "always seek a way
for a large number of people to join the struggle."
http://www.tbwt.org/home/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=49&Itemid=1
Author
