Title: An AfricanTree Branches:KwameTure Shares His Roots Post by: Tyehimba on December 11, 2003, 08:42:33 AM 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 |