Ready for Revolution: the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael - Kwame Ture - Book Review

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2004 by C. Gerald Fraser

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell Scribner, November 2003 $35.00, ISBN 0-684-85003-6

In the autobiography of Kwame Ture, ne Stokely Carmichael, there are triumphs but no happy ending. Completed with generous help from his friend and cohort Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, the book ends when Ture dies of prostate cancer in November 1998, after living a richly textured life for 57 years.

Carmichael and his young compatriots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and others in America's mid-20th century's Civil Rights Movement, profoundly changed the United States. Narrowly put, the "movement" enabled black men and women in the South to access their Constitutional voting rights.

Telling his story, Carmichael meticulously describes his West Indian childhood in Trinidad with a nurturing father, mother, two sisters, grandmother, and aunts; his teen years in an integrated neighborhood in New York, at an elite public high school; under graduate years at Howard University, when medical school was considered; and then his sojourn in the hard-core hateful South.

The organization he eventually led, SNCC, went to war armed only with righteousness, yet it helped unmask the intrinsic racism of America's major political parties. Carmichael tells how Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Richardson, other movement personalities and SNCC members helped shape him. He speaks of admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and distaste for the NAACP's leader, Roy Wilkins. He recounts how the U.S. government kept an eye on him.

There is, however, more to Carmichael than even the 640 pages disclose. The bulk of this work focuses on his Southern experiences. Perhaps his time tan out before he could present a comprehensive analysis of his post-SNCC life. Or he may have desired to emphasize the inherent American contradictions.

After the Southern Civil Rights Movement morphed into the nationwide urban demand for black power, Carmichael reports that he traveled worldwide, meeting among others, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. He based himself in Guinea, the West African, former French colony. There, he associated with--he would say "studied under"--Guinea's first president, Sekou Toure, as well as Ghana's exiled president, Kwame Nkrumah. (Hence Carmichael's adopted and legalized name). As Kwame Ture, he married Miriam Makeba in New York's City Hall. Consequently, the South African singer was punished professionally for her ties to a "radical." They divorced in 1979 and a year later, in Guinea, he married Marliatu Barre, "from a respected Fulani family," he notes. They had a son, Boabacer Biro.

As a writer, Carmichael always used his intellectual talents to infuse black Americans with an understanding of the intricacies of revolution. This is Carmichael's third book. The others are Black Power: The Politics of Black Liberation in America, with Charles V. Hamilton: and Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. His legacy may be the guidelines for making change that he wove through Ready for Revolution, the narrative of his extraordinary life, which ended when it did because, he says, he was too busy to pay attention to symptoms.

--Reviewed by C. Gerald Fraser C. Gerald Fraser is a journalist who lives in Harlem.