29/06/2022
Kwame Ture, the prominent civil rights activist, writer and Pan-Africanist who was first credited with using the phrase “Black Power,” was born in Trinidad in 1941. He is pictured here (front right) alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ture was given the name “Stokely Carmichael” when he was born in Port of Spain. As a child, his parents migrated to the US, leaving him and his sisters in the care of their grandmother at the family home on 54 Oxford Street. This location is now recognized by the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago as a Heritage Site (called The Home of Kwame Ture).
At age 11, Ture was reunited with his parents in the US, where they encountered many social barriers living as Black immigrants in the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws, which were designed to enforce racial and economic segregation, were implemented in many US states until the late 1960s.
Ture’s early activism was inspired by the bravery of young people protesting segregated service at sit-in lunch counters in the American South.
In 1960, he enrolled in Howard University and joined the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality. Together with other Freedom Riders, he challenged the segregated bus services in the South and faced violence, arrests and jail time for protesting.
After graduating from Howard with a degree in philosophy, Ture became involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; popularly pronounced “snick”), of which he was eventually appointed the chairman in 1966. SNCC was known for their courageous and strategic approaches to challenging the laws of racial segregation.
As a SNCC field organizer, he helped increase the number of registered Black voters in Lowndes County, Alabama from 70 to 2,600. With others, he founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization whose objective was to register Black voters.
