STOKELY CARMICHAEL

 

IMPACT & IMPORTANCE

SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)

Carmichael was the chairman of the SNCC. He began to challenge the idea of nonviolent protesting and later became a supporter of “Black Power.” The SNCC was a very independent group of black college students. Martin Luther King Jr. influenced them, but they tried to make their own statement.

CORE (Congress of Racial Equality)

Stokely Carmichael joined the Congress of Racial Equality, a nonviolent protesting group, after hearing about nonviolent protests called sit-ins. He protested in New York against Woolworth stores, a chain that segregated lunch counters in the South.  

Freedom Rides

Carmichael was one of the many Freedom Riders who made the journey from New Orleans, Louisiana to  Jackson, Mississippi on June 4, 1961. He was arrested for the first time in Mississippi. Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC awarded him a scholarship that supported students who had been arrested and Stokely returned to college at Howard University.

Albany Movement

The Albany Movement was designed to end all forms of racial segregation in the city, first focusing on desegregating forms of public transportation, forming a committee to discuss further desegregation, and releasing those jailed in protests. Throughout the campaign, Albany protesters utilized different methods of nonviolence, including demonstrations, jail-ins, sit-ins, and boycotts. Notably, in addition to students, the campaign also involved a lot of black adults of varied classes.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

The MFDP pressured the Democratic Party to create a policy that would prevent the seating of a segregationist delegation and later campaigned for Johnson, recognizing that a Goldwater victory would have devastating implications for the civil rights movement.

Selma to Montgomery March

Martin Luther King said: ‘‘The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man’’ (King, ‘‘Address,’’ 130). After the march a group of march leaders attempted to deliver a petition to Governor Wallace, but were rebuffed. That night, while ferrying Selma demonstrators back home from Montgomery, Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Michigan who had come to Alabama to volunteer, was shot and killed by four members of the Ku Klux Klan. Doar later prosecuted three Klansmen conspiring to violate her civil rights.

Later president Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act and King addressed this saying: ‘‘Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960; Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Selma produced the voting rights legislation of 1965’’ (King, 11 August 1965).

Lowndes County Freedom Organization

Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent political group that became known as the Black Panther Party. (Activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton would later borrow the Black Panther symbol when organizing the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in October 1966.) He recalled how people in Lowndes County responded to King’s leadership: ‘‘People loved King … I’ve seen people in the South climb over each other just to say, ‘I touched him! I touched him!’ … The people didn’t know what was SNCC.’’ When asked, ‘‘You one of Dr. King’s men?,’’ he replied, ‘‘Yes, Ma’am, I am’’ (Carson, 164).