Stokely Carmichael: A look back at a radical

They say revolution's in the air
I'm dancing in my underwear
'cause I don't care
"Piggy in the Middle," The Rutles, 1978.

I've watched about a third of Tom Mannis' video of last month's Students for a Democratic Society reunion that took place in Chicago.

SDS was a extreme left wing group found by, among others, Tom Hayden, who later gained notoriety as Jane Fonda's husband--they later divorced. SDS dissolved in 1969, but more radical elements within the SDS formed the Weather Underground.

Tom runs an excellent blog called The Bench. The first speaker is Michael James, who as he explains in his recollection, left snobbish Lake Forest College in 1964 and journeyed to the capital, then and now, of radical America: Berkeley, California.

I'm going to do another post about Tom's great video, but this part deserves a separate entry.

While in California, James, who owns the Heartland Cafe vegetarian restaurant on Chicago's North Side, mentions that he met with Stokely Carmichael. James asked Carmichael, who later joined the Black Panthers, where should his own path of radicalism should lead. Carmichael told James to head to Chicago, and "work with white people," rather than join Tom Hayden in Newark, New Jersey.

James met Carmichael while he was with another lefty group, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I don't think Carmichael was ever part of SDS. He did however, participate in a typical late 1960s anti-American tour, making stops in North Vietnam and Cuba.

Carmichael became increasingly more extreme as the 1960s wound down, and by 1969, he moved to the West African nation of Guinea, where he became closely tied to that nation's thug leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré. Carmichael quickly changed his name to Kwame Ture, his new surname was chosen to honor the Guinean dictator.

During his many years in Guinea, Carmichael spewed Marxism and anti-Americanism, and he later claimed that the cancer that afflicted him was introduced to his body by the FBI.

But where did Carmichael choose to be treated for his cancer? At Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, the largest city in the country he hated. He wasn't there for a quick diagnosis either, he received medical care there for two years. The vaunted Cuban medical care wasn't up to his standards, I guess.

He died in Guinea in 1998.

Like many left wing extremists, Kwame Ture, née Stokely Carmichael, was a hypocrite.

Oh, he was an anti-Semite too.

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