'Within two months, millions of Americans would come to know him as a larger-than-life agitator: the twenty-five-year-old SNCC chairman and black revolutionary whose Black Power call resounded through the nation like a war cry.' While spending his second consecutive summer in Mississippi, Carmichael found his calling: 'I had discovered what I was - an organizer - and that the movement was my fate.' But Carmichael's organizing days came to an end on election day in Lowndes. In Stokely: A Life, the biographer explores the various arcs in Carmichael's life - from his high school years when he spent time in Harlem where he met and befriended Bayard Rustin, then his college activism under the influence of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, and beyond. The memories associated with Carmichael were consistent - Black Power and the Black Panther Party. On Saturday night, I attended the Mardi Gras celebration at my parish, where I passed the book to my dinner companions. For the past several days I've been walking around with the book tucked under my arm, using it as a conversation piece in different venues and locales. The discussion at Allan's Bakery was not my first public exchange related to Stokely: A Life. The standing ovation that ended Carmichael's presentation rivaled the wild cheers and large crowds that greeted his appearance, the same day, at Université de Montréal. Thus began an occasional correspondence and cordial political relationship that found the elderly Trinidadian offering wisdom of a lifetime spent studying historical materialism to Carmichael.

Old enough at sixty-six to be Stokely's grandfather, James identified Black Power as the culmination of mass political energies harnessed by world historic figures including Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and Frantz Fanon. Carmichael's speech, demeanor, and charisma impressed James, who wrote to him shortly after. James joined dozens of blacks, among a sea of white students, at Carmichael's February 24 lecture at Sir George Williams University, also in Montréal. The next day, the Trinidadian born, one-time Trotskyite, and life-long Marxist historian C.L.R. At Montréal's McGill University, on February 23, he spoke before an audience that found his combination of physical appeal and intellectual provocation irresistible. Carmichael left the country for a brief speaking tour of leading Canadian universities.

Stokely carmichael book