Stokely Carmichael - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael moved to Harlem, New York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents, who had left him with his grandmother and two aunts to immigrate when he was two. He attended the elite Tranquility School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for him.

His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, at that time an aging Jewish and Italian neighborhood. According to a 1967 interview he gave to LIFE Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

He attended the Bronx High School of Science. In 1960, Carmichael went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black university in Washington, D.C.. His professors included Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare and Toni Morrison. Carmichael and a white student and civil-rights activist, Tom Kahn, helped to fund a five-day run of the Three Penny Opera, by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill: "Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances. It was a classic win/win. Members of the Council got patronage packets of tickets for distribution to friends and constituents". His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964. He was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but turned it down.

He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Tom Kahn introduced Carmichael and the other SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, who became an influential adviser to SNCC. Carmichael became inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days at the infamous Parchman Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi. He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at least 29 or 32, and telling the Washington Post in 1998 he believed that the total number was fewer than 36.