Carmichael, Stokely (1941–1998)

Early Years

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Carmichael is said to have been a rebellious child. In Ready for Revolution, Carmichael is described as defiant of scoldings by older friends of the family to avoid playing with “barefoot, scruffy little boys,” and “bad company.” He often responded to such admonitions by questioning the morality of avoiding others because of their socioeco-nomic status. Such rebellious zeal in his younger years is cited as an early sign of his belief in the equality of all people, regardless of racial or class divisions. While [Page 245]disobedience to elders was atypical of children's behavior in West Indian culture, Carmichael based his defiance on Christian doctrine by citing verses from the Bible. Carmichael himself acknowledged uncertainty over whether his boyish actions reflected a “guileless, simple faith” or a “strategic maneuver.” Regardless, such actions appear to have laid the bedrock for his adult activism: Carmichael would years later use the same tactic to appeal to White southern conservatives in the Bible Belt of the U.S. South.

When he was 11 years old, in June 1952, and due in part to the death of his grandmother 6 months earlier, Carmichael moved into a three-bedroom apartment with seven other relatives (his two parents; his four sisters, Umilta, Lynette, Janeth, and Judith; and his aunt “Mummy Olga”), at 861 Stebbins Avenue, in the South Bronx area of New York City. He began fifth grade in the New York City schools and expressed consternation at the disrespect, lack of control, and disengagement with learning among students there relative to those in the British colonial schooling system of his homeland.

Not long after, his mother and father bought a home on Amethyst Street (in the Morris Park/White Plains Road area, near the Bronx Zoo), which to Carmichael's surprise was a mostly White neighborhood. In 1956, he entered the Bronx High School of Science, where he surpassed his classmates in various subjects as well as IQ tests. Carmichael would remark that it was during those school years that he learned that intelligence and intelligence testing reflected cultural bias and social inequality. Also during this time, he was approached by the Communist Party but did not join because of his early connection with religious ideology; its centrality in the everyday life of the West Indies kept him from fully embracing Marxist thought. Yet because of his attendance at the Bronx High School of Science and its scientific materialist orientation, his religiousity gradually lessened but never waned completely. In his last years of high school, he heard the socialist Bayard Rustin speak, and his awareness of Black Nationalist thought was broadened by his introduction to the writings of two landmark intellectual activists who were also West Indian: C. L. R. James and George Padmore.

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