Black Cultural Center Eulogy

by

Dr. Floyd W. Hayes, III

Department of Political Science

Purdue University

December 1, 1998

I want to express my appreciation to Ms. Dorothy Washington, the Black Cultural Center’s Librarian, for inviting me to comment on the life and struggle of our recently deceased brother, Kwame Toure. I am honored to talk about a person, who in many respects, represents the highest expression and continuing significance of the modern American struggle for black human rights that emerged in the 1960s. He became civil rights reformist, Black Power activist, and Pan-African revolutionist. Toure is significant because it was he, along with fellow SNCC worker Willie Ricks, who enunciated audaciously the "Black Power" slogan during June of 1966, which provided the political language for the turbulent black liberation struggle during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Given the present resurgence of antiblack racism and violence throughout America--as witnessed by lynchings in Virginia and Texas, recent white supremacist aggression at many college campuses, such as Miami University in Ohio and Cornell University in upstate New York, and the vicious right-wing assault on Affirmative Action policies--Kwame Toure’s commitment to contest and uproot all forms of cultural domination is important because it should inspire us to study and struggle against injustice, even to fight the racism and repression at Purdue. Indeed, he epitomizes the contours, questions, challenges, and struggles of our times. Kwame Toure died Sunday, November 15, 1998, in Conakry, Guinea, of prostate cancer. He was 57 years old.

In the spring semester of 1974, then recently hired Black Cultural Center director Tony Zamora invited Kwame Toure to Purdue University. Toure spoke to an overflowing audience in the South Ballroom of the Purdue Memorial Union. After his speech, Toure came over to the center and continued to talk with students. You can imagine that in this bastion of white supremacist conservatism, many worried about what the relatively new BCC director was up to. It was to his credit that the BCC’s imaginative leader, who retired in 1995 after 22 years of service, had the foresight and courage to bring Toure here. For it was under Zamora’s improvisational leadership that the BCC gained national recognition as one of the major university treasures of black culture and history.

I want to take a few minutes to examine dimensions of Kwame Toure’s life and times, briefly focusing on his background, ideas, and organizational activism. In the process, I shall assert that one of his major precepts--that black people need to be organized in order to struggle against systems of injustice--still demands our attention.

Born Stokely Carmichael on June 29, 1941, in Trinidad, West Indies, he renamed himself in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, former president of Ghana, and Ahmed Sekou Toure, past president of Guinea. In 1952, his parents brought him to New York City, where he later attended the academically prestigious Bronx High School of Science. In 1960, he went to Howard University, where he majored in philosophy, graduated with a B.A. in 1964, and became active in the Civil Rights Movement.

As a civil rights reformist, Kwame Toure went South to participate in the struggle to desegregate public transportation--bus trips known as freedom rides--where he learned first hand the terror of being locked up in Mississippi jails. In 1964, as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field organizer, he participated in a dangerous voter registration campaign that increased the numbers of black voters in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, from 70 to 2,600. Using the black panther as its party symbol, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization became active in local political elections.

Two years later, Kwame Toure became the national leader of SNCC, and within days, he and Willie Ricks demanded "Black Power." In 1968, Toure left SNCC to be the Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, which Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton had founded in October, 1966. Although both Toure and the Panthers were socialists and internationalists, Toure’s Pan-Africanism clashed with the Panthers’ more traditional Marxist-Leninism, which allowed the development of coalitions with white radicals. Toure strongly opposed coalitions with white individuals and organizations. It needs to be pointed out that in the 1960s, politically radical individuals and groups held rigid ideological positions; few tolerated the slightest apparent ideological deviation from the party line. Consequently, Toure only remained in the Black Panther Party for a short time.

Like many black activists of the 1960s, Toure’s political ideas and ideologies changed. During his early 1960s years at Howard University, he believed in the basic tenants of reformist or liberal integrationism. And as the head of SNCC, Toure stood at the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the struggle for black civil rights. However, his frustration with the slow pace of reforms within the American political system, and his growing resistance to King’s nonviolent social protest methodology in the face of vicious white terrorism, provided the impetus for Toure to embrace the more aggressive "Black Power" doctrine as the rallying cry of younger black radicals. Toure’s break with King precipitated the radicalization and increased militancy of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s. King recognized this shift as he struggled desperately to explain and critique these developments to white America in his 1967 book, entitled Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? At the same time, Kwame Toure collaborated with then Roosevelt University political science professor Charles V. Hamilton in writing of the 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, which sought to present a radical political framework and ideology of black liberation and self-determination. They wrote that Black Power:

Clearly influenced by Malcolm X, the Black Power Movement’s spiritual and intellectual father, Toure and Hamilton spoke decisively to black America in setting forth a political outlook and social practice that centered on the collective concerns of America’s black population.

As were many radical activists in the 1960s, Toure had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and he read vociferously. (In the fall semester of the 1966-1967 academic year, just after the explosive Black Power slogan burst on the world scene, I was vice president of North Carolina Central University’s Student Government Association. We invited Toure to speak to our campus community. Afterward, I watched him read a book on the Vietnam war. And that evening at Duke University, he quoted from that book word-for-word in a talk on the war. I was astounded by his memory!) In addition to his study and work, Toure’s travels contributed significantly to his intellectual and theoretical development. In 1967, he went to African and Third World nations. In the process, he was making plans for his future residence in Guinea, West Africa, having become convinced of the need for further study and of the need for black people to establish concrete ties with Mother Africa. He had established the groundwork for these plans during his visits with certain African heads of state and with Osaygefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

In early 1968, the American mass media began a clever campaign to discredit Toure on both personal and political levels. During this and earlier times, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the mass media attacked and discredited a variety of black and white revolutionaries in campaigns designed to crush all radical political formations (see Donner, 1980; O’Reilly, 1989. Moreover, assaults came from within the black community by Black Panther Party leaders and other so-called Marxist groups, who began to label Toure "pork chop nationalist" or "cultural nationalist." Even a few remaining members of a once dynamic and influential, but now waning, SNCC decided to "expel" the enigmatic Toure from the organization. Toure continued to travel, speaking to college audiences throughout the United States. He also continued to speak to numerous audiences in Canada, Guyana, Africa, and England.

In 1969, Kwame Toure made another significant political transition when he embraced the ideology of Pan-Africanism and moved to the West African country of Guinea. Under the auspices of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, he sought to organize a United States of Africa committed to democratic socialism. He always had been anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Even so, from the Mississippi Delta to Conakry, Guinea, Toure experienced a logical growth and development of his ideas from Black Power to Pan-Africanism. Clearly influenced by a close reading of Kwame Nkrumah, Toure argued that all black people are Africans. He called for a united Africa based on the ideology of socialism. In a speech, entitled "Black Power Back To Pan-Africanism," Toure declared:

Noting that the concept of Pan-Africanism was not new, Toure delineated a genealogy of Pan-Africanist theoreticians: W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Sylvester-Williams, Joseph Casely-Hayford, George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, Ben Bella, Ahmed Sekou Toure, and Kwame Nkrumah. For Toure, as for his predecessors, the unity of Africans is the indisputable prerequisite for the complete liberation of African peoples. Toure stated that Malcolm X’s call for Black Nationalism is really African Nationalism, and the highest aspiration of African Nationalism in Pan-Africanism. Hence, Black Power really means African Power. In the above-mentioned speech, Toure continued:

Unlike many Black Power militants of the 1960s who have since faded from the scene, Kwame Toure remained a revolutionary activist until his very last days. Toure’s activism was sustained by his quest to uproot injustices wherever they existed. He maintained his revolutionary zeal because he was profoundly and unalterably committed to African and human liberation. The African tradition of social justice requires a long-term commitment; Toure’s was a life-long struggle for black liberation. In this context, I am reminded of his distinction between the black militant and the black revolutionary. He said that a black militant is a black person who is angry at white folks for keeping him out of their system. On the contrary, a black revolutionary is an angry black person who wants to tear down and destroy an entire system that is oppressing the people and replace it with a new system where the people can live like human beings (Carmichael, 1971).

Throughout his active life, Kwame Toure put forward three major concepts: (1) We must have undying love for our people. (2) Every Negro is a potential black person. (3) For black people the question of community is not simply a question of geographical boundaries but a question of our people and where we are. Toure argued that we are Africans scattered all over the Western hemisphere. Underlying these three concepts was another powerful perspective. Toure constantly called on black people to organize so that we could fight collectively against injustice and for human rights. Yes, Toure was anti-racist, anti-imperialist, Pan-Africanist, and socialist. In the face of capitalist European cultural domination and Euro-American white supremacy, Toure called for black unity. He was a thoroughgoing revolutionary collectivist in the best sense of that tradition. Throughout the numerous times that I heard him speak, Toure constantly challenged his audiences to embrace and practice the essential necessity of organized struggle. For him, effective organization is the vehicle for conveying the revolutionary idea of black self-determination and black consciousness that will provide the basis for political, economic, and cultural strength. Now and in the coming millennium, we need to grasp Toure’s legacy of organized struggle in order to combat the structures, processes, and discourses of racial, gender, and economic oppression and exploitation.

As we prepare to enter the twenty first century, the forces of antiblack racism, political repression, gender oppression, cultural domination, and economic indifference are mounting in an evolving managerial society that is energized by new knowledge, advanced science, and high technology. The emerging social order will not utilize knowledge only for social participation and techno-science solely in the people’s interest. Rather we are witnessing the increasing use of knowledge for social control and the techno-science of surveillance, especially in urban areas that have high concentrations of people of color and impoverished populations. With the new society’s dramatic expansion of private-enterprise prisons, a growing number of citizens will experience the new managerial politics of surveillance. Witness the strategic placement of video cameras at ATMs, malls, parking facilities, and stores, etc. Increasingly, the postmodern spirit is characterized by what my colleague Mike Weinstein calls "postcivilized modernity" (Weinstein, 1995). It is the unhappy consciousness of a morally and socially decadent culture--a breakdown in the rules and laws that guide civil conduct. It is the emergence of a managerial order ruled by the postmodern tyranny of the high-tech police state or the cybernetic fascist state--the tyranny of culture over flesh. As usual, power is exercised at the expense of the people.

How shall we speak of rebellion against the postmodern condition? How can we understand a world that is an unfit habitation for human beings? In answer to these stirring questions, I am reminded of a passage articulated by the rebel-outsider in Richard Wright’s powerful novel of ideas, The Outsider:

Kwame Toure left a legacy of audacious and committed struggle designed to overthrow injustice and human exploitation in order to create a liberated African world. As long as there is one of us who can speak his name, Toure will live in our hearts and minds. His legacy challenges us to study and struggle against the forces of evil. If we are to struggle for freedom in the new social order that is rapidly developing at the dawn of the twenty first century, we will have to cast off the psychological blinders of fear, silence, complacency, and ignorance so that we can acquire the courage and commitment necessary in order to continue the task of creating our own liberated world.

Long live Kwame Toure!