*Born Stokely Carmichael in Trinidad, Kwame Ture became one of the loudest voices agitating for civil rights in the US and across the world. He coordinated with the civil rights movements in the US and reached out to the global pan-African movements.
Ture came to the US as a boy of 11 years old with his family. He started his activism when he was just a teenager at Bronx High School of Science.
He strongly believed that pro-organizing was more effective than mobilization when it came to fostering change for Black people in America. He was against reformism but wholly supported pro-revolutionary ideology. It is believed that it was his hate for political reactionaries that made Bill Clinton dislike him. More about that, shortly.
A political scientist would tell you that a reactionary or a reactionist is someone holding political views that support a return to the status quo. It is Ture who coined the slogan “Black Power.”
In 1968, he changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor his fellow civil rights activists Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, who were both Pan-African leaders.
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So how did Kwame Ture differentiate between mobilizers and organizers?
“We must make clear distinctions between mobilizers and organizers,” he said in one of his speeches. “To be an organizer, you must be a mobilizer, but being a mobilizer does not make you an organizer. Much confusion is to be found here. Malcolm X was a great mobilizer. He was a great organizer. Martin Luther King was a great mobilizer. He was not a great organizer. These facts can be easily seen in King and Malcolm. When Malcolm went to a place he left a mosque. When King went to demonstrations, he broke down segregation and he moved on.”
In another speech, he explained the difference between mobilization and organization.
“One of the characteristics of mobilization is that it is temporary. The organization is permanent and eternal. Clear differences must be made,” he said. He added that mobilization is used to sway people but not to effect change.
He also explained the difference between revolution and reform in yet another speech.
“Reform the system…they are trying to make it look different but keeping the same rotten foundation,” he said. “Reformists make you think things are being changed. A revolutionary looks at the foundation and says…it must be torn up and a new one must be put in its place. I’m a revolutionary, not a reformist. I want the American system destroyed. It has to be destroyed and replaced.”
Ture relocated permanently to Conakry, Guinea, in 1969. He died there of prostate cancer in 1998.
WOW. This is so tone deaf. So disrespectful. So inaccurate. This is what happens when we let people think they got a cookout seat. pic.twitter.com/tAzaFuuHiT
— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) July 30, 2020
At the funeral of another civil rights icon, John Lewis, on July 30, 2020, Bill Clinton took a swipe at Ture.
When he rose to speak about John Lewis, Clinton seemed to compare him with Ture.
“It was a pretty good job for a guy that young and from Troy, Alabama,” Clinton said, referring to Lewis’s involvement in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and how Lewis lost the job as leader of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael. “It must have been painful to lose, but he showed as a young man there are some things that you just cannot do to hang on to a position because if you do, then, you won’t be who you are anymore. And I say there were two or three years there, where the movement went a little too far towards Stokely [Ture], but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.”
The question still on many people’s lips is, who invited Clinton to John Lewis’ funeral?
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