Stokely Carmichael At the Center of the Revolution Author Thelwell Helps Document Activist's Life Achievements

Author: Karrina Arrue

Last Thursday, Bicentennial Hall Room 220 was filled to capacity as the audience anxiously waited to hear, "The Origins of Significance of 'Ready for Revolution': the Autobiography of Stokely Carmichael," a lecture by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, a longtime friend of the revolutionary civil rights activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and collaborator on his autobiography.

Thelwell is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was also a staff member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s and colleague of Carmichael. He is well-known for his writings, including the 1980 novel "The Harder They Come."

Carmichael was the leader of the Non-Violent Action group at Howard University in the early 1960s. In 1966, he was elected chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later became prime minister of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Calif., He advocated the ideas of "Black Power" and believed in using violence if necessary.

"His life spanned the struggle of a generation in America and Africa," said Thelwell of Carmichael, who also supported the cause of pan-Africanism - the creation of a single African socialist state.

Thelwell recalled telling Carmichael, "You've got to start writing this stuff down ... the struggles you've had. They really ought to be preserved."

Carmichael was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December 1996, and he and Thelwell began writing the autobiography nine months later. He died in Guinea on Nov. 15, 1998, and was only able to revise six chapters.

Thelwell continued to edit and put together the taped narrative which the civil rights activist left behind - an endeavor that took him six years to complete.

"He gave me not only the freedom but the responsibility to take responsibility for the language of the book ... but he [Carmichael] dictated what should have been in the book," said Thellwell.

The account, "'Ready for Revolution': The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael," is being released this month on the fifth anniversary of Carmichael's death.

Only calling himself a "disinterested observer," Thelwell remarked, "Since it's not my book I can say that this is the most unusual text I've ever read."

Although Carmichael "didn't have a presence in the white American media," according to Thelwell, "he was loved all across the world." He was "unrepentant, unapologetic and defiant ... in writing his story."

Carmichael wanted his autobiography to "tell the truth, that's all. He wasn't running for office, this is not a campaign autobiography, and he wasn't looking for self justification. His sincerity was palpable and manifest - he truly loved the people."

"'Ready for Revolution' is the latest installment in a grand tradition of the autobiographical, black male narrative," noted Playthell Benjamin in the book's afterword - placing it beside the likes of Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcom X and others.

"Everyone should read this book because it significantly revises and rewrites the history of the civil rights movement, and it is probably the most significant book written in the last 10 to 12 years," said Thelwell.

After the lecture, Middlebury College students and faculty were able to purchase the book, which has not been released yet, and have it signed by Thelwell.