Activist – Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael, a prominent civil rights organizer, first led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then became the honorary prime minister of the Black Panthers, and lastly leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. (A-APRP). 

Carmichael also popularized the Pan-African Movement, which was anti-slavery and anti-colonialism and aimed to unite indigenous African People with its diaspora ethnic groups, and African descendants from colonized countries like the US. He participated in the Freedom Rides, where he and black activists would travel on trains in the south, sitting in the “white sections” to protest segregation. J. Edgar Hoover’s Counter Intelligence Program targeted Carmichael and other black activists, this program endorsed the harassment slander of activists like Carmichael, and even worse, often having activists killed to stifle and emerging “revolutionaries”. 

Carmichael fled the US as a result of this persecution and relocated to Ghana and Guinea where he continued to preach Pan-Africanism and justice for black people this time on an international scale. He’s renowned as one of the major founders of Black liberation groups during the civil rights movement.