Stokely Carmichael

Born as Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael (Trinidad June 29, 1941 – Conakry, Guinea November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Black revolutionary Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture after emigrating to Guinea in 1969. Carmichael had married Miriam Makeba, the exiled singer from S-Africa, in the US in 1968. They divorced in Guinea after separating in 1973. Carmichael became one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders of the late 1960s. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, secretly identified Carmichael as the man most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America's "black messiah". The FBI targeted him through its COINTELPRO program, and so Carmichael moved to Africa in 1968 and began campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism. Ture died of prostate cancer in 1998 at the age of 57. Carmichael's 1998 obituary in The New York Times referred to his survivors as two sons, three sisters, and his mother, without further details.