I FIRST MET STOKELY CARMICHAEL IN THE SUMMER OF 1961, during the Freedom Rides. At the time, he was a student and activist at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I would later be elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in charge of our organization's efforts to register African-Americans in the segregated South to vote. Even back then, Stokely was hard to ignore. Tall and lanky, he was very talkative and very up front. He didn't wait to be asked his opinion on anything--he told you, and expected you to listen. I remember admiring his utter self-confidence, and his unwavering devotion to the principles of freedom and racial equality. He remained true to those ideals until his death last week at the too young age of 57.
And yet, though Stokely and I became fast friends in those early, difficult days of the movement, I cannot say that we remained so in the long years that followed. Back then, he embraced the tactics and techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience that were the guiding principles of the movement. During Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, struggling to register blacks to vote, Stokely and I spent a lot of time together, and we stayed with a family in Greenwood, Miss., sleeping in the same bed and sharing our clothing. We were like brothers.
But already, I could see that Stokely was becoming disheartened and discouraged. Progress was sometimes slow, and remaining nonviolent despite constant violence was difficult and frustrating. There was a growing sense of militancy among some in the movement, a sense of urgency that something more forceful had to be done. Stokely became their leading voice. He began talking about ""black power'' and self-defense, and about escalating the pace of change. He said we should ""tell off'' Dr. King, and ""stick it'' to Lyndon Johnson. Indeed, he began to lose faith in Dr. King's dream of an integrated, colorblind society. Stokely shunned the support of the many white students and activists who had worked and bled with us. SNCC, he believed, should be for blacks only.
In May 1966 I discovered that my friend was secretly agitating to replace me as SNCC chairman. At a contentious meeting in May 1966 I was re-elected. But in the middle of the night, after most of the members had gone home, Stokely's supporters challenged the vote and held another election. I was de-elected. Stokely--who was moving away from the principles of nonviolence--was now in charge of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
I stayed on with SNCC for eight weeks, then resigned. Much as it pained me to leave, there was no longer any place for me there. I could no longer pledge my allegiance to an organization that had come to embrace such wrongheaded thinking.
In the years that followed, I had only sporadic contact with Stokely. He became still more radical, and changed his name to Kwame Ture. He became the personification of raw militancy. Recently, he had become almost obsessed with his belief in a worldwide conspiracy to hold blacks in subjugation. He held fast to the hope that the people of Africa and the Third World would somehow rise up in a revolution to liberate African-Americans. This was very sad to me. Stokely had lost sight of the dream that once brought us--and so many other people of good will--together. The revolution we wanted was one of values and ideas, not of violence. I last saw him this past spring, at a tribute to Stokely. We hugged, and after so many years I discovered the personal hurt had faded. He held my hand for a while, and seemed happy, and in that moment I was no longer sitting next to the revolutionary Kwame Ture, but my old friend and brother Stokely Carmichael.