6. Stokeley Carmichael, Black Panther

Honolulu, Hawaii, Tuesday 19th March 1985.

Went over from my office at the East-West Centre to the University of Hawaii campus to hear Stokely Carmichael. Now there’s a name from the past - a sixties’ culture hero, founder of the black student movement and the Black Panther Party, coined the slogan Black Power, worked with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey Newton (who now has a PhD in New Consciousness History, or some such!) Bobby Seale (now running a barbecue business), Eldridge Cleaver (who wrote memorably in Soul on Ice about how frightening and special it is when two people open up their lives to each other; in his case to his lawyer).

Cleaver’s now a born-again Christian. All those black radicals either dead or diverted into the by-ways of history, into psychobabble, new age cults, suits and ties. Such a sell out. But not Stokely. Here he is, still only forty-three, tall, thin, stately, handsome as ever, now proselytising for the Pan American Revolutionary People’s Party. Into Marxist political education of black Americans in a big way but based in Guinea, West Africa, and calling himself Kwame Ture (Kwame after Nkrumah of Ghana and Ture, I think, after Sekou Toure of I forget which old French West African colony – Guinea perhaps). Stokely married the lovely Miriam Makeba who I saw in London years ago in the Bantu jazz musical King Kong where she was the lead singer, but they were divorced in the late seventies and now he has in his retinue another gorgeous African lady decked out in full tribal costume, headdress and all, plus young child. The revolutionary’s lot is not a happy one?

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Huey Newton became a crack cocaine addict and was fatally shot by a drug dealer in 1989.

Eldridge Cleaver became an active member of the Republican Party and died in 1998.

Stokeley Carmichael died in Guinea of prostate cancer on November 15th 1998 age 57.

Bobby Seale wrote a cookbook, advertised ice cream and worked in youth education programmes. He is still alive.