June 16, 2019
Stokely Carmichael was a charismatic black agitator from the sixties, during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration.
He was a Trinidadian..
At one point Stokely led the Black revolt in Detroit, during the 1967 summer period in which the Black population burned down and destroyed much of the infrastructure in their neighborhoods. It exploded into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in American history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot 24 years earlier.
“BURN BABY…BURN!” was the oft’used chant as building, after building was reduced to ashes.
Tear gas and rubber police bullets filled the smoke-laden air.
By the end of summer, th black neighborhood of Detroit looked like Berlin at the end of World War Two.
The district struggled to recover, with very little outside assistance.
The next year, 1968, Stokely Carmichael flew into Detroit from his home in the Caribbean, to take up where he has left off, the year before.
The 1968 reaction was an interesting one.
The Black residents threw him out commenting about the fact he had flown in, the year before, and had them burn themselves out, after which he had returned to Trinidad.
Enough was enough!
The community was not going to be duped again!!!
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Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, secretly identified Carmichael as the man most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America’s “black messiah”. Carmichael fled to Africa in 1968. He re-established himself in Ghana, and then Guinea by 1969, where he adopted the new name of Kwame Ture.