I was piddling around and ran across this footage of one of my all time favorite Civil Rights/Black Power Activist Stokley Carmichael. The speech entiltled “We Ain’t Goin’” is a racially charged one with colorful language where Carmichael talks about Malcom X, Robert Kennedy, Black Power, and the nashville riots at Tougaloo college in 1967. You can feel the focused anger chaneled by Stokley how America being on the brink of implodsion due to racial unrest, had affected young Stokley and everyone in the audience for that matter. The 1960’s will forever be a decade to remember!

Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and later as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements. He popularized the term “Black Power”. Carmichael was Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael moved to Harlem, New York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents, who had left him with his grandmother and two aunts to emigrate when he was two. He attended the elite Tranquility School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for him.
He attended the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school for gifted students with a rigorous entrance exam, from which he graduated in 1960. His experience with the intellectual riches of the high school convinced him to drop his friends from the Dukes gang.
In 1960, Carmichael went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C., rejecting scholarship offers from several white universities. At Howard his professors included Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare and Toni Morrison. His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964.

He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of SNCC. He was inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days at the infamous Parchman Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi. He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at least 29 or 32, and telling the Washington Post in 1998 he believed the total number was fewer than 36.