Revolution in Babylon: Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s

Introduction: In Search of an Icon

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) is one of the most important political leaders of the postwar era, yet remains one of the most obscure icons of his generation. A civil rights militant turned Black Power revolutionary, Carmichael’s call for ‘‘Black Power’’ in Greenwood, Mississippi during a late spring heat-wave in 1966 sent shockwaves throughout the United States and beyond. Black Power represents one of the most controversial, enduring, and pivotal stories of the twentieth century. Individuals and groups that played major and minor roles in this movement—which range from Malcolm X, William Worthy, Lorraine Hansberry, The Black Panthers, Lyndon Johnson, Black Muslims, FBI, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Huey P. Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, Fidel Castro, and the New Left to name a few—make this period nothing less than a historical epoch that encompasses the tragic and heroic character of the postwar global era. Spanning continents and crossing oceans, Black Power’s reach was global, stretching from urban projects in Harlem to rural
hamlets in Lowndes County, Alabama, to poor Black neighborhoods in West Oakland out to the revolutionary cities of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Conakry, Guinea, Algiers, Algeria, and the cosmopolitan internationalism of London, Stockholm, and Paris.