PROFILE: STOKELY CARMICHAEL RACIALIST WHO IS DEMED OPPORTUNITY OF MARTYRDOM

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31657, 18 April 1968, Page 8

PROFILE: STOKELY CARMICHAEL RACIALIST WHO IS DEMED OPPORTUNITY OF MARTYRDOM

IBu

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

He was born a British subject on the island of Trinidad and went to a school called Tranquillity. He is no longer a British subject, the Trinidad Government has barred the door against him and he has bidden farewell to the tranquil mind.

He is also grossly overrated as a catalyst of America’s colour problem. He talks a good revolution. But the ghettoes were seething, the rioters rioting, the snipers sniping and the looters looting long before he let loose his anti-white vituperation. “A Black Robespierre” It is the wind of his own words which has inflated the reputation of 26-year-old Stokely Carmichael so that otherwise serious commentators can talk of him as a black Robespierre looming out of the chaos of Martin Luther King’s death. He has repeatedly been described as intelligent, although his recorded intelligence seems to consist largely of larding his tirades with quotes from Sartre, Camus, Machiavelli and Lewis Carroll (the last-named apart, the

standard ammunition of high school firebrands everywhere). Perhaps he is intelligent enough to appreciate the sour irony of the fact that it is the very white-founded democracy he so consistently lacerates that has permitted him to shape an ogre’s image out of words. The Best Way If he hates that freedom his hatred is understandable. For, seemingly regardless of the extravagance of his words, it denies him the opportunity of martyrdom. It'is a truism of revolution that the clandestine, the forbidden word‘is immeasurably more potent than the words that may be publicly declaimed. Unwittingly or not America has so far chosen the best way of coping with Carmichael. It has swung with his wordy punches. To many outsiders official tolerance has sometimes seemed to verge on absurdity. His recorded quotes are bloodcurdling—“lt’s time to let the Whites know we’re going to take over. If they don’t like it we will stamp them out, using violence and any other means necessary”— they are also adolescently offensive—President Johnson is “a buffoon,” the Americans a nation of “murderers and cowards.” It is a measure of the maturity of the American Government that they have accorded them the status of weighing-in braggadocio—“l’ll moider da bum.”

dentally, that Carmichael has been barred from both Trinidad and Jamaica. Both are independent territories where black power (without the capital letters) is already a fact. Neighbouring Communist Cuba gave him a big hand, with Castro describing him as “one of the most prestigious civil rights leaders in the United States." But predominantly Negro Trinidad and Jamaica did not want to know.