Brother Stokley Carmichael died the other day and a lot of my past came flooding back. Not the civil rights days; that's another story. This was later: I was in my mid twenties living with the woman who was to become my second wife in London. I had become friends with Abdul Malak a.k.a. Michael X through two people, one was an Armenian, Richard X ,and the other was Ian.
When my pal Ted Joans heard I was close to Michael he was delighted because he was close to Stokley. Stokley was in Britain for the Dialects of Liberation Conference that some Trotskyist group or another had put together. Ted was reading poetry, Stokley was going to speak and Michael was introducing Stokley. I was taking still pictures and went along with Ted. I wanted to meet Paul Goodman. I had called Michael to arrange seating as it cost a lot of money and neither Ted nor myself ever carried much money. The establishment leftists always wanted lots of money to get into these things; they were a greedy lot.
We took the tube to Hammersmith where the event was being held and went through the hassle of getting into the conference. Finally Ted's poetry and my cameras got us in the door. Michael was there and Ted and I introduced him to Stokley and George Ware. I had never met George before or since that week in London.
Ted had brought a few gris-gris from Africa; during the break in the long speeches we went to the rail-yard for a cigarette. I smoked, Ted didn't smoke or drink, Stokley was quitting and George didn't smoke, Michael never smoked tobacco and drank water, he was Muslim.
Ted asked Stokley about the Saint Christopher that he wore and why, if he was a Black African-American, didn't he wear a gris-gris; how could he access his power. The gris-gris is an access to power not a symbol of religious preference.
Stokley was a Carmichael and they are Scots-Jamaican, cousined to the Hamiltons etc. On the island they are called "white noses." His adventures in America and the fact he was one of the few surviving Black leaders of America bothered him a lot. Death and prison awaited him in America as death awaited Michael who was to be hanged five years later.
We were in the rail-yard when Stokley pulled the Saint off his neck, put on the gris-gris and became an African. I took the picture, Ted wrote the poem. I felt at ease around Stokley as I did around Michael and Ted. They were real people with their own ideas; they had nothing but their talent.
Ted got word that John Coletraine had just died. Coletraine was at the heart of the 'New Thing' in Jazz and regarded as the 'man'. I had every album he recorded; he was breaking new musical ground with each album and we knew his tunes carried the real revolution; the English rockers were nothing but jingle writers compared to Coletraine or Ornette Coleman or Don Cherry. Today many Blacks have forgotten the ground these giants covered.
Ted interrupted, respectfully, the speaker who was blathering about the revolution, and called for a quiet moment for the soul of John Coletraine. At the end of that moment the dynamic of the conference changed from logos of Europe to dynamic of Africa and America. Vanessa Redgrave's theater as solidarity with the oppressed people became simply theater and suddenly there was Michael, Stokley, Ted; all voices who had arrived in similar places from different roots.
Stokley was raised in a very middle class home that valued education above all. He perceived very early that he was being lied to. The values, the culture, the people are kept from us and the intelligent among us understand that early in life. We might all cheer John Wayne as little children but as we grow we realize we are the rebels, the renegades, the mutineers. We did not need the liars in the college any more. The writings of Hughs, Fanon, Garvey were there as was the intellectual persuasion of Robeson. Ted Joans covers this in The Nice Colored Man and S.C. Threw J. C. Away; we had become dangerous.
Stokley was changing during that week and a half in Britain. The police attempted to arrest him one night. They knew he was armed and dangerous and if he wasn't armed there would be an assassination attempt. The people present were all from the street. The guns disappeared and the police were sent packing. The bad guys suddenly saw that the people there were quite able to look after themselves. We were an odd bunch: a couple of white guys with cameras, one of them South African, Michael and his friends, Richard, George and Stokley himself. We lived through the night and Stokley got to speak the next night. The Chelsea set tried to lionize him but they didn't turn his head or get into it. He was developing a way of looking at the oppressor's methods of coopting leaders and thinkers, and manipulating their weaknesses into getting them to modify their thinking. He wanted to know about some obscure French-Dutch-Danish thinkers whose work I knew about; we talked until dawn.
He and Michael discussed this for hours each, growing stronger. About that time Frankie Diamond and his brother Winston showed up; Michael's house was like a University.
When we parted, Stokley said how unhappy he was with the attitude in America as well as Europe and said he was changing his name and wanted to learn more about Africa. He had hoped to spend more time at the British Museum where the treasures stolen from Africa are housed. But the English were getting ready to deport him. It was a time of coups and uprisings, the secret police were everywhere.
I never lost sight of the answers and questions we were exploring. The questions Kwame Ture raised, looking at our history, our actions, and who owns the world, are still out there. He questioned the roots of history and the defenders of the establishment rushed to debunk him. I might disagree with him but we never got another chance to talk; the American Earth called me and I returned.
People say he was a racist; that would be untrue, he did have a hard time suffering fools White or Black, the establishment has exploited that a lot. He spent a lot of time being harassed by governments, the press, who asked many stupid questions, and he was called names by police agents, many times the same press-police people. Ignored by the puppet teachers in schools, he broke new ground, socially, politically and historically. History will forget the army of police, the press and sycophants, however we will remember the example of Kwame Ture. "That is as clear as the nose on your face."
©Cordley Coit
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