Ture’s name change, the biography notes, reflects his admiration for the Guinean president Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. King had just been assassinated in Memphis (in 1968), and Ture was being harassed by the F.B.I. It was a dramatic time: The Black Panthers were engaged in a violent struggle, Dr.

Joseph interprets the factors that led Ture to leave the country in 1969. Some of that debate, they said, will turn on how Mr. Some scholars and activists believe that the book will invite debate about Ture’s actions and legacy. Joseph’s book “completes the circle and the history of the black movement.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, described Ture in an interview as “the link between the civil rights movement, as headed by Martin Luther King, and the radical black movement that emerged from within the civil rights movement through the younger generation.” Mr. He became increasingly radicalized and finally declared that the highest political expression of black power was Pan-Africanism. King and helped start the Black Panther Party. His political life tracked the divergent paths of the modern black political struggle in the United States: He worked with mainstream civil rights activists like Dr.

files on Ture.Īnd it’s a life full of choices - like moving to Africa - that many Americans might debate.Ī native of Trinidad who grew up in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of Science, Ture spent most of the last 30 years of his life in Guinea, in West Africa, trying to fashion a revolutionary Pan-African movement. Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, had access to almost 20,000 previously unreleased pages of F.B.I. In addition to interviews and exhaustive research in archives around the world, Mr. Joseph’s book, 10 years in the making, is being billed as the first definitive biography of its subject, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture. Joseph writes, “impoverishes our understanding of the most important movement in our national history.”Ĭoming out on Tuesday from Basic Civitas Publishers, Mr. Joseph says he set out to “recover” Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, a man whose diminished historical footprint, Mr. With “Stokely: A Life,” the historian Peniel E.

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