The former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and
Black Panther leader was 57.

He died in Guinea of prostate cancer, according to his All-African
People's Revolutionary Party.

"In many ways he was at peace with himself," said the Rev. Jesse
Jackson, who had visited with Ture three times at his home in
Guinea last week.

"He was one of our generation who was
determined to give his life to transforming
America and Africa," he said.

"He was committed to ending racial apartheid
in our country. He helped to bring those walls
down," Jackson added.

Said NAACP Chairman Julian Bond: "The
tragedy is that he's going to be remembered as
the man who popularized the phrase 'black
power,' when in fact he ought to be
remembered for having spent almost every
moment of his adult life tring to advance the
cause of black liberation."

"Black Americans have lost a prince, and those of us lucky enough
to have known him have lost a true friend," added Bond, a
co-founder of SNCC.

Ture was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996. A
self-described socialist, he was treated in Cuba and received
financial help for his treatment from Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan.

As the young Carmichael, he was among the most fiery and visible
spokesman of black militancy in the United States in the 1960s,
first as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and then as prime minister of the Black Panther Party.

He cut his ties with the American groups over the issue of allying
with white radicals, and moved to Guinea in West Africa in 1969.

There, with a new name taken from the African leaders Kwame
Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, he organized the All-African
People's Revolutionary Party.

For the rest of his life, both overseas and in appearances before
largely black audiences at U.S. colleges, he continued preaching
black power and championing socialism while condemning
America, capitalism and Zionism.

Born in Trinidad on June 29, 1941, Ture was
raised there and in New York, where he
attended the elite Bronx High School of
Science.

In 1960, he enrolled at historically black
Howard University in Washington, where he
plunged into the civil rights revolution.

In a time when black college students were
being beaten and arrested for daring to sit at
whites-only Southern lunch counters, Carmichael joined the first
freedom rides — bus trips aimed at desegregating public
transportation.

As a SNCC field organizer in Mississippi he led a perilous
voter-registration effort that raised black enrollment from 70 to
2,600 in Lowndes County, 300 more than the white registration.

In June 1966, he was elected national chairman of SNCC and
shortly afterward raised the cry of "black power" as he led a
freedom march in Mississippi.

Responding to those who called the slogan racist and
inflammatory, he said that by black power he meant political and
economic empowerment.

He also took an anti-America message to Cuba and North
Vietnam. Critics said his speeches, and those of his successor, H.
Rap Brown — now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin — had
effectively removed the word "nonviolent" from SNCC's name.

In 1968, he left SNCC for the Black Panthers, but broke with that
urban revolutionary movement the next year because it favored
working with radical whites. He said history showed such alliances
had "led to complete subversion of blacks by the whites."

When many prominent black leaders of the time were being murdered under then FBI headman, J. Edgar Hoover's command, he moved to Guinea and declared himself a Pan-Africanist with a
goal of forming "one cohesive force to wage an unrelenting armed
struggle against the white Western empire for the liberation of our
people."

Although he denied being anti-Semitic, his condemnations of Israel
and Zionism in the early 1990s led the Anti-Defamation League, a jewish cult organization which some refer to as 'The New McCarthyism', to
call him "a disturbing, polarizing figure."

Ture is survived by his mother, three sisters and two sons.

-- Midknight - 11/16/98