Kwame Ture at Democratic Party of Guinea HQ in 1997 in Guinea-Conakry with other A-APRP cadre who also belong to other Pan-African formations in Africa like the PAIGC, the Pan African Union of Sierra Leone, Convention People's Party of Ghana, etc.
November 15, 2025, commemorates 27 years since the physical disappearance of Kwame Ture (formally known as Stokely Carmichael). If one is to seriously use Kwame’s life to reflect on what lessons we should learn from his example, one of the most critical ones is his often stated quote – “power only comes from the organization of the masses of the people!” Although its going on 30 years since Kwame himself was able to utter that phrase, the comment is often repeated and shared in articles and throughout social media platforms. Still, there isn’t a logical argument to be made that people today have any greater understanding of what Kwame meant by that statement than they had during the 1990s when he made it.
The capitalist system drills individualism into our heads 24/7/365. By individualism we mean the core belief that our interests, perspectives, philosophies and actions only need to be guided by what we perceive to be our personal vison of the world, not the interests of the masses of humanity. As a result, individualism requires that we don’t see ourselves as a part of a collective. Instead, we see our accomplishments as solely the result of individual initiative. We define advancement as individual representation within the capitalist system. This dysfunction explains why celebrity culture is so dominant within the capitalist system because celebrities portray the myth of individualism better than anything else. In other words, the capitalist system relies on individualism because as long as people continue to see the world through that backwards vision, they will never see collective victory as realistic. And, despite the fact that the capitalist system understands clearly that collective struggle is the sole approach that can effectively dismantle capitalism and build something better, they also know that they have so effectively convinced so many of us to worship individualism that provided they can continue to promote this lie, they need not worry about a serious threat to their dominance.
We believe one of Kwame’s most significant contributions was to advance the notion that individualism is a trap of the capitalist system and that collective consciousness and action is truly what we must strive to achieve. Kwame knew this lesson firsthand. As a young man in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he was unfortunately able to consistently witness and experience the brutality of the capitalist system against the masses of Africans in the Southern U.S. who were simply fighting for basic human rights. From that critical work, he learned that the masses were truly the key to any meaningful work towards achieving power. Any study of his life and work during his Stokely Carmichael years in the 1960s will illustrate this. Kwame knew that no one in the civil rights movement, not even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was more important than the masses of people. In fact, Kwame understood that without the masses, Dr. King would have been nothing more than another African Baptist preacher in the South. Kwame articulated this understanding when he recounted the story of when the Montgomery Improvement Association was founded in 1955. At its inaugural meeting, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used the meeting to announce its plans to lead a one day bus boycott of Montgomery buses. Ms. Rosa Parks, an NAACP member, had fulfilled an NAACP strategy (that actually was tested with other women who refused to give up their “whites only” seats on buses before Ms. Parks) by refusing to relinquish her seat in the “whites only” section of the bus. After the one day boycott, and its perceived success, a second meeting was called and E.D. Nixon issued a nomination of Dr. King to become president of the association. Kwame Ture’s consistent point about this is the inspiration for the expanded bus boycott came from the collective actions of the people of Montgomery and Dr. King being thrust into leadership was a manifestation of that, not the reason for it. Quoting Ture – “if Dr. King wasn’t there, the people were ready. They would have chosen Dr. Smith, or Jones, etc., to lead the organization!”
This perspective provided by Kwame Ture flies in the face of the capitalist interpretation of history that people like Dr. King are exceptional and no one else could play the role that he played. Certainly, he demonstrated great skill, courage, and intellect in his leadership capacity, but it would be ahistorical and undialectical to suggest that the movement only moved because he was in it. That type of individualistic interpretation of history has always been brought to us by this capitalist system which wants you to believe that if you are not King, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Franz Fanon, Assata Shakur, Cabral, Carmen Peirera, Imbalia Camara, Huey P. Newton, etc., then you cannot make the level of contribution that they made so why even try?
The truth of Kwame’s analysis is that each of our contributions may not be exactly the same as those historical African giants, but each of us has a contribution to make and once we make it, we find that it has value and is very necessary. It was this level of consciousness that led Kwame Ture to embark on the work which, although much less known than his work in the U.S. civil rights and Black power movements, was in our view much more consequential and important.
Kwame spent from 1961 through 1968 in SNCC, seven years. He spent approximately one year in 1968 in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, he moved permanently to Guinea-Conakry, West Africa, where he worked and lived until his physical transition in 1998. He spent that last 29/30 yeas of his life organizing within the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), the party of Sekou Ture. He served as a political secretary to Kwame Nkrumah who was living in Guinea-Conakry as co-president (until his physical transition in 1972) after being illegally overthrown as president of Ghana by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1966. As a citizen militant of the PDG, Kwame Ture shed the name Stokely Carmichael in 1977, choosing to honor his political mentors Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture. He accepted the assignment asked of him by Nkrumah to carry out the mission of Nkrumah’s “Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968) to unite revolutionary Pan-African formations on the ground in Africa under the All African Committee for Political Coordination and All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-ACPC/A-APRP – pages 56 to 60 in the Handbook). Kwame Ture took the assignment seriously, working feverishly within the PDG, eventually becoming a lead coordinator for the youth of Guinea and then a member of the PDG Central Committee. All the while, being a Central Committee member of the A-APRP as well. Kwame used his political contacts and relationships to help move A-APRP cadre into neighboring Guinea-Bissau to join the Amilcar Cabral founded African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), following the work example Kwame illustrated in Guinea in Guinea-Bissau and several other countries in Africa.
The other aspect of Kwame’s assignment from Nkrumah was to help build the A-APRP in the Western Hemisphere. This was the reason he returned to the U.S. annually to conduct speaking engagements. Many people, unfamiliar with revolutionary organizing work mistakenly assessed that Kwame’s speaking engagements didn’t produce the type of mass mobilizations that happened in the 1960s so, in their eyes, his mission was unsuccessful. What they missed is his work was designed to recruit and create revolutionary Pan-African cadre within the A-APRP who would be committed, disciplined, and dedicated to continuing to carry out Nkrumah’s vision after Kwame Ture was no longer walking the earth.
We see that his work in Africa after the 60s was his most important because as great as SNCC and the Black Panthers were, they are no longer operational in 2025. Kwame has been away from this earth for the last 27 years, but the A-APRP cadre that he helped establish the foundation for continue to organize today in every corner of the African world. This is the highest expression of collective work. It was this level of political activity that ushered in Kwame’s political maturity beyond his 1960s activism, where some SNCC comrades referred to him as “Stokely Starmichael” based upon their criticism that he didn’t work collectively with staff. Within the A-APRP and PDG, Kwame helped institutionalize criticism/self-criticism, the antithesis of the criticisms against him in SNCC. And most impressively, his work those last 29/30 years demonstrated without a doubt his commitment to mass empowerment over individual advancement.
After the 1960s, virtually every major civil rights and Black power movement figure who was not murdered or imprisoned leveraged their position within the movement for individual positions of visibility. Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Bobby Rush, Marion Barry, the list goes on, but unlike all of them, Kwame never ascended to U.S. politics. He never wanted to be mayor of New York or some other major city. He didn’t want to be chancellor of some large university. Certainly, since his notoriety was as large, if not larger, than all the others around 1970, he could have pursued those interests had he desired to do so. We would argue (without disparaging any of those aforementioned civil rights workers turned politicians) that although their names were more popular than Kwame who abandoned U.S. capitalism at the height of his personal popularity , none of their works will have the long lasting and critical impact of Kwame Ture’s work to build revolutionary cadre operational on the ground, all over the world. Cadre who do the work everyday to build the type of collective consciousness and organization that we are convinced will led us to the victory that our most sincere warriors gave their lives for. This is Ture’s biggest gift to his people and to humanity. And, even if the cadre he spawned are somehow unsuccessful in our mission, he has helped demonstrate that the collective organizing approach is the correct model. It’s a living testament to Ture’s statement that he only ever wanted “the power of the organized masses!”
The capitalist system drills individualism into our heads 24/7/365. By individualism we mean the core belief that our interests, perspectives, philosophies and actions only need to be guided by what we perceive to be our personal vison of the world, not the interests of the masses of humanity. As a result, individualism requires that we don’t see ourselves as a part of a collective. Instead, we see our accomplishments as solely the result of individual initiative. We define advancement as individual representation within the capitalist system. This dysfunction explains why celebrity culture is so dominant within the capitalist system because celebrities portray the myth of individualism better than anything else. In other words, the capitalist system relies on individualism because as long as people continue to see the world through that backwards vision, they will never see collective victory as realistic. And, despite the fact that the capitalist system understands clearly that collective struggle is the sole approach that can effectively dismantle capitalism and build something better, they also know that they have so effectively convinced so many of us to worship individualism that provided they can continue to promote this lie, they need not worry about a serious threat to their dominance.
We believe one of Kwame’s most significant contributions was to advance the notion that individualism is a trap of the capitalist system and that collective consciousness and action is truly what we must strive to achieve. Kwame knew this lesson firsthand. As a young man in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he was unfortunately able to consistently witness and experience the brutality of the capitalist system against the masses of Africans in the Southern U.S. who were simply fighting for basic human rights. From that critical work, he learned that the masses were truly the key to any meaningful work towards achieving power. Any study of his life and work during his Stokely Carmichael years in the 1960s will illustrate this. Kwame knew that no one in the civil rights movement, not even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was more important than the masses of people. In fact, Kwame understood that without the masses, Dr. King would have been nothing more than another African Baptist preacher in the South. Kwame articulated this understanding when he recounted the story of when the Montgomery Improvement Association was founded in 1955. At its inaugural meeting, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used the meeting to announce its plans to lead a one day bus boycott of Montgomery buses. Ms. Rosa Parks, an NAACP member, had fulfilled an NAACP strategy (that actually was tested with other women who refused to give up their “whites only” seats on buses before Ms. Parks) by refusing to relinquish her seat in the “whites only” section of the bus. After the one day boycott, and its perceived success, a second meeting was called and E.D. Nixon issued a nomination of Dr. King to become president of the association. Kwame Ture’s consistent point about this is the inspiration for the expanded bus boycott came from the collective actions of the people of Montgomery and Dr. King being thrust into leadership was a manifestation of that, not the reason for it. Quoting Ture – “if Dr. King wasn’t there, the people were ready. They would have chosen Dr. Smith, or Jones, etc., to lead the organization!”
This perspective provided by Kwame Ture flies in the face of the capitalist interpretation of history that people like Dr. King are exceptional and no one else could play the role that he played. Certainly, he demonstrated great skill, courage, and intellect in his leadership capacity, but it would be ahistorical and undialectical to suggest that the movement only moved because he was in it. That type of individualistic interpretation of history has always been brought to us by this capitalist system which wants you to believe that if you are not King, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Franz Fanon, Assata Shakur, Cabral, Carmen Peirera, Imbalia Camara, Huey P. Newton, etc., then you cannot make the level of contribution that they made so why even try?
The truth of Kwame’s analysis is that each of our contributions may not be exactly the same as those historical African giants, but each of us has a contribution to make and once we make it, we find that it has value and is very necessary. It was this level of consciousness that led Kwame Ture to embark on the work which, although much less known than his work in the U.S. civil rights and Black power movements, was in our view much more consequential and important.
Kwame spent from 1961 through 1968 in SNCC, seven years. He spent approximately one year in 1968 in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, he moved permanently to Guinea-Conakry, West Africa, where he worked and lived until his physical transition in 1998. He spent that last 29/30 yeas of his life organizing within the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), the party of Sekou Ture. He served as a political secretary to Kwame Nkrumah who was living in Guinea-Conakry as co-president (until his physical transition in 1972) after being illegally overthrown as president of Ghana by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1966. As a citizen militant of the PDG, Kwame Ture shed the name Stokely Carmichael in 1977, choosing to honor his political mentors Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture. He accepted the assignment asked of him by Nkrumah to carry out the mission of Nkrumah’s “Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968) to unite revolutionary Pan-African formations on the ground in Africa under the All African Committee for Political Coordination and All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-ACPC/A-APRP – pages 56 to 60 in the Handbook). Kwame Ture took the assignment seriously, working feverishly within the PDG, eventually becoming a lead coordinator for the youth of Guinea and then a member of the PDG Central Committee. All the while, being a Central Committee member of the A-APRP as well. Kwame used his political contacts and relationships to help move A-APRP cadre into neighboring Guinea-Bissau to join the Amilcar Cabral founded African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), following the work example Kwame illustrated in Guinea in Guinea-Bissau and several other countries in Africa.
The other aspect of Kwame’s assignment from Nkrumah was to help build the A-APRP in the Western Hemisphere. This was the reason he returned to the U.S. annually to conduct speaking engagements. Many people, unfamiliar with revolutionary organizing work mistakenly assessed that Kwame’s speaking engagements didn’t produce the type of mass mobilizations that happened in the 1960s so, in their eyes, his mission was unsuccessful. What they missed is his work was designed to recruit and create revolutionary Pan-African cadre within the A-APRP who would be committed, disciplined, and dedicated to continuing to carry out Nkrumah’s vision after Kwame Ture was no longer walking the earth.
We see that his work in Africa after the 60s was his most important because as great as SNCC and the Black Panthers were, they are no longer operational in 2025. Kwame has been away from this earth for the last 27 years, but the A-APRP cadre that he helped establish the foundation for continue to organize today in every corner of the African world. This is the highest expression of collective work. It was this level of political activity that ushered in Kwame’s political maturity beyond his 1960s activism, where some SNCC comrades referred to him as “Stokely Starmichael” based upon their criticism that he didn’t work collectively with staff. Within the A-APRP and PDG, Kwame helped institutionalize criticism/self-criticism, the antithesis of the criticisms against him in SNCC. And most impressively, his work those last 29/30 years demonstrated without a doubt his commitment to mass empowerment over individual advancement.
After the 1960s, virtually every major civil rights and Black power movement figure who was not murdered or imprisoned leveraged their position within the movement for individual positions of visibility. Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Bobby Rush, Marion Barry, the list goes on, but unlike all of them, Kwame never ascended to U.S. politics. He never wanted to be mayor of New York or some other major city. He didn’t want to be chancellor of some large university. Certainly, since his notoriety was as large, if not larger, than all the others around 1970, he could have pursued those interests had he desired to do so. We would argue (without disparaging any of those aforementioned civil rights workers turned politicians) that although their names were more popular than Kwame who abandoned U.S. capitalism at the height of his personal popularity , none of their works will have the long lasting and critical impact of Kwame Ture’s work to build revolutionary cadre operational on the ground, all over the world. Cadre who do the work everyday to build the type of collective consciousness and organization that we are convinced will led us to the victory that our most sincere warriors gave their lives for. This is Ture’s biggest gift to his people and to humanity. And, even if the cadre he spawned are somehow unsuccessful in our mission, he has helped demonstrate that the collective organizing approach is the correct model. It’s a living testament to Ture’s statement that he only ever wanted “the power of the organized masses!”
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