Inside #TheVault: Kwame Ture

When we scream "Black Power," we are evoking the passionate and progressive vision of Pan-African activist, author, and educator Kwame Ture. Ture is responsible for several of the most popular Black revolutionary struggle events in the United States History. From SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), to Black Panthers, to Pan-Africanism, his words ring into the spirits of many young protesters today.

Kwame Ture was born in the Port of Spain, Trinidad on June 29, 1941 and reunited with his parents in Harlem, New York City, New York at age 11. Ture enrolled in the historic Howard University and studied under the legendary Black intellectuals Toni Morrison and Sterling Brown. During his time at Howard, he became acquainted with Bayard Rustin and facilitated hundreds of Freedom Rides --a name given to the coordinating actions of traveling, mostly college-aged, Civil Rights protestors. When he graduated in 1964 with his degree of philosophy, Ture was offered a full scholarship to Harvard University but turned it down to become a full time Civil Rights Activist. Throughout the 1965 Freedom Summer (a titled given to the voter registration movement led by the Missisippi Freedom Party and spread to tens of cities across the United States), Fannie Lou Hamer mentored a young Ture. SNCC organizer Joann Gavin wrote that Hamer and Carmichael "understood one another as perhaps no one else could.

In May 1965, Ture was elected to succeed John Lewis, who had recently been elected to U.S. Congress, as Chairman for SNCC and immediately changed the rhetoric of the organization. It was during a 1966 march in Selma, Alabama that Ture would first proclaim “Black Power.” The slogan inspired many of the Black Revolutionary movements we see today such as Black is Beautiful Movement, I'm Black and I'm Proud Movement, Black Panthers Movement, Black Feminism Movement, New Black Panthers Movement, Black Lives Matter Movement and more. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in 1968, in honor of his friends and political allies, Pan-African leaders Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah.

Ture spent the last decades of his life traveling across West Africa; denouncing U.S. racism and imperialism; and all while working to build the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party. In 1969, Ture settled permanently in Conakry, Guinea where he died of prostate cancer in 1998. 

Today we honor and celebrate our ancestor Kwame Ture's life in remembrance of his day of birth.