Kwame Ture--A Life Lived For the People
Statement by Carl Dix, National Spokesperson, RCP,USA
Revolutionary Worker #984, November 29, 1998
With
the passing of Kwame Ture, the people have lost a mighty champion in the cause
of ending oppression. We in the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA send our
deeply felt condolences to his family, to his friends, and to his comrades in
the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (AAPRP).
My earliest recollection of Kwame Ture, then Stokely Carmichael, was when he was a young activist issuing the call for Black Power during a civil rights march in the South in 1966. In the more than three decades since then, Jim Crow segregation got busted up--but the oppression of Black people not only continued but intensified. And one thing that remained constant through these decades was Kwame Ture's dedication to the liberation of Black people.
Kwame gave voice to the fury and determination of the oppressed. He moved and electrified millions. And he put his life on the line for the cause of freedom and liberation. Kwame Ture was loved by the people. And in equal measure, he was hated and hounded by the powers-that-be.
As activist and leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early and mid-1960s, Kwame helped organize some of the most heroic and far-reaching efforts of the civil rights movement. He and others braved police, vigilantes, and lynch mobs to mobilize Black sharecroppers to stand up and fight for their most basic rights. When some counseled reliance on politicians from on high, Kwame looked to the grass-roots. When others advocated a "go-slow" approach, Kwame sought to step up the fight.
Kwame Ture would soon become a pivotal figure in the transition from the movement for civil rights to the struggle for Black liberation. His cry of "Black Power" signalled the dawning of a new awareness. The fig<%1>ht had to go beyond obtaining rights long overdue. Because as Kwame began to articulate, this system's economics, its institutions, and its values are based on exploitation and racism. Black people had to confront and destroy a system that, as he so passionately declared, denied Black people their very humanity. Kwame did not mince words: liberation required the force of arms.
Kwame identified with the oppressed of the world. In the late 1960s, he traveled to Vietnam and Cuba, calling for international revolutionary solidarity. He promoted solidarity with liberation movements in Africa. Kwame spent the last three decades of his life living in Guinea in Africa and he traveled the world as a tireless leader and organizer for the AAPRP.
In the late 1960s, many of us, spurred on by Kwame and others, began to see the need for revolution. For me, this eventually came to mean taking up the ideology of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism. It has come to mean building a revolutionary movement whose solid core is the alliance of the struggle of the proletarians of all nationalities against all oppression with the struggle of the oppressed nationalities against their oppression. It has come to mean building a revolutionary movement in the "belly of the beast" that aims to overthrow U.S. imperialism as part of the international proletariat's struggle for a communist world. Kwame saw the struggle of African-Americans differently, as part of a Pan-Africanist struggle. But whatever our differences, we in the RCP,USA always knew that Kwame could be counted on to firmly stand for the liberation of oppressed people throughout the world. To his last breath, Kwame never wavered from his stance of condemning capitalism as the cause of untold suffering for the people.
We join in mourning Kwame Ture's passing. We call on all who seek justice to celebrate and learn from his life. And we say to those who with us yearn for the day when all the evils of capitalism are ended once and for all to take up the spirit of Kwame Ture's signature greeting...and get "READY FOR THE REVOLUTION."
| Carl Dix, National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA |