BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : STOKELY CARMICHEAL A BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND BLACK PANTHER LEADER : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael moved to Harlem, New York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents, who had immigrated when he was age two and left him with his grandmother and two aunts. He had three sisters. As a boy, he had attended Tranquility School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for him.
His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, at that time an aging neighborhood of primarily Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants. According to a 1967 interview he gave to LIFE Magazine, Carmichael was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

Carmichael as a senior in high school, 1960.

He attended the elite, selective Bronx High School of Science in New York, with entrance based on academic performance. After graduation in 1960, Carmichael enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C.. His professors included Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare and Toni Morrison, a writer who later won the Nobel Prize. Carmichael and Tom Kahn, a white student and civil-rights activist, helped to fund a five-day run of the Three Penny Opera, by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill: "Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances. It was a classic win/win. Members of the Council got patronage packets of tickets for distribution to friends and constituents". His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964. Carmichael was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but turned it down.