The IRD’s effort did not attack Carmichael as a pro-Soviet or communist stooge, a hitherto frequent line of attack. “Enough is enough – why Stokely must go! – and do his thing elsewhere,” read the pamphlet, alleging Carmichael was “weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism” and was controlled by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and former president of Ghana who had been deposed in a coup in 1966.Ĭarmichael attends a non-violent student protest in Alabama in June 1967.

The documents show the IRD created a fake west African organisation called The Black Power – Africa’s Heritage Group, which produced a pamphlet calling Carmichael an “unbidden prophet from America” who had no place on the continent. The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent.īased mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials. Photograph: © Horace Ové/Courtesy Horace Ové Archives Carmichael gives a Black Power speech at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London in 1967.

Stokely carmichael black power speech