As the Civil Rights struggle continued into the mid-1960s, the tensions on either side of the battlefield began to mount. In the South whites became more vicious in their attacks. In the North, as Blacks began to cry for freedom there also, whites reacted with stiff opposition. Many Blacks began to tire of what they saw as, "waiting for white America to give them justice". In Harlem a protest march against a police station turned into a rebellion with guerilla attacks by Blacks upon white police. In Brooklyn, Rochester, Chicago, and Philadelphia, Molotov cocktails and revolt were replacing picket signs and demonstrations. After the disastrous Selma March of 1965, even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was disturbed that the movement had not increased the standard of living of the masses, was becoming disillusioned.

All of this did not go unnoticed by the young black Civil Rights workers. They had joined the various organizations expecting so much more than had been achieved by this time. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of these especially. They watched as Civil Rights leaders like Fanni Lou Hamer and D.U. Pullium were severely beaten. They watched as Herbert Lee and Louis Allen were beaten and eventually killed. And they had listened to the fiery orator Malcolm X speak on ideas of self-defense and nationalism. On August 11, 1965 the degradations, oppression and rage exploded in the Watts Rebellion. For six days Blacks fought white policemen, firemen, and National Guardsmen in pitched battles. When the dust had cleared, the Civil Rights struggle was changed forever.

Kwame Ture was born Stokely Carmichael in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on June 29, 1941. His father was a carpenter and left with Ture's two sisters and mother to the US. Ture remained in Trinidad, living with two aunts and his grandmother. In 1952 at age 11, he joined his parents in the Harlem section of New York, where his father held a second job as a cab driver to help support his wife, Mae, and children. Ture had journeyed to the US at a decisive period. This was the eve of the Civil Rights Era, and the young man who had grown up in an Afro-Caribbean environment surrounded by blacks had never experienced racism quite like the type in the US. In 1960, after seeing pictures of blacks sitting in at lunch counters in the South, Ture decided to become more politically active. He rejected scholarships from several prestigious white colleges and entered the predominantly black Howard University in Washington, D.C.

During his freshman year he took part in freedom rides: integrated bus trips to the South to challenge segregated interstate travel. In 1964, graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, he became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually rising to head the youthful Civil Rights organization. Ture and other young activists saw their peaceful tactics met with even greater brutality by white citizens and authorities alike. And they watched as urban blacks fought in riotous acts of rebellion in major US cities. After an attempted assassination of Civil Rights leader James Meredith, a protest march was held in Mississippi. The leader of the march was none other than the young Ture. At the march it was Ture who uttered the historic words, "Black Power". They were two simple words that both the masses of whites and blacks would hear for the first time. "Black Power" rolled like thunder throughout America and was picked up as a rallying cry. The movement had taken a new turn that would change the politics of the Black world forever.

Ture resigned as chairman of the SNCC in May 1967 and became affiliated with the Black Panther Party that had been founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. He gained an honorary title and for a short period worked within the organization. However he became disenchanted with the Panthers after Eldridge Cleaver's espoused the belief that coalitions could be formed with liberal whites. He left the party and, in an open letter, said the party had become "dogmatic" in its ideology. Forced to flee the country in exile after pressure from the FBI, Ture left the United States in 1969 to live in Guinea after he was barred admittance into his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago by an American-intimidated government. He changed his name to Kwame Ture, taken from then President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who is regarded by many as the father of modern Pan-Africanism, and Ahmed Sekou Ture, the President of Guinea. He founded the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and by 1971 he was advocating a homeland in a united Africa for oppressed blacks of the world.

Kwame Ture continued in his activism of uniting Africans on the continent and abroad until his death from prostate cancer in 1998 at the age of 57. Revolutionary groups, activists, diplomats, family and friends from around the world converged on the West African country of Guinea on November 22 1998 to bid farewell to Pan-African freedom fighter Kwame Ture who died on November 15. His contribution to the politics of Black America and eventually the Black world is beyond substantial. He remains one of the most prominent icons of the 1960s and the Black Power Movement. As one writer put it, "His determination to transform America and Africa, and his prodding of black Americans to look beyond their country in the fight for racial justice, will be his most enduring legacy".

The cry of Black Power uttered by Stokely Carmichael and the new radical Black nationalism of the 1960s put into motion by Malcolm X could not have taken greater form, than in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. A product of the frustration at the slow movement of the Civil Rights movement and the death of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in October, 1966, in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and it began spreading eastward through the Black urban communities across country. The small group formed by the two disillusioned poverty workers soon grew in prominence and numbers to become the vanguard of Black revolutionary struggle in the 1960s.

Starting with the theory that the police were the main oppressive force in the Black community, they began to monitor them. They took to the streets first armed with only cameras. Facing negative reactions from the law enforcement agents, they returned with loaded guns. Their bold and defiant stance coupled with their ability to render the police powerless, threw them onto the world stage. Soon Black Panther Party chapters were set up throughout the country in major cities. Everywhere could be seen men and women dressed in Black declaring ideologies of self-defense and self-determination. In their Ten Point Program they called for the following: freedom, full employment, an end to capitalism, decent housing, true education, military exemption, an end to police brutality, release from prison of Blacks, fair trials for Blacks, and land, bread, housing, clothing, justice and peace. Their motto was, "We are advocates of the abolition of war; but war can only be abolished through war; and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun."

But the Black Panther Party was not all guns and rhetoric. They established numerous programs including free breakfasts for children, free day care, free health care, and free political education classes. They also established programs to provide community control of schools, tenant control of slum housing, and campaigns to oust drug dealers. With such revolutionary actions, the Black Panther Party soon became public enemy number one first to the police and most especially the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI counter intelligence program, COINTELPRO, waged a brutally successful war against the Black Panther Party and other revolutionaries. Moving westward, under COINTELPRO police departments in each city made military raids on BPP offices or homes in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, Omaha, Denver, New Haven, San Diego, Los Angeles, and other cities, murdering some Panthers and arresting others.

Black Panther Bobby Hutton, only 17, was shot and killed by policemen. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Panthers in Illinois, was shot and killed along with Mark Clark in a police raid. Numerous armed clashes between Panthers and the police, as the infamous New Jersey turnpike incident of Assata Shakur, resulted in even more deaths. Soon Huey P. Newton was in jail, Bobby Seale was on probation, and Eldridge Cleaver was forced into exile. Twenty-one Panthers were charged with a bomb conspiracy, among them Angela Davis, while allies such as Stokely Carmicheal and H. Rap Brown were harassed repeatedly.

Through COINTELPRO, problems with other Black organizations were escalated and soon Panthers were involved even in shootouts with other groups. Through informants, false documents, false information and playing on human weaknesses, COINTELPRO was able to destroy the Black Panther Party from within and without. Huey P. Newton was shot to death in August of 1989, his long struggles against a seemingly invincible enemy resulting in a later life of cocaine addiction and other troubles. His greater life's work would always be remembered however. The young man who defied police and electrified the Black masses would forever live on in the name of the Black Panther Party.

Nearly three decades ago Assata Shakur was described as "the soul of the Black Liberation Army (BLA)," an underground black liberation group that emerged following the COINTELPRO led destruction of east coast chapters of the Black Panther Party. Among her closest political comrades was Ahfeni Shakur, mother of now slain Hip-Hop artist Tupac Shakur. Forced underground in 1971, by charges that were later proved false, Assata was accused of being the "bandit queen" of the BLA; the "mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting." The BLA's alleged actions included: assassinating almost ten police officers, kidnapping drug dealers (one of whom turned out to be an FBI agent), and robbing banks from coast to coast.

Throughout 1971 and 1972 "Assata sightings" and wild speculation about her deeds were a headline mainstay for New York tabloids. Then, in 1973, Shakur and two friends were pulled over by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike. During the stop, shooting erupted. A trooper and one alleged BLA member, Zayd Shakur, were killed, another trooper was slightly hurt and Assata was severely wounded by a blast of police gunfire. The third person in the car, Sundiata Acoli, is still serving time near 30 years later and has recently been denied parole for another 20 years.

Left to die in a paddy wagon, Assata survived only to endure beatings at the hands of police as she lay near death in the hospital. She was eventually charged for the trooper's death, which she vehemently denied, and sentenced to life in prison.

During the next six years Assata spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement. To her credit Shakur defeated a half dozen other indictments. After almost a year in a West Virginia federal prison for women, where she was purposefully surrounded by white supremacists from the Aryan Sisterhood prison gang, Shakur was transferred to the maximum-security wing of the Clinton Correctional Center in New Jersey. In 1979, after giving birth in prison only to have her daughter taken away in less than a week, Assata Shakur (assisted by allies) managed one of the most impressive and still unexplainable jailbreaks of the era. For the next five years authorities hunted in vain but Shakur seemed to simply have vanished. Numerous other alleged BLA members were arrested during those years, including Tupac Shakur's uncle, Mutula Shakur. In 1984 word came from 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The FBI's most wanted female fugitive was living in Cuba, working on a masters degree in political science, writing her autobiography, and raising her daughter.

Today Assata Shakur remains in exile of a US government that has never given up on recapturing her. Thus far US tactics, including an attempt to get the Pope to intervene on their behalf and craftily introducing hidden legislation in a bill, have failed. Assata remains today an inspiration for many and remains active in struggle for Black liberation, commenting frequently on the current socio-political state of the global black community.

For more information see:

Bin Wah, Dhoruba. Still Black, Still Strong

Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice

Cleaver, Kathleen. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party.

Johnson, Jacqueline. Stokely Carmichael: The Story of Black Power.

Jones, Charles. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered

Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide

Phillip, Foner S. ed. The Black Panthers Speak

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party

Shakur, Assata. An Autobiography

Sparks Fly: Women Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the U.S.

Ture, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism.

Ward, Churchill. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement

Black Panther 10 Point Program http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpprog.htm

MIM's Black Panther Newspaper Collection http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/index.html

Electronic Version of 1998 Interview with Assata Shakur about the Pope's Visit to Cuba http://www.iacenter.org/shakpope.htm

Electronic Version of 1995 Statement on Castro and Cuba http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/036.html