The legendary Trinidad-born American civil rights, Black Power, and Pan-Africanist leader Kwame Ture was recognised at the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA) in Port of Spain on Sunday.
Born in Port of Spain in 1941 as Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael, Kwame Ture went on to become a prominent global voice for Black Power and Black consciousness. His legacy continues to be celebrated in Trinidad and Tobago through a lecture series organised by the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (ESCTT).
According to ESCTT Director Dr. Asha Kambon, Mr. Ture’s deep understanding of the challenges facing our people to end colonialism and neo-colonialism continues to inform their work.
“We in Trinidad and Tobago heard it too; and we rallied Africans and Indians and all non-white people to regain the power of self knowledge, self definition, and self determination and the pride and belief in our aesthetic, artistic creations, our cultural retentions, our cultural practices, belief systems, way of speech, natural speech, colour of skin, song, dance.”
Dr. Kambon said the ESCTT has called for the renaming of Oxford Street to Kwame Ture Street, noting that it’s the street where the great man was born and grew up before migrating at the age of eleven to join his parents in the United States.
“Notably, the house still stands, is maintained in good order, and attracts many foreign visitors who wish, with due reverence, to see for themselves the place of birth and earliest home of the most iconic figure of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s.”
Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut, Professor Lewis Gordon, noted that individuals forcibly removed from African nations and brought to the Caribbean via the Transatlantic Slave Trade were integral contributors to sophisticated societies, possessing their own forms of power.
“The people being enslaved and snatched away were everything from physicians to architects, and this is not – you can look it up yourselves – they did; they had working agronomy. This is the reason why plantations that had people directly from Africa had the knowledge from Africa because a lot of the conditions in the Americas were very hostile for what they wanted on the plantations.”
Prior to the beginning of Sunday’s 26th annual lecture held in recognition of Kwame Ture at the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA) in Port of Spain, specially invited guests were taken on a tour of Mr. Ture’s Oxford Street home.