The Road to Hell

After five months of jetting around the world, Black Power Proselyter Stokely Carmichael announced last week in Sweden that his journey is about to end. "I shall return to hell," he declared. "That is, to the United States."

Instead, he jetted to Paris, where he was held up for 17 hours at the airport as an "undesirable foreigner" until Charles de Gaulle himself ordered that "Car-michel," as he is called in France, be granted entrance; he was issued a three-month visa. Within hours, the quondam chairman of the misnamed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the star anti-American ideologue at a left wing-sponsored "Che Guevara Week" meeting. "We do not want peace in Viet Nam," Carmichael fulminated before an enthusiastic audience of 4,000. "We want the Vietnamese people to defeat the United States." Standing under a huge portrait of the late Cuban revolutionary and flanked by Viet Cong flags and a Christmas tree, Carmichael added: "We feel we are not paying too high a price even if we have to destroy the structures of the United States."

First-Class Philippic. With no other visible means of support, Carmichael, 26, has turned the same philippic into a first-class, round-the-world airline ticket. Since July he has visited at least a dozen countries—speaking everywhere from Havana to Hanoi—and has not missed an opportunity to attack the U.S. at any stopover.

In Cuba, he boasted that "we have our own list, and it includes McNamara, Johnson and Rusk—if we have to kill them, we will." In North Viet Nam, he gave his "warm support for the struggle against the common enemy." In London, he vowed that "we are going to take over—if the whites don't like it, we will stamp them out." (After that, the British government told him not to bother to return.) In Conakry, Guinea, he declared: "We will win our rights or we are going to burn the country down to the ground." He even managed to alienate African revolutionaries when in Dar es Salaam he said: "They are not making true revolution. They are more interested in big cars and white women than facing the problems of the people."

Negritude & Nihilism. Curiously, Carmichael is a Jeremiah-come-lately to the cause of the American Negro. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, he was eleven before he moved to the U.S. He grew up in his carpenter-father's home in an all-white area of New York's The Bronx where his best friends were three white youths. They remain his friends today. They remember him for his easy laugh and quick smile, traits that still captivate some. "We were immediately and completely accepted," recalls his mother Mabel. He attended the tough Bronx High School of Science and Howard University, from which he graduated with a degree in liberal arts in 1964. Since then, smarting from some first-degree burn of the soul, he has spent his time advocating negritude and nihilism.