Kwame Ture was a revolutionary organizer, theorist, and Pan-Africanist who carried the Black freedom struggle from the civil rights movement to the fight for a united socialist Africa. Born Stokely Carmichael in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1941, he moved to New York as a child and grew up in the Bronx. As a student at Howard University he joined the Freedom Rides of 1961 and spent weeks in Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison. He became a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, working through Freedom Summer and registering Black voters across the Deep South in the face of terror and violence.

In Lowndes County, Alabama, where no Black person had been registered to vote, Ture helped build the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent Black political party whose black panther symbol later inspired the Black Panther Party. In 1966, as chairman of SNCC, he raised the call for Black Power during the March Against Fear in Mississippi, and the slogan spread across the country and the world. With Charles Hamilton he wrote Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, which introduced the concept of institutional racism. He denounced the war in Vietnam, connected the Black struggle to anticolonial revolutions abroad, and traveled to Cuba, Vietnam, and Guinea to build solidarity among the world's oppressed.

In 1969 he moved to Guinea, where he studied under Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré and later took the name Kwame Ture in their honor. For three decades he organized for the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, arguing that the liberation of African people everywhere required a unified, socialist Africa. He greeted comrades with the words "Ready for the revolution!" until his death in Conakry in 1998. His legacy endures as a model of lifelong revolutionary commitment, from the voter registration drives of the rural South to the struggle for Pan-African liberation.