Kwame Ture Buried In Guinea

CONAKRY, Guinea - They came from California and Chicago and New York and Conakry, aging radicals - some with graying dreadlocks - who wanted to honor the man who electrified America and the world more than 30 years ago with his cry of "Black Power!"

Kwame Ture - who gained fame as Stokely Carmichael, one of the most prominent civil-rights activists of the 1960s - was buried yesterday in this ramshackle West African capital, his adopted hometown.

Ture, who had been a freedom rider, a Black Panther, a preacher of revolution and a fierce adherent of pan-African socialism, changed his name when he moved to Conakry in 1968.

He died Nov. 15 of prostate cancer at age 57.

"Kwame is a struggler. He struggled all his life, he struggled until the last second of the last minute of the last hour of the last day," Bob Brown, a longtime friend, told 400 cheering people at a memorial service at Conakry's Gamal Abdel Nasser University.

Ture's politics shifted over the years, from the nonviolence of the freedom riders to angry calls for armed revolt, but he never stopped championing the cause of socialist upheaval.

Speakers paid homage to him under a banner that read: "The CIA gave me cancer. Kwame Ture."

Leftist rhetoric suffused the memorial, with Guinean politicians and American activists invoking the rallying cries of the 1960s.

"We send our revolutionary condolences to the family of comrade Kwame Ture," Macheo Shabaka, a member of Ture's All-African People's Revolutionary Party, said in a typical statement.

While some speakers were in their 20s and 30s, most were decades older, men and women who first got to know him - or at least know of him - as Stokely.

Ture began his political career as a college student in the 1960s, helping integrate public transportation in the American South as a freedom rider. He soon became one of the most fiery figures of the era, popularizing the term "Black Power" and changing the way the once-nonviolent civil-rights movement was viewed.