Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago-Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series

Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series

The Emancipation Support Committee began its annual public Lecture Series in 1992 as part of its commemoration of the emancipation of Africans in the English speaking Caribbean in 1838 from chattel slavery. However, its name was changed from the Emancipation Support Committee Public Lecture Series to the Kwame Ture Memorial Public Lecture Series in 1999, the first emancipation celebrations after Ture had passed over to the land of the ancestors in 1998.

Kwame Ture was the last of four great Trinidad-born Pan Africanists who struggled on the international stage for the liberation and unity of Africa and its Diaspora in the 20th Century. Beginning in 1900, Henry Sylvestre Williams organized the first recognized Pan African Conference which was held in London, England. During the course of the next 60 years, George Padmore and CLR James, heightened the ideological debate of Pan African or Communism as the solution to the problems of Africa's children both within and outside the continent. In the last third of the 20th Century, the debate was joined by Kwame Ture, who opted for Scientific Socialism as the solution.

Padmore who was at one time the highest ranking African member of the Workers International, the Comintern, eventually left the Communist Party and worked in Ghana, until his untimely death in 1959, with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, its first president. Kwame Ture also migrated to Guinea where he worked with Sekou Toure, the first President of Guinea and Nkrumah when the latter was deposed in a coup d'etat in 1966. Perhaps more than any of the others, Kwame Ture lived the Pan African ideal and at his passing in 1998 at the age of 57, he was Chairman of the All African People's Revolutionary Party of which he was a founding member.

Kwame Ture represented the best of his generation. Born in 1941 in Trinidad, his family migrated to the United States when he was seven years old. He attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science from which he graduated in 1960 and enrolled at Howard University in Washington DC where he pursued a course of study in Philosophy. He became involved in the politics of the times in a traditional black institution, which had a history of scholarship and human and civil rights activism among students and faculty.

He was a member of the leadership of the campus' Non-Violent Action Group, a city-wide student protest organization. He was Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which was one of the most militant organizations during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid to late 1960's. He was Field Organizer of the Lowndes County (Alabama) Freedom Organization where the symbol of the black panther was first displayed. He was a member of the leadership of the Black Panther Party where he served briefly as Chairman and Minister of Defense. He first used the term Black Power when he and others marched in support of James Meredith who had been denied admission even though he had won a court battle to attend the University of Mississippi Law School. That slogan became the rallying cry for black people the world over.

He spoke at rallies across the United States, Canada, Britian, and the Caribbean before he was banned by most Caribbean Governments as well as by the British and Canadian Governments. He was an implacable foe of the Vietnam war. He abhorred oppression of any kind. He hated the capitalist system and particularly American imperialism. His tremendous intellect and ability to make simple the most complex ideas and arguments, persuaded and inspired others to act in defense of their rights, to face the enemy of black people with courage and determination and to seek knowledge and use it as a weapon in the struggle for freedom, dignity and economic development.

The Public Lecture Series is named in memory of this fighter for Africa's freedom. It pays homage to one of our most committed Pan Africanist of the 20th century. It honors an African who represented the best of his generation. He was a warrior who was always “ready for the revolution.” Through the medium of the Kwame Ture Memorial Public Lecture Series, may his deeds continue to inspire us.