Page 31 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

CARMICHAEL,
STOKELY
20
CARMICHAEL, STOKELY (Kwame Toure) (1941- ) created the term
' 'black power'' and applied it to his life and the lives of many African Amer-
icans during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Educated at Howard University, he was very active politically. He joined the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964 and later became
its chairman. In that role, he worked throughout the South to register voters and
promote political education as it related to African-American causes and issues.
During that time, Stokely developed leadership skills, which he used to instill
a militant tone into SNCC, which threatened civil rights supporters, both black
and white. Also during this time he coined the phrase "black power" as a way
to express the energy that African Americans needed to ensure a future in Amer-
ica.
After leaving the SNCC, he joined the Black Panthers, a national radical
group that espoused the same ideas as his. He eventually became the prime
minister of that group. Disfranchised with the movement, he left the Black
Panthers to study under African leaders in Guinea. He claimed Guinea as his
home and in 1978 changed his name to Kwame Toure. In Guinea, he has openly
criticized the West, particularly the United States, and has worked with the All
African People's Revolutionary Party, which promotes unity of African interests.

SOURCES: Kenneth Estell, ed., Reference Library of Black America, 1994; Shirelle
Phelps, ed., Who's Who among African-Americans, ninth edition, 1996; Jack Salzman,
David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, eds., Encyclopedia of African-American Culture
and History, 1990.
Jacqueline Nash Gifford

CENSORSHIP is used by government officials to prevent information from
reaching the public. The term implies prior restraint of publication, not action
after publication. In practice this means that official censors see everything be-
fore it is published or aired. The First Amendment prohibits this in the United
States, but it is permitted by the military in wartime. In many other countries,
censorship is practiced all the time, and everything that is published or aired is
with the consent of the government. Censorship should be distinguished from
official secrecy, which keeps information from being released and has somewhat
the same effect. Secrecy, of course, is practiced by politicians everywhere. How-
ever, it is limited by law in the United States and in most free societies.
SOURCE: Ralph L. Holsinger and Jon Paul Dilts, Media Law, third edition, 1994.
Guido H. Stempel III

CHAFFEE, STEVEN H. (1935- ) obtained his bachelor's degree at the Uni-
versity of Redlands and his master's at the University of California. He obtained
his Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he currently is chair of the Department
of Communication.
In 1965 he joined the journalism faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where