He Cried Out ‘Black Power,’ Then Left for Africa

With “Stokely: A Life,” the historian Peniel E. Joseph says he set out to “recover” Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, a man whose diminished historical footprint, Mr. Joseph writes, “impoverishes our understanding of the most important movement in our national history.”

Coming out on Tuesday from Basic Civitas Publishers, Mr. Joseph’s book, 10 years in the making, is being billed as the first definitive biography of its subject, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture. In addition to interviews and exhaustive research in archives around the world, Mr. Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, had access to almost 20,000 previously unreleased pages of F.B.I. files on Ture.

And it’s a life full of choices — like moving to Africa — that many Americans might debate.

A native of Trinidad who grew up in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of Science, Ture spent most of the last 30 years of his life in Guinea, in West Africa, trying to fashion a revolutionary Pan-African movement. He died in Guinea in 1998 at 57....