Howard University
From Social Justice Wiki
"Because in our time--the opening four years of the 1960s--Howard University was an extraordinarily interesting place for any young African to be who was not totally brain-dead and who was concerned with his people and their struggle."
In the fall of 1960, Stokely Carmichael enrolled at Howard with the intent of becoming a doctor. However, what he realized while he was there was that he was interested not in medicine but in helping the black community on a larger scale. Much of his education at Howard, both in and out of the classroom, led Carmichael down the path from observer to activist.
First, the lessons that Carmichael learned in the classroom helped to shape his ideology. Between attempting to fill his pre-med requirements, Carmichael found himself in the classrooms of E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, and Sterling Brown. Frazier's The Black Bourgeoisie and Logan's The Betrayal of the Negro and The Negro in American Life and Thought are academic tomes that Carmichael cites as particularly influential.
Secondly, Carmichael learned from the Howard community at large. Before college, Carmichael had limited exposure to black activism, both having attended a predominately white high school (Bronx Science) and living a relatively protected life in Harlem. At Howard, he met two groups of "Africans" that largely influenced his world view. The first of these groups is Southern blacks. According to Carmichael, "Howard would give me the first direct contact with the lived experience of the South," the constant humiliation, brutality, and exploitation that he did not experience in his isolated enclave of Harlem. The second group: non-American Africans, those from the Caribbean and anglopohone Africa. In the early 60's, several Carribean and African countries began to be freed of their colonial holds, which seemed to evoke a pan-African sense of promise among the students at Howard, Carmichael included. As he related, "Africa, we were fully confident, would solve the great human problems that continued to bedevil European civilization."
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Quotations on this page taken from Ready for Revolution.