The Gravest Error: Expansive Blackness and Stokely Carmichael’s 1970 Guyana Debacle

In “The Gravest Error: Expansive Blackness and Stokely Carmichael’s 1970 Guyana Debacle,” Cornell University’s Russell Rickford examines Pan Africanist leader Stokely Carmichael’s highly controversial May 1970 visit to Guyana, South America. Occurring at the height of the African American militant’s influence, the trip was designed to clarify Black Power’s relevance to the Caribbean. But Carmichael’s pronouncements while in Guyana roiled the ethnically and racially complex society. Caribbean radicals promoted an expansive definition of “Black Power” that included exploited laborers of South Asian descent. During his Guyana appearances, however, Carmichael framed Black Power as the exclusive province of Afro-Guyanese, thereby embarrassing his hosts and threatening to aggravate Guyana’s ethno-racial antagonisms. Carmichael’s statements in Guyana reflected broader contradictions between multiracial Third Worldism and black nationalism in the political imaginary of contemporary Pan Africanists.