Chuck Stone died yesterday, after living out his recent years among us virtually ignored. He was a legendary journalist as well as point man for Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (who wrote his Black Position Paper after speaking to a Howard University commencement and asking if any good could come out of Nazareth), both important personsin the Black Power movement, In the summer of 1967 he had the idea of starting the Washington Committee for Black Power (a coalition of the black civil rights and nationalistic groups). I believe he had another guy who campaigned for the chairmanship in mind, but without campaigning, I won. When school started he participated in a rally on campus against the firing of six professors, four white and two black, for so-called Black Power activities. When Stokely Carmichael moved to town, it was agreed that he could inherit the group and change its name to the First National Black United Black Front and try to make Chucks dream come true. The last time I saw him was at Howard University in 1978 when I was keynote speaker for the Fourth National Conference of Afro-American Writers (whose theme that year was the 1960s)and Chuck was in the audience with his wife, Louise, and they would be together for a total of fifty years. We lost a good black man.. He never let on that he was a Tuskegee Airman, let alone their navigation flight instructor. You never know when greatness is around you and you dont know it..
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 05:33:36 +0000
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