How Did Stokely Contribute To African American Self-Empowerment?

Unlike Malcolm, who had already reached out to a number of international leaders before presenting his programmatic contributions to the public, Stokely’s quick rise to fame emerged out of a regional southern context that had increasingly expanded to other places in the United States prior to his calling for Black Power. While some SNCC leaders had already forged international alliances and travelled to several countries in Africa and other places, the idea of Black empowerment, as defined by Stokely and other more radical members of SNCC, focused mainly on the United States. Hence, unlike Malcolm, Stokely turned to Pan-Africanism at a time when it became clear that the divergent organizations that operated under the umbrella of Black Power were not even able to cooperate with each other, less to unify.
Rather, his thinking centered around the pluralistic political system, as he tried to develop conceptual solutions to the dilemma that African Americans lived in a society with a majority political system that complicated any plans of African American self-empowerment. However, the colonial analogy would remain a powerful trope in his thinking, as he later on urged people to recognize that both the United States and Canada were colonial societies, created and maintained by means of genocide and racist oppression. Reiterating Malcolm’s critic that imperialism, the exploitation of non-White people around the world would be the single most unifying characteristic of the Western world, Stokely suggested that White Americans should be called Europeans. Calling them Americans would only normalize, if not legitimize the acts that their forefathers committed against Native