William Strickland, a longtime civil rights activist and supporter of the Black Power movement who worked with Malcolm X and other prominent leaders in the 1960s, has died. He was 87 years old.
Strickland, who was pronounced dead by relatives on April 10, was active in the civil rights movement as a high school student in Massachusetts. Peter Blackmer, a former student who is now an assistant professor of African studies and African American studies at Eastern Michigan University, said he was inspired by the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin while an undergraduate at Harvard. It is said that it became
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“He made an incredible contribution to the Black freedom movement that was underappreciated,” Blackmer said. “His argument was that civil rights was not a sufficient framework for challenging the systems behind the oppression of black communities throughout the diaspora.”
Civil rights leaders hold hands and lead a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC. (Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Ms. Strickland joined the Boston chapter of the Northern Student Movement in the early 1960s and supported sit-ins and other protests in the South. He became the group’s executive director in 1963, and from there he became a supporter of the Black Power movement, which emphasized racial pride, independence, and self-determination. Strickland also worked with Malcolm X and Baldwin on rent strikes, school boycotts, and protests against police brutality in New York.
Strickland followed a very similar path to civil rights pioneer Du Bois, said Amilcar Shabazz, WEB DuBois Professor of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
“He was committed to being an agent of social change around the world in response to the civil rights movement’s three major problems: imperialism or militarism, racism, and the economic injustice of plantation capitalism. I had a similar experience,” Shabazz said. “He did his best against these triple evils. He did it in his studies, his teaching, his activities, and the way he walked in the world.”
After the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Strickland co-founded the Black World Institute, an independent black think tank. Founded in 1969, it served as a gathering place for black intellectuals for several years.
From there he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught political science for 40 years and served as director of WEB Du Bois Papers. Mr. Shabazz also traveled to Africa and the Caribbean, where he met with leaders of African black liberation movements and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, he said.
Blackmer said Strickland has written about racism and capitalism for multiple outlets, including Essence and Souls, and has appeared in “Eyes on the Prize” and the PBS documentary “Malcolm X: Make It Plain.” He has served as a consultant for several documentaries, including “.
Comparing himself to Malcolm He said he was able to make it “approachable.”
“As a teacher, he taught us to think as students – to be able to understand and dismantle racism, capitalism, and imperialism, and in doing so to be fearless and to understand the challenges we face. “It taught me not to be afraid to name the system as the bad guy, and to develop strategies to counter them,” Blackmer said.
To his relatives, Strickland was an intellectual giant with a great sense of humor and who was not afraid to “speak his mind.”
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“He always spoke truth to power. That’s the type of person he was,” said his cousin Ernestine Norman, recalling conversations they often had on the phone app FaceTime. They had planned a trip to Spain, where Strickland had his home before he started having health problems.
“He always spoke the truth about our culture, about being African here in America, and the struggles we had,” she continued. “His truth was his truth, although it may have confused some people and others at times. His knowledge was his knowledge, and he did the proverbial biting of his tongue.” He wasn’t a good person.”
