Of all of the heroes of the 1960s, Kwame Ture was the one person who maintained his position to the end, said chairman of the Emancipation Support Committee, Khafra Kambon.

"He remained a revolutionary and was as strong in his personal battle with cancer as he was with the establishment in New York," Kambon said yesterday.

Ture, the fiery US black activist of the 1960s, born in Trinidad as Stokely Carmichael, died on Sunday of prostate cancer in the West African nation of Guinea. He was 57.

Minister of Public Administration Wade Mark will today make a statement in the Senate on Ture's death.

Mark said Government was exploring whether there could be some representation at the funeral, which takes place on Sunday in Guinea.

Khafra Kambon said Ture was a son of the soil who Trinidadians and Tobagonians could be proud of.

Kambon said people felt that an injustice had been done to Ture, who had been banned from coming here (and from entering several other countries in Europe and the Caribbean) for many years. The ban was eventually lifted in the late 1980s.

Born in Trinidad in 1941, Ture lived with his two sisters, three aunts and a grandmother at Oxford Street. His parents migrated to the United States when he was just two years old. At the age of 11 he joined them in Harlem. He was one of the few blacks to get into the Bronx High School of Science and his parents dreamed of him becoming a doctor. Ture however opted to study philosophy at Howard University in Washington DC.

Ture helped found the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s and became its chairman in 1966, helping steer it philosophically to "black power" from nonviolence and encouraging the cultural empowerment of African Americans.

It was Ture who, with clenched fist, shouted to a civil rights crowd at a meeting in Mississippi, "We want Black Power", and gave the movement that swept the world its rallying cry.

But Ture, who worked under civil rights leader Martin Luther king Jr., disagreed with him on the question of nonviolence.

Ture left SNCC in 1968 and became leader of the militant Black Panther party until resigning in 1969 and moving to Guinea.

He changed is name to honour the disposed Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea's first President, Sekou Toure.

In the 1970's he travelled frequently, speaking on Nkrumah's behalf and igniting controversy with highly - charged remarks on American college campuses.

Ture continued to travel and work for the party and other leftist causes, including ending embargoes on Cuba and Libya, even after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1996.

Ture, who lived with very bare material resources, could not afford the cost of medication and it was the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan who became his major beneficiary in this period. The Trinidad and Tobago Government donated US $1,000 a month earlier this year.

Civil rights leader Jessie Jackson said in a statement that Ture was a man who "rang the freedom bell in this century". Jackson said he visited Ture last week while in Africa on a peace mission as an envoy of President Bill Clinton.

Ture "knew he had made a contribution to the hope we now share, having helped defeat legal segregation in the United States and colonialism in Africa," Jackson said.

Ture, who was married and divorced twice, once to singer Miriam Makeba, is survived by his mother, three sisters and two sons.
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