A Vanderbilt Guest Starts a Riot

Vanderbilt’s 1967 Impact speakers' program featured Martin Luther King Jr., poet Allen Ginsberg and South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. But few people remember anything King, Ginsberg or Thurmond said. What they remember is that Stokely Carmichael came and was accused of starting the worst Nashville riot since the Civil War.

In contrast to Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, Carmichael was a black power activist who made inflammatory speeches in which he derided the very notion of nonviolent protest and called on blacks to take up arms against “oppressive” whites. Vanderbilt’s student-run Impact program extended Carmichael an invitation in the fall of 1966, but Carmichael didn’t accept until about three weeks before he was to speak.