c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ The death of Stokely Carmichael, who died Sunday in Conakry, Guinea at the age of 57, calls to memory a different time and a different era.

As a young boy growing up in a rural, southern New Jersey town in the 1960s, I was far removed from the tumultuous racial conflicts occurring in other parts of the country.

For me and the other kids growing up in Chesilhurst, a tiny, predominantly black hamlet about 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia, the civil rights struggle had a vastly different look to it.

As the children of a small, but expanding black middle class, we were among the first wave of what sociologists would later call”black flight”kids. That is, as opportunities for career advancement and social mobility became available to blacks, those who could afford to move from the inner city to safer environs began to do so.

Curiously, some of the most divisive issues facing the rest of the country had little effect on our lives.

In Chesilhurst, for example, school busing was not a matter of debate but a fact of life. Lacking an elementary school of our own and not permitted to attend the schools in neighboring Winslow and Waterford townships, we made the daily nine-mile trek to Hammonton Elementary School without incident.

Yet, while my parents and those of my peers were leaving Philadelphia in search of a more secure life for their children while daily returning to the city to work, the battle for civil rights was being waged on a more fundamental _ and sometimes explosive _ level in other parts of the country.

It was within this context that I first became familiar with Stokely Carmichael. Brash, angry and irreverent, he was _ in the opinion of many churchgoing blacks, including my parents _ a less than savory alternative to Martin Luther King Jr.

For most blacks, Dr. King _ and for most blacks, he was always”Doctor”King, out of respect for his educational achievements _ was God’s prophet speaking with divine authority to the pharaohs of the federal government and the deep South.” King’s nonviolent approach was seen as reasoned, intellectually responsible and, most importantly, righteous. For a God-fearing people, King’s status as a Christian minister advocating a godly response to oppression was all-important. Such a strategy, it was believed, honored God and thus would be honored by God.

By contrast,”black power,”as advocated by Carmichael and his young comrades, was a frightening concept. Undefined, used primarily as a rhetorical device, the term for many people evoked visions of an apocalypse, with hundreds of black bodies strewn in the streets. For them, the riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark and other cities provided a frightening omen, a precursor of things to come.

Yet, if fears of an urban Armageddon were premature, so, too, perhaps, was our judgment of Stokely. For, in retrospect, he no more represented the Antichrist, than King embodied the Second Coming. Both were very human and attempting within their own frames of reference to bring justice to an unjust situation.

If Carmichael’s approach was unChristian, it was nonetheless a gut-level response to the oppression he and his fellows experienced in a nominally Christian nation.

Thus, as the nation debates Carmichael’s legacy, it should also remember the circumstances that influenced it.

DEA END ATCHISON