ITHACA, N.Y. -- Scholar, activist and author Ekwueme Michael Thelwell will read from his latest book, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture ) (Scribner, 2003), Thursday, April 1, at 4:30 p.m. in Cornell University's Africana Studies and Research Center, 310 Triphammer Road. The reading, free and open to the public, is part of the Africana center's Black Authors/New Books Series, Spring 2004.

A book-signing and reception will follow the event.

Thelwell is professor of literature and writing in the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In 1968 he was among three scholars invited to Cornell to teach what was then called black studies, prior to the establishment of the university's Africana studies center in 1969.

Thelwell's book, co-written with Carmichael (now known as Kwame Ture) and based on almost two years of interviews with the dying civil rights leader and comprehensive background research, chronicles Carmichael's rise from chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to social revolutionary and Pan-Africanist. Carmichael died in Guinea, West Africa, in 1998. He was 57.

"What's really important is Ready for Revolution is the first major autobiography of a key civil rights leader, one who arose from a later generation than that of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X," said James Turner, professor of Africana studies at Cornell. "On the one hand, it's a treatise about Ture, whose life and politics helped to change the course of American democracy. On the other, it's a finely written social history of that change."

Thelwell also was a staff member of SNCC who, in the early 1960s, joined many others in a courageous desegregation and mass voter registration movement in the rural backwaters of the violently racist deep South. SNCC's efforts, along with that of other civil rights groups, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.The book describes Carmichael's growing influence on domestic and international affairs, and independence movements in Africa, the Caribbean and parts of Asia. Carmichael, a Black Panther Party leader, coined the term "Black Power." "Ready for revolution" was Carmichael's personal motto.

Born in Jamaica, Thelwell is author of the classic Jamaican novel The Harder They Come (Grove Press, 1980) and a collection of political and literary essays, Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). Thelwell's essays on the 1963 March on Washington and the voting rights struggle in the Mississippi Delta are included in the Library of America anthology Reporting Civil Rights (1941-1973).

A pan-Africanist himself, Thelwell was director of the Jamaica Hurricane Reconstruction Fund of Western Massachusetts in the late-1980s and remains an activist for human rights in Jamaica. In 1986 he led a citizens' legislative initiative to end tax write-offs to U.S. based corporations invested in the apartheid regime in South Africa. The initiative was enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in December 1987.

Thelwell's work has appeared in the Black Scholar , the Massachusetts Review, Temps Moderne, Freedomways , Partisan Review, Mother Jones, Presence Africaine (Paris), Ramparts , Village Voice and The New York Times . He was a columnist for Z Magazine and African Commentary , the magazine published by Chinua Achebe.

Thelwell received his B.A. from Howard University in 1964 and his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1968.

For more information about the reading, contact Judy Holley at the Africana Studies and Research Center, (607) 255-4291, e-mail at jsh2@cornell.edu .