In Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, based on Ron Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman (Flatiron Books, 2018), the Colorado College Black Student Union invites Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Ture) to speak on campus in the early 1970s.

Did that really happen?

YES! But not exactly in the way the film suggests.

In real life, Carmichael / Ture visited Colorado Springs in 1977 and spoke at Bell’s Nightingale Club. According to the memoir, Stallworth attended that event, but it was not connected to CC in any official or documented way.

Two years later, the Black Student Union at CC sponsored a visit. Carmichael / Ture spoke on campus in the lounge of Bemis Hall on April 12, 1979.  One local newspaper (the Colorado Springs Sun) described his subject as “The Plight of African People in America and What Must Be Done”; the CC student newspaper (the Catalyst) gave the title as “College Students and the American Socio-Economic Order.”

Seven years after that, the Black Student Union invited Carmichael / Ture to campus again. He spoke at on April 22, 1986 in Packard Hall.