Isiah Wolde



Isiah Wolde (born Gerald Carmichael; November 3rd, 1955) is the leader of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement forming in the American South. A native of the United States, he emigrated to Ethiopia as a young man as part of the North American Airlift. After spending time abroad and converting to Islam, he returned to the United States in the late 1970's and started a Civil Rights movement that started with black college students.

Early Life in America
Gerald Carmichael was born in Seymour, Indiana in the winter of 1955. His father Wayne worked at a refrigerator factory while his Gloria mother was a maid. Even though Indiana was not part of the Jim Crow South, the Carmichaels faced de facto discrimination and segregation in the rural town of Seymour.

Wayne Carmichael was drafted into the US Army to fight in the First North American War, where he was killed during heavy fighting in the swamps of Florida. With his father gone and his mother scraping by to make ends meet, the news of escape from the war-ravaged country seemed like a godsend to the young family. In Chicago, Gloria and Gerald got on the last airplane flight out of the country.

Africa
Gerald and his mother were soon settled in the town of Gambela, where Gloria found work as a seamstress while Gerald was able to attend school. It was in school, freed of segregation and given a fair education, that the young Gerald began to learn and grow. He learned of political theory, philosophy, and religion. While Gloria continued her Baptist faith, Gerald converted to Islam and changed his name. He rejected his last name of Carmichael, a name that had connections to his old life in Indiana and his family's history as slaves. Changing his name to the more fitting Isiah Wolde, he attended university with the purpose of reading and practicing law.

But then, at the outbreak of the Second North American War, Wolde witnessed newsreels and photos of the destruction. As he learned more about his homeland, the more he learned of the horrors going on in the country. As the war ended and the postwar American began to recover, Wolde watched events going on from afar. Black veterans who had fought for the survival of their country were clamoring for the rights many of them had died for, but they continued to be kept down. Wolde felt stirrings for the black men and women in the United States. He prayed for guidance before he dropped out of university and boarded a ship headed for America.

Return to America
Returning to the United States in 1978, Wolde began to make contact with the new movement that was forming in the American South. Led mostly by younger, liberal black college students, he found himself among intellectual equals and soon was looked to as a leader of the movement that seeks to put blacks on equal footing with whites for the first time in the history of the Republic.