''When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South,'' he told Gordon Parks in Life magazine in 1967, ''I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds.

Stokely Carmichael was inspired to participate in the civil rights movement by the bravery of those blacks and whites who protested segregated service with sit-ins at lunch counters in the South. Though his active participation in the struggle for civil rights lasted barely a decade, he was a charismatic figure in a turbulent time, when real violence and rhetoric escalated on both sides of the color line. Ture's advocacy of Pan-Africanism was the last phase in a political evolution that passed from indifference to the civil rights movement when he was a high school student to emergence as an effective nonviolent volunteer risking his life against segregation to honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. Ture, who changed his name in 1978 to honor Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, two African socialist leaders who had befriended him, spent most of the last 30 years in Guinea, calling himself a revolutionary and advocating a Pan-African ideology that evoked few resonances in the United States, or, for that matter, Africa. He once said his cancer ''was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them.'' Ture had been treated at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York in the last two years. The cause was prostate cancer, for which Mr.

He was 57 and is best remembered for his use of the phrase ''black power,'' which in the mid-1960's ignited a white backlash and alarmed an older generation of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Kwame Ture, the flamboyant civil rights leader known to most Americans as Stokely Carmichael, died yesterday in Conakry, Guinea.

Black power charles hamilton