Kwame Somburu, a 1960s radical who vainly sought elective office as a perennial candidate of the Socialist Workers Party in New York and California, died on May 3 in Albany. He was 81.

The cause was complications of kidney cancer, his son Daryl Boutelle said.

Mr. Somburu evolved from a high school dropout named Paul Boutelle, who sold the Great Books of the Western World series door to door and voted for the straight Republican ticket in 1956, into a public school teacher who adopted the name of a Kenyan tribe and embraced a Trotskyite scientific socialism forged in anti-imperialism and class-conscious black nationalism.

He renounced violence but echoed Malcolm X’s credo of gaining black power “by any means necessary”; organized blacks against the war in Vietnam; unambiguously declared that “if it weren’t for crime and lies and terrorism and massacres there’d be no United States”; and, while insisting that he was not anti-Semitic, vigorously opposed Zionism.

In his first of nine campaigns for public office, he ran for the State Senate in Harlem in 1964 as a candidate of the Freedom Now Party, a branch of a fledgling all-black organization formed in Michigan. But after his defeat, he acknowledged that a black political mass movement was probably premature.