“A Free Black Mind is a Concealed Weapon” Institutions and Social Movements in the African Diaspora

Abstract

Interviews I have conducted with activists from the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), Black Panther Party, Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) reveal how institutions indigenous to the African diaspora helped facilitate exchanges between Black power and African liberation organizations during the 1960s. This study enriches our understanding of the relationship between each of these social movements' transnational emancipatory praxes and their now iconic rhetorical and aesthetic articulations of white supremacy as physical, economic, political, and cultural terror. Through engaging with African anti-colonialism, Black power organizations acquired a more refined class analysis and confronted the opportunities and challenges created by grafting racial politics onto the geopolitical landscape. African-American institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, and activist gatherings in what I define as emancipated spaces, played a vital role in facilitating connections between African liberation and Black power through their financial, cultural, and architectural resources and their function in the African-American community as builders of group consciousness. In addition to demonstrating how exchanges between African liberation and Black power helped create ideational and tactical dynamics that continue to serve the struggle against white supremacy, the remarkable life stories of the activists I interviewed point toward a generalizable theory about the mechanisms and consequences of transnational relationships between social movements in the African diaspora.

Keywords:

• African anti-colonialism
• Black power
• indigenous institutions
• oral history
• social movements
• transnationalism

Notes

Hanspeter, Kriesi, “Cross-National Diffusion of Protest,” in New Social Movements in Western Europe, Hanspeter. Kriesi and et al. eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993); Doug McAdam and Dieter Rucht, “The Cross-National Diffusion of Social Movement Ideas,” Annals of the American Academy, no. 528 (1993).

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, eds., paperback ed., Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Alternative Types of Cross-National Diffusion in the Social Movement Arena,” in Social Movements in a Globalizing World, Donatella della Porta, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht, eds. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, pp. 157–158.

Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles and Bet: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979 (1977)), p. 11.

Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: Aids and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999).

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 40.

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Robin D.G. Kelley, ““But a Local Phase of a World Problem;” Black History's Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History (1999).

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Sidney LeMelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, “Introduction Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Revisited,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Sidney. LeMelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds. (London: Verso, 1994), p. 7.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), p. 31.

Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles and Bet: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought; Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).

Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism; Kelley, ““But a Local Phase of a World Problem:” Black History's Global Vision, 1883–1950;” Ronald W. Walters, “The Pan African Movement in the United States,” in Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997).

Robin Hayes, “Interview with A. Peter Bailey,” in Office of Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches (Silver Spring, Maryland: 2005).

Stokely Carmichael and Michael Ekwueme Thewell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) (New York: Scribner, 2003), p. 112.

Ibid., p. 137, Harry G. Lefever, Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957–1967 (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2005), p. 167.

Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, p. 176.

New York Federal Bureau of Investigation, NY, “Organization of Afro-American Unity Internal Security—Miscellaneous,” in FBI File on Organization of Afro-American Unity (New York: 1965).

Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Carmichael and Thewell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), p. 254.

Robin Hayes, “Interview with Robert (Bob) Moses,” in Algebra Project Classroom at Lanier High School (Jackson, Mississippi: 2005).

John Lewis and Michael D'Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 81.

Carmichael and Thewell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure).

Pan African Students Organization in the Americas, “Press Release: 8th Annual Conference at Howard University,” in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959–1972 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1968).

“Congress of African People,” in Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, 1968–1994 (Palo Alto: 1970).

Ibid.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Organization of Afro-American Unity Internal Security—Miscellaneous.”

Robin Hayes, “Interview with George Houser,” in The Home of George and Jean Houser (Pomona, New York: 2005).

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Jonathan Rutherford, ed. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).

Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957.

Robin Hayes, “Interview with Sylvester Leaks,” in The Home of Sylvester Leaks (Brooklyn, New York: 2005).

Hayes, “Interview with A. Peter Bailey.”

Hayes, “Interview with Sylvester Leaks.”

George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 101.

In 2001, the American Committee on Africa merged with the Africa Fund and the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC) to become Africa Action (www.africaaction.org).

Hayes, “Interview with George Houser.”

Hayes, “Interview with Robert (Bob) Moses.”

Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995), p. 104.

James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

Carmichael and Thewell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), p. 613.

Donna Richards, “Memo Re: A SNCC African Project,” in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959–1972 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1961–1967 (nd)).

Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972).” In The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), Charles E. Jones, ed. (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), p. 212.

Conrad Clark, “Pan-African Cultural Festival Draws Blacks,” New York Amsterdam News, 26 July, 1969, “Ed Bullins Attends First Pan-African Festival,” New York Amsterdam News, 30 August, 1969.

Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972),” p. 213.

David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 267.

Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2001).

Ibid.

Sanche de Gramont, “Our Other Man in Algiers,” New York Times Magazine, 1 November, 1970.

Robin Hayes, “Interview with Barbara Easley Cox,” in The Home of Ms. Easley Cox (Philadelphia: 2005).