Description:

A Panel Discussion on Black Internationalism: A Closing Event for Black History Month

"As long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out."

- Malcolm X, after his second trip to Africa

This (hybrid) panel discusses the collaborations and mutual inspirations that took place between the Civil Rights Movement in the US and the liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean countries in the 20th century. Most African and Caribbean countries won their independence between the late 1950s and 1960s. This coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in the US. However, we can’t take their contemporaneity as purely “coincidental.” In the same period, key Civil Rights Movement leaders and other liberation fighters from the broader African diaspora traveled in great numbers to Africa. Their aim was to discuss the inter-connectedness of their history and current struggles, and to co-strategize toward the liberation of all Black people the world over. 

CRM leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Stockley Carmichael, and an 11-member delegation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led by John Lewis visited various African countries and met with their leaders. Similarly, many would be African liberation leaders studied in historically black colleges and universities in the US where they joined ongoing civil rights struggles and formed enduring alliances with their leaders. The same can be said of many young African leaders who studied in the UK and France before returning to liberate their countries from colonialism.

This historical relationship among Black liberation leaders of the world is the central topic of the panel that the African Graduate Students Association wishes to bring together in the Black History Month of February 2025.

This event is organized by the Africa Graduate Students Association with co-sponsorship support from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, The Graduate School Office of Diversity and Inclusion, The Program of African Studies, and the PhD program in Rhetoric, Media and Publics.

Speakers:

Prof. Martha Biondi, Northwestern University. Prof. Biondi teaches courses on social movements and Black political thought. She is the author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003) and The Black Revolution on Campus (2012). Her talk will focus on solidarity campaigns for freedom in Southern Africa and draws from her forthcoming book: We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation.

Prof. Fikru Negash Gebrekidan, St. Thomas University, Canada. He is the author of Bond without Blood: A History of Ethiopian and New World Black Relations, 1896-1991 (2005). His 2021 publication in Northeast African Studies, "Race, Gender, and Pageantry: The Ups and Downs of an African American Woman in Imperial Ethiopia," focuses on the Pan-African life of Dorothy Hadley Bayen, a native of Evanston, IL., whose sojourn in Ethiopia in the 1930s remains little appreciated. His talk will focus on Pan-Africanism before and after the Civil Rights movement.

Prof. Bright Gyamfi, UC San Diego. He is a scholar of West African and African Diaspora intellectual history, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, and economic development. He writes on African intellectuals who worked to transform and radicalize the study of Africa in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. An alumnus of Northwestern University, Gyamfi has won prestigious awards including the National Endowment for Humanities, SSRC, and Fulbright. He was also a presidential fellow at NU.

Prof. Evan Maina Mwangi, Northwestern. Prof. Mwangi teaches 20th Century Anglophone African Literature. He is the co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (2007). Mwangi's other works include Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009), and Translation in African Contexts (2017).  

Prof. Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Cornel University. Prof. Tolan-Szkilnik is a historian of 20th century Africa and the Middle East. Her first book, Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Post-colonial Future (2023) tells the story of a group of militant-artists, some Maghrebi, others Angolan, Haitian, or American, who led Pan-African cultural and political projects out of the recently decolonized cities of Rabat, Algiers, and Tunis.