“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? … Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. … I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. … What, to the American [captive], is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
—Frederick Douglass, 1852
In Part 1 of My Top Ten Black History Events, I explored how I define Black history and where I believe that history truly begins. In Part 2, I examined four Black Atlantic freedom struggles: histories of self-liberation, organized resistance, revolutionary transformation, and legal abolition across Brazil and the Caribbean.
Palmares was a long-lived autonomous polity rather than a single uprising. Haiti was a revolution that achieved both emancipation and national independence.
The three great Caribbean risings—Bussa’s Rebellion in Barbados, the Demerara Rising, and Sam Sharpe’s War in Jamaica—were major freedom wars, even though they were violently suppressed. As Maya Angelou reminded us, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” Although these struggles could be classified as historical defeats, the freedom they fought for could not be defeated. The Big Three showed that the plantation system depended on terror and force, and they contributed to the crisis that produced British emancipation. They form part of the longer history through which African-descended Caribbean people became the principal makers of political life in their societies. In many former British Caribbean strangleholds—including Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines—Black men and women have become political leaders. Black-led governments now govern countries where their ancestors fought to break the chains.
In Brazil, the abolition of 1888 was likewise achieved from within a much longer history of resistance: flight, uprisings, quilombos, collective self-liberation, mutual aid, and Black-led abolitionist organizing. Together, these four stories form a powerful arc of resistance, revolution, and emancipation.
Part 3: From Pan-African Consciousness to Black Power turns to four further histories of Black political consciousness, cultural self-definition, mass organization, and civil-rights struggle across the African world. If Part 2 centered on liberation from captivity, Part 3—Numbers 5 to 8—follows the continuing struggle against the “gross injustice and cruelty” of which Douglass spoke in 1852.
Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the Civil Rights Movement each offered a different answer to the “mournful wail of millions” that persisted after legal emancipation. Together, they show that emancipation was not an ending, but the beginning of a new and continuing struggle to define Black humanity, dignity, power, and collective destiny.
Pan-Africanism
The first generation to self-consciously describe themselves as Pan-Africanists emerged in the late nineteenth century, in the Caribbean, Europe, and America. Pan-Africanism’s roots, however, trace back to the eighteenth century, when displaced Africans and their descendants first yearned to reconnect with their ancestral homeland. Early Pan-Africanists believed that Africans, no matter where they lived, were one people, sharing a common history, aspirations, and culture whether in Africa or the diaspora.
In 1900, Henry Sylvester Williams organized the first Pan-African Conference in London. More than 30 prominent men and women gathered from the Caribbean, America, Canada, Europe, and Africa to discuss how to unite the African world and lobby effectively for its interests. The gathering protested land seizures and racial discrimination and issued an appeal to European monarchs urging an end to racism. Delegates formed a Pan-African Association and prepared to launch a journal, The Pan African. This conference marked the moment Pan-Africanism emerged as a political movement.
W.E.B. DuBois inherited the movement and organized a sequence of congresses during the interwar years — Paris (1919), London/Brussels/Paris (1921), London/Lisbon (1923), and New York (1927) — each refining demands for racial equality, self-determination, and decolonization. The Depression and the Second World War then halted the congresses until 1945.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester from 15–21 October 1945, is the most famous of the series. It gave rise to a more militant brand of Pan-Africanism, rooted in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1934. Ethiopia was one of only three states in the world widely recognized as governed by Africans or people of African descent, alongside Liberia and Haiti, and it therefore held a special place as a symbol of African and Pan-African independence and self-determination — a significance reinforced by biblical references to the country. While the world’s attention was fixed on Ethiopia, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore, and others founded the International African Friends of Abyssinia in London in July 1935. These radical, iconic figures, together with DuBois, drove the Manchester Congress forward.
Roughly 200 people attended, including 87 delegates representing nearly 50 organizations from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. What made the Congress unforgettable was the roster of future heads of state it brought together, among them Kwame Nkrumah, who later called it a decisive turning point: “we went from Manchester knowing definitely where we were going.”
The Congress’s resolutions called for an end to colonialism, national self-governance, freedom of the press, education, trade union rights, and the return of land to its rightful owners. It also stressed the political role of the masses, calling for strikes, boycotts, mass mobilization, and, if necessary, force. This radical departure from earlier conferences transformed Pan-Africanism into a genuine political movement, and helped spark a wave of independence movements across the continent. Many delegates returned home to intensify the struggle: Kwame Nkrumah, based in Europe, went back to Ghana a year after the Congress and led the country to independence in 1957. Nigeria followed in 1960, then Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya between 1961 and 1963.
In 1946, Nkrumah and Kenyatta founded the Pan-African Federation, whose networks later shaped the 1958 All-African People’s Conference and the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. When the OAU became the African Union in 2002, many saw it as a new beginning for Pan-Africanism, especially as the AU articulated a clear definition of Pan-Africanism: “an ideology and movement that encouraged the solidarity of Africans worldwide,” rooted in the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political progress and aimed at uniting and uplifting people of African descent. At its core, the AU held that Pan-Africanism is “a belief that African peoples both on the continent and in the diaspora share not merely a common history, but a common destiny.
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an African-American artistic and cultural movement whose impact reached far beyond Harlem, shaping other cultural and political movements across the African diaspora. Known to contemporaries as the “New Negro Movement,” it began in Harlem, New York City, during the 1920s and 1930s, when the neighborhood was considered the most politicized Black community in the world. Harlem’s population — largely southern-born Americans and Caribbean-born immigrants — included a high proportion of radicals and outstanding Black creative artists. Race-uplift groups of all kinds flourished, and Lenox Avenue became a favorite haunt of soapbox orators. Out of this radical environment, the Renaissance emerged fully formed, with Black pride at its center.
Contemporaries described the movement as a “spiritual coming of age” — a moment when African Americans turned “the long cry of struggle, distress and hope” into an artistry of collective self-expression. Jessie Fauset saw the Harlem Renaissance as a quest for racial consciousness, one meant to reveal and celebrate what was beautiful and praiseworthy in Black life.
The movement’s influence flowed outward to Paris, shaping Négritude among French-speaking Africans and Caribbeans. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor reimagined Négritude as more than a literary philosophy: it became a powerful rejection of cultural assimilation, an embrace of Blackness, and a celebration of African civilization. Harlem’s influence also sparked literary awakenings across the Caribbean and Latin America, including the rise of Afro-Cuban literature through writers such as Nicolás Guillén, and it reached the African continent itself. South African writer Peter Abrahams described discovering African American literature in a Johannesburg library and credited those works with sparking his dream of becoming a writer. For Abrahams and countless other African readers, Harlem Renaissance authors proved that European writers did not hold the final word on literature, intellect, or the power of human expression.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression undermined the movement, and the Harlem riot of 1935 is often seen as its symbolic endpoint. Its legacy endured nonetheless: the Harlem Renaissance laid the cultural and political foundation for the Civil Rights Movement and, later, the Black Arts Movement. It also set the stage for Marcus Garvey’s rise.
Marcus Garvey and UNIA
“I had to decide whether to please my friends and be one of the ‘black-whites’ of Jamaica, and be reasonably prosperous, or come out openly, and defend and help improve and protect the integrity of the black millions, and suffer.”
Marcus Mosiah Garvey chose the latter path. Born in Jamaica in 1887, he traveled to Costa Rica in 1910, where he worked first as a timekeeper and then as a laborer on a pier at Port Limón. He edited the newspaper La Nación before being arrested for urging workers to fight for better conditions and was ultimately expelled from the country. He spent the next year or so traveling through Latin America, possibly stopping briefly in the United States, before returning to Jamaica and then moving to England, where his only surviving sister, Indiana, worked as a governess. In England he honed his public speaking at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner and became a regular visitor to the House of Commons. He also worked for the African Times and Orient Review, the leading Pan-African journal of the day, whose pages regularly featured figures such as Booker T. Washington, Edward Wilmot Blyden, John Edward Bruce, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Ferris, alongside coverage of nationalist and anticolonial struggles across the Middle and Far East — coverage that shaped Garvey’s own outlook. He also visited Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Germany.
In July 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African (Imperial) League to work for better conditions among Black people everywhere. Garveyism took shape when he returned to Jamaica and built what would become the largest and most influential Black political movement of its time; he saw himself as “a man with a mission from the High God.” In the United States, he took to the Harlem stage, joining the soapbox and stepladder orators and forming alliances with some of Harlem’s leading radicals. One contemporary recalled that he “could throw his voice around three corners without batting an eyelash” — a fitting description of the reach the UNIA would go on to have.
The organization’s Pan-African vision radiated across the Black Atlantic world, into Africa, and across generations. Though the exact scale of UNIA membership is hard to verify, by 1921 Garvey led the largest organization of its kind in the race’s history. At a 1926 conference in Detroit, held while Garvey was imprisoned, secretary general G. Emonei Carter reported 814 domestic branches and 215 foreign branches, with 91 new branches added, for a total of 1,120 — plus 25 pending charter applications. Branches existed as far afield as Dahomey and the Congo.
Garveyism began to decline in the 1930s, and Garvey died in London in June 1940, active to the end of his life in efforts to emancipate his race. As one observer put it, he “was a great success in so far as he stirred the people to greater consciousness of self and provided a nursery for young politicians and trade unionists... from the time of Garvey you found African consciousness continuing to flower... in all kinds of ways.” That influence flowered in Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and Rastafarianism, and in struggles across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It continues today in the hearts and minds of Black radicals who “care about the redemption of Africa” and who believe that “the noblest purpose for which to live is the emancipation of a race.”
The Civil Rights Movement
In late 1946, a committee appointed to address civil rights concerns recommended expanding the civil rights section of the Department of Justice, establishing a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, and passing federal laws against lynching and voting discrimination, along with new laws to end racial discrimination in employment. The committee concluded that the United States could no longer “escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics.” It was not until 1954, however, that the Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine it had upheld since the 1890s.
That decision signaled to the world that the United States had outlawed segregation, but by 1955 the reality on the ground told a different story, as African Americans demonstrated that the Court’s words had done little to change daily life. The arrest of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. transformed the racial and political landscape. During a mass meeting in Montgomery amid the boycott, King declared: “We have known humiliation, we have known abusive language, we have been plunged into the abyss of oppression. And we decided to rise up only with the weapon of protest.”
Nonviolent direct action — boycotts, marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and mass protest — defined the movement’s early years, and Congress responded with civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, and 1964. Its iconic moment came at the March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Just eighteen days later, however, a bomb exploded in the basement of a Black church in Birmingham, killing four girls attending Sunday school. Two months after the march, Malcolm X delivered a scathing critique of the movement’s direction. From 1963 onward, King remained widely respected but was increasingly overshadowed by newer leaders such as Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael, as “Black Power” emerged as the movement’s new rallying cry.
The African American freedom struggle resonated worldwide, connecting with other anticolonial movements. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the medal podium, turning Black Power into an unmistakable international symbol of resistance. Malcolm X’s visits to Britain in 1964–65 and Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 visit helped inspire Black British activists to establish the British Black Panther Party, while across the Caribbean, Black Power energized struggles against racial discrimination, and the movement remained closely tied to liberation struggles in Africa. The exchange ran both ways: John Lewis’s invocation of “one man, one vote” at the 1963 March on Washington echoed language from the African National Congress, and the Civil Rights Movement helped shape anti-apartheid activism, with Nelson Mandela himself acknowledging King’s influence. Its legacy continues today, reverberating in the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Thank you for reading,
Meserette Kentake