There’s a familiar story about the origins of the modern Civil Rights movement. Typically, the history starts in the mid-1950s with a cluster of events, including the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954; the uproar over the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955; and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. But there’s a parallel history that adds a crucial and often forgotten dimension to this story. Around the same time, independence movements were exploding across Africa. Several countries broke away from their colonial occupiers in the late Fifties, and in 1960 alone — what’s often called "The Year of Africa" — 17 countries declared their independence.
In Ghana, it happened at midnight on March 6, 1957. “At long last the battle has ended,” Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah declared to tens of thousands of people. “Ghana is free forever.” In the crowd that night was a delegation of U.S. Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. “I stood there thinking about so many things,” he said upon his return to America. “Before I knew it I started weeping. I was crying for joy.”
It was a remarkable moment of Black transatlantic solidarity and the culmination of decades of collaboration between American Civil Rights groups and African liberation movements. “It stems from a view that colonialism and Jim Crow in the United States share the same structure of white supremacy and racial hierarchy,” says Adom Getachew, a political theorist at the University of Chicago.
Adom is one of our guests in this week’s show, “Decolonizing the Mind.” It’s the third episode in our “Ideas From Africa” series. So why tell this history now? Because so many contemporary debates are actually arguments over the legacy of colonialism and its racist underpinnings. Questions about identity, language, policing, statues, what should or shouldn’t be taught in school — all stem from debates about how we should confront injustices in our history - about how to decolonize our minds.
—Steve