Transformations in Global Blackness: African and African American Relations, c. 1960 to Recent Times

• Published in: Transition (Kampala, Uganda) Uganda), 2022-01 (131), p.78-95
• Main Author: Akyeampong, Emmanuel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; African cultural groups; African diaspora; Apartheid; Black Lives Matter movement; Black people; Black white relations; Blacks; Children; Civil rights; Civil rights movements; Descent; Diaspora; Ethnicity; Expatriates; Floyd, George; Heads of state; History; Immigrants; Immigration; King, Martin Luther Jr (1929-1968); Migration; Nation states; Neocolonialism; Petition; Presidents; Race identity; Racial discrimination; Racism; Remittances; Slavery; Social cohesion; Social movements; Study and teaching; Summit conferences; Transnationalism
• ISSN: 0041-1191; 1527-8042
• DOI: 10.2979/transition.131.1.08

In July 1964 Malcolm X traveled to Cairo for the Second Summit of the recently established Organization of African Unity (OAU), then comprised of thirty-five independent African states. His objective was to seek their support for the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and to have the organization pass a resolution that condemned the blatant racial discrimination against African Americans in the United States. At its founding summit in 1963, the OAU had passed a strongly worded resolution against racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa. Malcolm X hoped the OAU would expand its remit to embrace people of African descent in the diaspora. Malcolm X was initially discouraged by the lack of interest among the African heads of state, who had enough problems on their table with their new nation-states-until Julius Nyerere, the Pan-Africanist President of Tanzania, moved to support Malcolm X's petition and got other African heads of state to join. Nyerere agreed with Malcolm X that the fight for the liberation of Africans and people of African descent in the United States were connected. The result was Resolution 15 (1): Racial Discrimination in the United States of America, which, while acknowledging the progress made with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, indicted the United States for failing to combat racism, noting that not much had been achieved in this sphere since the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years ago.In May 2020, policemen in Minneapolis publicly assaulted an African American man, George Floyd. A white policeman kneeled on his neck for eight minutes. George Floyd died, sparking widespread protests across American cities and in many African cities under the Black Lives Matter movement. The African Union (AU), the body that had replaced the Organization of African Unity, issued a statement strongly condemning the murder of George Floyd and rejecting "the continuing discriminatory practices against black citizens." In the half-century or so between Malcolm X's visit to Cairo in 1964 to lobby the OAU and 2020, significant changes had occurred to transform Africa's relations with people of African descent in the United States and the diaspora. In a recent article gauging pan-ethnicity among African Americans and children of black immigrants, which appears in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Onoso Imoagene wondered whether recent events and social movements like the Black Lives Matter Movement "would strengthe