The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965

I had met with African students in America many times, on college campuses around the country. I'd read the newspapers and watched television reports, and had a basic sense of current events across Africa, the wave of liberation movements there. I felt a sense of communion, a sense of fellowship with these rising nations of Africa, and especially with the young men and women who were so much at the heart of it all. --John Lewis, SNCC Chairman, 1963-1966 (1) At the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, 16-18 April 1960, the delegates declared unequivocally: "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind." To reinforce this claim, Antioch College undergraduate Alphonse Okuku from Kenya was a featured speaker at the conference. Okuku was invited to address the radical implications of the "African struggle" and to express words of solidarity with young activists at the forefront of the student sit-in movement engulfing the U.S. South. (2) In many respects Okuku was part of a politically ambitious generation of African students who were attending U.S. colleges and universities and were firmly committed to ending all vestiges of European colonialism in Africa. In addition to the urgency and momentum of student protest activity, many African American students in the U.S. had witnessed the awesome display of militancy among continental African students at an ecumenical religious conference in Athens, Ohio, several months before the SNCC gathering. (3) This event, along with the persistence of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South and a rising awareness of anti-colonial movements in Africa, prodded many into action at their respective campuses and beyond. For the better part of the 1960s SNCC was the most conspicuous national student organization engaged in the struggle to eradicate Jim Crow segregation, or American apartheid. No student group rivaled its political reach and organizational depth. SNCC assisted local people and their organizations in securing the franchise and making small, though significant, advancements in improving the living conditions for black southerners. (4) Yet from its inception, SNCC organizers saw their local efforts as inseparable from larger international movements engaged in similar and sometimes overlapping struggles for freedom and self-determination. SNCC took a concerted interest in anti-colonialism and nationalism on the African continent and throughout the Third World. Because of its decentralized organizational structure and the relative autonomy of its members, SNCC's internationalist vision was not uniform. As a result, SNCC's rarely acknowledged internationalist work has generally been understood as merely a corollary to its post-1966 demands for "Black Power." (5) On the contrary, however, SNCC's internationalism was far more organically rooted in the organization and the experiences of its members than has heretofore been acknowledged, and it operated in tension and in tandem with the organization's domestic agenda. Indeed, SNCC's efforts, though organizationally anchored in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S. South until at least 1964, were never solely preoccupied with civil rights. Longstanding material, psychic, and existential concerns with freedom, dignity, and political powerlessness enabled many in SNCC to recognize--as previous generations of black freedom activists had--that the problems that black folk faced in the United States extended far beyond the borders of Mississippi and Alabama. (6) SNCC's internationalism, particularly as it pertained to Africa, was an outgrowth of the extensive social and political networks it developed through grassroots organizing, nurtured on college campuses, and strengthened through international travel and fundraising activity within and beyond the United States. …