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Given the conditions of Black people in America, there is an urgent need to revitalize a program of Black Nationalism.
Throughout the history of the Black Movement in America there has
always been a stream of Black leadership that has advocated a strategy
of self-determination as the foundation for organizing and achieving
freedom, justice, liberation, independence and power.
This stream of the Black Movement in America is called Black
Nationalism. Black Nationalism is a tradition that emerged in the early
nineteenth-century among those African leaders who understood the need
for African people in America to develop a national entity as the only
solution for African people in America, Latin America or the Caribbean.
These nineteenth-century Black Nationalist leaders such as Denmark
Vesey, Nat Turner, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, James T. Holly,
Martin Delany, Pap Singleton, Edwin McCabe, and Henry McNeal Turner
understood that African people in America were a “nation within a
nation” and should organize to collectively struggle for the liberation
of African people in this country and throughout the world.
Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X best represented the
continuation of the Black Nationalist tradition in the
twentieth-century.
Self-Determination simply means that African people in America should
determine our own destiny without the interference of others. And Black
Nationalism seeks to bring about the complete independence of African
people in this country with the aim of making us consciously involved
in controlling our own communities.
Martin Delany exclaimed in his profound book, The Condition, Elevation
Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,
written in 1852, that “We are a nation within a nation - as the Poles
in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish in
the British dominions.”
Speaking in this same vain, the great AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
said in 1883 that “What we need is an outlet, a theater of manhood and
[womanhood] actively established somewhere for our men and women, a
place that the world will respect and whose glory and influence will
tell upon the destinies of the race from pole to pole; our children's
children can rest securely under its aegis, whether in Africa, Europe,
Asia, America or upon the high seas.”
In a more a contemporary context, Harold Cruse explained in his
controversial book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) that
“There is, however, a broad strain of Negro social opinion in America
that is strictly cogent and cuts through class lines. This social
outlook cannot be and never has been encompassed by the program of an
organization such as the NAACP, whose implied definition of racial
integration offers no answers to the questions that agitate the
collective minds of those Negroes who reject such a philosophy.”
Further, Cruse states - “In other words, there is a definite strain of
thought within the Negro group that encompasses all the ingredients of
nationality and strikes few sympathetic chords with the (intergration
program) of the NAACP.”
What is needed today, more than ever, to aid in our quest for
independence, liberation, freedom and justice is a total return in our
organizing and mobilizing efforts toward a program of Black Nationalism.
A great Black Nationalist Unity is needed among those who profess to be
Black Nationalists. This is urgently needed to save African people in
America who appear to be doomed if we fail to wake up!
As Africans in America, we must understand that we can’t rely on the
deeds of one individual, nor one organization to solve the problems we
face in this country. We must rely on the collective efforts of all our
organizations who understand the need to struggle for
self-determination and Black Nationalism.
In other words, we need a collective Black Nationalist Program that
strives toward 1) economic self-sufficiency; 2) reciprocity and mutual
exchange with African people all over the world: 3) cultural unity:
4)and the building of a governance system that will protect the
interests of the African World.
In terms of concrete steps to be taken, we must build linkages of
cooperation and mutual exchange with African people wherever we are and
move toward developing the economic independence which is so vitally
needed for the attainment of a free people.
We must control and protect what we create - that is we must control
all aspects of our culture. Our songs, dances, writings, and art must
be protected from hostile and thieving aliens.
No longer should other races and ethnic groups define who we are and
what we should do. We must raise our own questions about our own
circumstances and conditions that lead to our own
solutions.
Ultimately, we need a world union of African people dedicated and
committed to the protection and development of the African World Order.
Again, Martin Delany explained - “But we have been, by our oppressors,
despoiled of our purity, and corrupted in our native characteristics,
so that we have inherited their vices, and but few of their virtues,
leaving us in character, really a broken people.”
We must return to a program of self-determination and Black Nationalism
if we are ever going to break the chains of white supremacy and white
domination. This should be clear to all those seeking our true
emancipation as a people.
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BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Contact Dr. Worrill and BC.
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 is published every Thursday |
Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD |
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA |
Publisher:
Peter Gamble |
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