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Roundup

The Fight for Black Freedom Must Be International

by Shaun Armstead

Shaun Armstead is a history doctoral candidate at Rutgers University and is completing her dissertation on the National Council of Negro Women’s liberal internationalism in the mid-20th century as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

At a recent news conference, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” While McConnell contended he misspoke, many Black Americans understood his statement as an admission that he sees African Americans as fundamentally outside of belonging in the United States. In turn, many Black Americans defended their claim to American identity online using the hashtag “#Mitchplease,” and affirming their status as full U.S. citizens, with some touting histories of military service or consistent voting to emphasize the point.

Impassioned claims to U.S. citizenship as a rejoinder to white supremacist rhetoric and policies are nothing new. Black Americans have long sought to demonstrate first-class U.S. belonging through patriotic sacrifice and service. Such efforts showcasing Black contributions have been crucial to Black Americans’ struggle to access U.S. democracy as equal citizens. McConnell’s comments, however, and the ongoing failure to secure voting rights, may serve as a reminder that, for many White Americans, Black citizenship is conditional.

This points to the need to recognize that the struggle against white supremacy cannot be won within a national framework. Black Americans have long recognized the global dimension of this project. In fact, African Americans’ visions for racial justice often transcended the fight for first-class belonging to nation. Instead, Black internationalists resisted American racial oppression and imperialist exploitation within and outside the confines of U.S. borders.

National efforts to dismantle racism have often occurred in a global context. For example, abolitionists recognized that systems of slavery transcended borders. To advance abolition, formerly enslaved people often recounted their lived experiences to audiences within the United States and abroad. Britain was a popular stop for those delivering abolition lectures given its prominent antislavery movement, and the entanglement between its empire and slavery. Noted African American abolitionist and minister James W.C. Pennington said in an 1843 address to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, “What I gain anywhere and everywhere … I gain for every manacled slave in America, and for every benighted African in the world.”

This tradition of courting international public opinion continued after slavery’s end. The rise of lynching in the late-19th century U.S. South spurred Ida B. Wells to travel in 1893 and 1894 to Europe, where she reported on the racial violence White Americans inflicted upon Black people. She anticipated that White U.S. audiences were inured to Black suffering, so she pursued her mission abroad instead. She thought cultivating global support would help effect change within the United States.