Black internationalism refers to the shared struggle for the liberation of Black people worldwide. Although this movement stretches beyond the twentieth century, it is often associated with the 1950s and 1960s. During these two decades, desegregation efforts in America and decolonial battles in Africa intensified. Thus, this period is often thought of as a peak of Black internationalism, an umbrella for such movements as Pan-Africanism (which hoped for unity on the continent), Black nationalism (which endeavored to support Black separatism wherever it took place), and négritude and negrismo (a notion of pan-racial solidarity). The fall of segregation and colonial rule had an enormous global impact. It brought about a shift from an international order of empires to one of nations. Yet by moving beyond the dismantling of legal segregation and legal colonial occupation, we can instead appreciate that Black freedom was a demand for so much more than civil rights or independence.

Black workers, activists, and intellectuals argued that freedom was a fight for more than just legal equality. This struggle also contested racialized economic exploitation and cultural degradation. As organizations like the US-based Council on African Affairs (founded 1937) fought for trade unions, convenings such as the Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1969), staged celebrations of Black culture. Of course, there were debates about the best means of achieving collective freedom. Yet Black internationalists shared a fundamental understanding that race offered a prism into the systemic, interlocking structures of exploitation. These systems operated on a global scale, requiring Black internationalist resistance and solidarity (mutual support) to overturn them.

Two individuals can help highlight these solidarities and global visions. Ella Baker, a veteran activist right alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., regularly framed African Americans’ battles in the term Africans used to describe their search for equality: self-determination. She was a prominent member of many organizations. In the 1930s, she was part of the Young Negroes League. She worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1940s. In the 1950s, she joined Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s. By the 1960s, she helped to found the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And in the 1970s she worked with organizations protesting South African apartheid. Baker did not segment her work in the 1950s as a discrete “civil rights” period opposed to everything else. Instead, like many of the people integrally involved in the movement, she viewed it as part of an ongoing, lifelong fight.

Similarly, African activists believed their liberation would hasten the freedom of Black people everywhere, including in the US. Kwame Nkrumah, who led the movement that brought the former British colony called the Gold Coast to independence as Ghana in 1957, argued as much. Like Baker’s, Nkrumah’s career stretched before and beyond the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s, he was involved in Black student groups in the United States and United Kingdom. He organized with African trade unionists in the 1940s, before returning to the Gold Coast to join the anticolonial movement. He continued to fight for African economic independence until his death in 1972. In the first decade of Ghanaian independence, he fostered diasporic solidarity. He invited hundreds upon hundreds of African Americans and Caribbean activists to the newly independent country. Among them were Shirley Graham Du  Bois and her husband W. E. B. Du  Bois. Graham Du  Bois became director of Ghana’s television and radio broadcasting, and part of Nkrumah’s inner leadership circle. Yet African Americans and Caribbeans learned as much from Africans as the latter did from the former. Nkrumah developed the highly influential concept of “neocolonialism.” This term describes the ongoing, extralegal structures of colonial exploitation. Activists and thinkers continue to use this concept to describe the way that economic and cultural structures persist which facilitate the oppression of Africa, as well as the Global South more broadly.

For this reason, many historians prefer the term Black Freedom or Liberation Movement rather than “civil rights” or even “independence.” This better captures the sheer expansiveness of these struggles’ aims, who fought them, and what they achieved. Viewing the 1950s and 1960s through a Black internationalist understanding of freedom helps us see their enormous ambitions and the still-important work left to be done.