Where Do We Go From Here? Black Greeks and Internationalism in the 21st Century (Bridges Built Series)

The following article is part of Bridges Built, a collaborative history project between Watch The Yard and NPHC West Africa documenting the history, presence, and impact of National Pan-Hellenic Council fraternities and sororities in West Africa. This series is being spearheaded by Freda Koomson, President of NPHC West Africa, a Liberian-Ghanaian-American and soror of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. The op-ed below was written for the project by Dr. Yatta Kiazolu an assistant professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at University of California, Irvine, with an affiliation in the Department of African American Studies. Dr. Kiazolu earned her PhD in history from University of California, Los Angeles and her research meets at the intersection of 20th century US and African American history, Women and Gender, Modern Africa and the African Diaspora. She is a Liberian-American member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and currently a member of the Inglewood Alumnae Chapter. She was initiated into the Epsilon Alpha and is a proud alumna of Delaware State University. 

Members of Black organizations in the United States have long traveled across the Atlantic to build relationships on the African continent. Earlier generations of Black civil rights leaders, including those from the Divine Nine, made these efforts based on an understanding that the political destiny of Black people in the United States was intimately tied to Black people around the world. These relationships reflected a shared political reality: in a global system shaped by racial hierarchy, freedom in one place could not be fully realized without freedom in another. So what do these previous linkages mean for us today?

What does it mean to be a part of organizations with long histories of international engagement, shaped by both commitments to Black freedom and constraint? What does it mean to build relationships with African communities today, in a world where inequality  between, and within nations, still shapes the political climate?

There are a few fundamentals to begin with.

First, not every international connection is inherently liberatory. Partnerships and programs can appear meaningful without analyzing and attempting to address the deeper systems that produce inequality. Second, class and access shape opportunity. Travel, leadership, and other forms of visibility determine whose voices are heard and whose priorities are centered. Relatedly, our third element invites reflection on our global position— how engaging from within the United States shapes the relationships we build and the roles we play. Without that awareness, even well-intentioned efforts can reproduce the same imbalances they hope to change.

We are often told that progress is inevitable. But the history of Black international engagement tells a more complicated story, one shaped by connection and constraints, by visions that expand in some moments and narrow in others. And yet, our own time is another moment of possibility. US global power remains significant, but is increasingly contested. Through the digital sphere, Black people are more visible to one another than ever before.

Black fraternal organizations’ scale, history, and influence positions them to be active participants in shaping what comes next. But doing so requires asking hard questions about what these relationships are for, who they serve, and what kind of future we want to build.

And these questions are not new. Looking back at an earlier moment when Black leaders grappled with building meaningful relationships across the African diaspora while navigating the political constraints of their time offers insight.

Black activists inside and outside formal institutions have long understood Black freedom as a global project. In the early 20th century, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Sierra Leonean educator and member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc, advanced a Pan-african feminist agenda to advance girls’ education and increase racial pride by building networks across West Africa, the US, and Britain, including collaborations with the National Association for Colored Women. These forms of relationship building would be later extended. In early 1960, Dorothy I. Height, civil rights activist and former national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., traveled to Liberia for women’s leadership training alongside Liberian women civic and political leaders. That summer, another Delta leader, Jeanne Noble, traveled to Ghana, joining women from Africa and the diaspora at the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent, where women from across Africa and diaspora discussed education, political participation, and what independence would mean for Black women globally.

 When Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the 20th century in 1957, Black Americans, including member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., traveled to Accra to witness the moment. Alpha’s W.E.B Du Bois, “father of modern Pan-Africanism,” alongside activist Shirley Graham Du Bois later relocated to take part in nation-building. For many, the realization of Black self-governance in Africa could reshape how Black people were seen globally— building on, and reimagining, earlier models represented by Liberia, a Black republic long shaped by its ties to the United States.

Throughout the mid-20th century, civil rights organizing in the United States and decolonization movements in Africa were widely understood as interconnected struggles. Black Americans paid particular attention to developments on the African continent in Black newspapers like The Pittsburgh Courier and The Chicago Defender among others. Activists raised funds, attended conferences, and built relationships with African leaders including brothers of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. William V.S. Tubman of Liberia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. 

At the same time, these efforts unfolded during the Cold War, the global contest for power between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was eager to present itself as a model of democracy, especially to newly independent nations, former colonies now deciding their own fates. Black Americans activists within mainstream civil rights were, in some ways, part of that story— advocating for the US to change and expand its promises of liberal democracy. But these broader conditions created a complicated set of pressures.

The U.S. government viewed certain kinds of Black international engagement with suspicion. Activists aligned with Pan-african and anticolonial movements were investigated and labeled “communists” and  “Un-American” under laws such as the Smith Act and McCarran- Walter Act. W.E.B. Du Bois was among those targeted— indicted in 1951 as foreign agent for his anti-colonial organizing, and soon after, denied a passport, which limited his ability to travel until 1958. In his later years, he relocated to Ghana, where he became a citizen and was ultimately laid to rest. These acts of repression sent a message that certain kinds of global Black political engagement would be surveilled and punished. Though these pressures did not end these connections, they did shape the terrain on which it operated. 

For some, international connection remained rooted in shared struggle and political solidarity. But for others, opportunities expanded in new roles in government, international organizations, nonprofits, and business. These roles operated within a world where U.S. politics and economics set the terms, and international engagement became tied to professional advancement and state priorities.

At the same time, the outcomes of decolonization were uneven. For example, Ghana’s push for an African socialist state under Nkrumah was undermined by Western pressures that resulted in a military coup in 1966. In many instances across the continent, fledgling economies and continued influence from former colonial powers and institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, made it harder to sustain earlier more transformative visions.

These changing conditions explain why some long-standing political connections between mainstream Black American organizations and African movements changed over time. Earlier relationships once rooted in political exchange and collective struggle moved toward philanthropy and profit motives, which do not always challenge the larger systems shaping inequality. 

Fortunately, those earlier visions did not disappear. In the 1960s and 1970s, organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party continued linking struggles in the United States to liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean. More recently, during the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, activists and scholars drew connections between Black Lives Matter and struggles against police and state violence in Nigeria and Brazil, for example.

These moments remind us that Black international engagement carries real stakes. They require choices about what kinds of relationships to build, whose interests they serve, and whether they expand the conditions for freedom. The question facing the Divine Nine today is how our global networks can advance more just and genuinely shared political futures.

Suggested Reading List:

Civil Rights Movement and Africa

Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation,          1941-1960. New York NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Plummer, Brenda Gayle. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Gaines, Kevin. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Gaines, Uplifting the Race

Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads

Meriwether, James Hunter. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Ashely Robertson Preston, Mary Mcleod Bethune the Pan-Africanist

Seth Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run

Tamara L. Brown, African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision

Giddings, Paula. In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement. New York: Amistad, 2006.

Grant, Nicolas. Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945-1960. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Greer, Brenna Wynn. Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

US Cold War/ Foreign Policy

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003

Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Ben Talton, In this Land of Plenty

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Diaspora Politics

Tillery Jr. Between Homeland and Diaspora

Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa 

Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide 

W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947)

Blackness and Africa

Blyden, African Americans and Africa

 Anima Adjepong, Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra

Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race