Pan Africanism, Anticolonialism, and Third Worldism: The Internationalist Ideologies of Black Nationalist Schools, 1968–72

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, scores of private, independent, black nationalist and Pan Africanist primary and secondary schools proliferated in cities across the U.S. These institutions reflected black power’s emphasis on building independent institutions to help create an alternative urban infrastructure that might enhance and systematize the practice of black nationhood. In this paper, Rickford argues that despite the fundamentalist ideals embedded in the political outlooks, cultural practice and pedagogy of many black nationalist schools of this era, the commitment of the institutions to anticolonialism and other internationalist philosophies reflected a vibrant culture of radicalism.

Black nationalist independent schools figured prominently in contemporary efforts to revive a sense of linked fate between African Americans and Africans on the continent and throughout the Diaspora. Black independent school organizers sought to cultivate among students and their families a sense of solidarity with anticolonial struggles, as well as a thoroughgoing “Third World” awareness. These principles lent a radical thrust to the pursuit of ethnogenesis, the attempt to create a qualitatively new black people through the rigorous practice of traditions and values seen as essentially African or African-inspired. Black independent school organizers helped deepen the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist implications of the popular theory that black America represented an “internal colony” of the U.S., a notion derived from the logic of Third World anti-colonial struggles.

Dedicated to promulgating internationalist consciousness as one method of “decolonizing” black minds and creating “new men,” black independent school theorists exemplified the optimism and creativity that characterized local institution-building during the black power movement.