The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle

This paper explicates the convergences and divergences in moments of protest across the Black Diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each section examines critical moments of continuity and discontinuity between generations of activists over the past seventy years. Focusing particularly on the impact of the American Civil Rights Movement upon activism in Paris, France. The work tracks three turning points within twentieth century discourses of protest and generational learning. The narrative begins in 1947 with the creation of Présence Africaine, a quarterly cultural, political, and literary magazine including contributions from Richard Wright and James Baldwin. These political and literary manifestos catalyzed Black activism in France. Building on this written campaign, the next turning point in 1956 launched the Congress of Black Writers and Artists. A final turning point in 1968 examines the May Parisian uprisings, which were propelled by activism occurring in the United States. Contextualizing efforts against inequality and police brutality in both countries, this paper argues that protest, in all forms,remains a defining feature of the transnational Black experience. In the second half of the paper, the evocation of the Black Lives Matter Movement calls attention to the nature of police violence and the continued struggle for freedom. The growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement from 2012 to 2014 mobilized Black French activists. In 2016, Black Lives Matter launched its French chapter in response to the death of an unarmed African immigrant named Adama Traoré. Afro-French activists used #BlackLivesMatter as an example of a movement that was tremendously successful in focusing racially conscious attention on issues of police brutality in a society that traditionally ignored them. In the search for truth and justice on both sides of the Atlantic, protest movement strategies and messages have proven both mutually constitutive and historically distinct.