Histories of Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism and trans-Atlantic solidarities between African and Black Diaspora activists have animated scholarship for decades. Particularly, interactions between African Americans and Africans. In these scholarly narratives, however, Africa and Africans are often cast not as the origination of or active formulators of pan-African ideas but rather a historical site which inspires Black diasporic struggles against anti-racial and anti-imperial politics. This panel seeks to highlight the significant impact African politics and intellectuals had on the US and the world at large and open new conversations around Black Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, African Diaspora, and Black Atlantic History. For instance, the origins of late nineteenth and early twentieth century pan-Africanist thinking and back to Africa movements are often framed as Black diaspora projects with little discussions of African pioneers of these political movements. In this sense, Chief Sam’s movement not only predate Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s well-known Back to Africa project but shows the contentious discourses of pan-African solidarities in pre-World War I British West Africa. Likewise, in the postwar years, at the heights of anti-communism, decolonization, and the Civil Rights Movement, while continental and diasporic Africans collaborated to advance Black development the narratives still center the experiences of diasporic groups such as Afro-Caribbean and African American peoples. Beyond Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, other African American activists like the Pan-African educator and first Black president of Lincoln University, Horace Mann Bond, leaned on continental Africans as vanguards for a new Black liberation and development movement. The career of Bond who was forced to resign as Lincoln’s president, also illustrates America’s uneasiness with Pan-Africanism. Perhaps more clearly, post-Nkrumah era radical Ghanaian scholars invigorated fresh African-centered cultural and political perspectives in global Black studies with a focus on political decolonization. While Ghana became a Mecca for Pan-Africanism, African Americans also became invested in the material and architectural legacies of the Atlantic slave trade. These legacies became an important point of tensions between African American and Ghanaian visitors to these sites. But rather than focusing on the ethnographic present, this panel historicizes how the former slaveholding forts and castles became emblematic of Ghanaian power and authority, a phenomenon which would contradict African American cultural sensibilities and memorial practices in the twentieth century. At the heart of these movements and engagements were attempts at building solidarity and transnational networks against racism and imperialism.