Ella Baker was there when Martin Luther King’s Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SCLC) was formed; she guided Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  As we commemorate African American History Month, we must remember that students were very much “our people” in the struggle.  Fifty years ago this February, a group of African American students ignited sit-in protests throughout the South by refusing to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter after being denied service.

While “our people” were fighting for freedom here in the U.S., across the ocean in South Africa the African National Congress (ANC) was pressuring the apartheid regime to democratize their country.  The apartheid authorities subsequently arrested liberation leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki and kept them in prison for 27 years.  This February 11 we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of the most famous political prisoner, Mandela.  This event and the unbanning of the liberation movement organizations in South Africa, led to the first non-racial democratic elections on the country in 1994.

From the inception of ANC in 1912, African Americans were communicating with and supporting the liberation group and others later on like the Pan Africanist Congress, as we saw that struggle as “our people’s” struggle.  This relationship included constant contact between the first leader of the ANC Pixley Ka Seme and African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington.  Solidarity with Africa was also expressed by groups like Council on African Affairs in the 1930s which advocated for African independence.  The Council’s membership included: Ralph Bunche, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alphaeus Hunton, Paul Robeson and Edith Sampson.  W.E.B. Du Bois and a few other leaders like Maya Angelou eventually moved to Ghana at the invitation of the newly-independent nation’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah to assist his country.  Such solidarity with struggles for independence and democracy by African Americans continues today.

African American History Month also gives me time to reflect on the shared fate of “our people” in Haiti—particularly this year as the country deals with the affects of devastating earthquake on January 12.  You see, on February 7, 1986 the people of Haiti forced the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier (aka “Baby Doc”).  Duvalier and his father François ruled Haiti with iron-clad fist—incidentally supported by various U.S. administrations—for almost thirty years.  Despite the progress with the ousting of Duvalier, Haiti’s military hijacked the liberation process and it took another four years before the country had its first truly democratic elections in 1990. 

The fight for democracy continued and like in 1804 when the then-enslaved Haitians defeated Napoleon, the people’s movement in the 1980s inspired the world.  That yearning for freedom in Haiti in the 1800s inspired people in the U.S. as Frederick Douglass stated in 1893, “We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy today is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago . . . striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”

“Now, who are your people?” The answer to that question is everywhere.  Our people are all over particularly in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas fighting for justice.  We must continue to support Haiti for years to come, in the spirit of the South African proverb Ubuntu—in short meaning you exist so that I can exist.

Nicole C. Lee, Esq. is the President of TransAfrica Forum