An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays

Author:Kyle T. Mays [Mays, Kyle T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The assassination of Malcolm X, on February 21, 1965, remains a sore spot for Black folks and human rights activists around the world. Scholars still speculate about the trajectory of Malcolm’s political and social thought and, although I won’t recount that here, I do want to trace his intellectual trajectory through those who followed him. It is here that we can see some of the rhetorical consequences of his rhetoric, in how his self-proclaimed disciples took up his mantle. The Republic of New Afrika was, perhaps most notably, the group that took up his masculinist idea of land, and used Indigenous histories to construct it.

In late March 1968, nearly five hundred Black nationalists convened in Detroit to discuss Black Power and how they might achieve Black liberation. Out of this historic meeting emerged one of the more important groups, which would later be called the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). The RNA’s mission was straightforward. The wanted to create a government for Black folks. Beyond ending a common oppression, it would build a nation within a nation, funded by the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States owed them for their exploited slave labor. The RNA based its argument on the belief that, upon the ending of enslavement, Black folks were not asked what they would like to do, given the fact that they were brought to this land as exploited labor.

More importantly, though, the members of the RNA were the ideological descendants of Malcolm X. Imari Obadele (formerly Richard Henry) stated in his autobiography that when the RNA was founded, it carried out what it believed to be the “Malcolm X Doctrine,” which was basically realized through its program for setting up a nation within a nation in the Deep South.22 Obadele stated that this idea for a separation hadn’t existed before: “It was not until Malcolm X came to repeat what Messenger Muhammad had taught him and to enlarge upon those ideas—namely, that we are an African people, in the wilderness of North America.”23 It was these experiences that undergirded the idea of a separate Black nation.

On March 4, 1970, Gaidi Abiodun Obadele (formerly Milton Henry, brother of Imari), a Yale-trained lawyer from Detroit and also a leader and founder of the RNA, gave a speech at a Black Power conference in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. It is here he outlines the necessity and historical logic of Blacks deserving land in the Black Belt South, using the Cherokee example of removal.24 He begins his speech with stereotypes about Native people and their connection to the land: “The Indian saw the earth, the land, as a sustainer and reviver of the internal spirit of man.” He continues, “The Indian would see in today’s concrete buildings and paving the glaring evidence of a people who, having no life spirit whatever or love of nature . . . were doing everything . . . to . . . insulate themselves from life and life’s dynamic spiritual processes.”25 He paints a

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