Let's begin today with an image of Martin Luther King, Jr. in West Africa in 1957.

He was there, in the country that was about to become Ghana,

to celebrate its independence from British rule, and to support his friend and

colleague, Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of Ghana.

While he was in Ghana, he was interviewed on the radio, and this is what he said.

This event, the birth of this new nation

will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world.

I think it will have world wide implications and

repercussions- not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America.

It renews my conviction in the ultimate triumph of justice.

And it seems to me that this is fit testimony to the fact

that eventually the forces of justice triumph in the universe, and

somehow the universe itself is on the side of freedom and justice.

So that this gives new hope to me in the struggle for our freedom.

Although there is much to say about how the independence movements in Africa

in the late 1950's and 60's affected the Civil Rights movement

in the United States, what I want to talk about today

is how experiences of Africans and in particular Kwame Nkrumah in America,

helped shape the independence movements on the African continent.

Kwame Nkrumah was born in the Gold Coast in 1909,

a British colony that would become the nation of Ghana.

He studied to be a teacher in Ghana and taught there from 1930 to 1935.

In 1935, after saving money for years,

Nkrumah made his way to the United States to become a student at Lincoln University

in Philadelphia, arriving in New York City on a steamer ship.

As I'll discuss in a minute, Nkrumah lived in the United States for the next 10 years

and it was an extremely formative period in his intellectual development,

which led him in 1947 to return to the Gold Coast to become a political activist.

By 1952, Nkrumah had succeeded in becoming a leader within the still

colonial government of Gold Coast, but began arguing for complete independence.

The nation of Ghana declared independence from the United Kingdom on March 6th,

1957, with Nkrumah as the first prime minister.

Let's go back to the 1930s and

learn more about Nkrumah's experiences in the United States.

When he arrived in New York by steamer ship in 1935, he had very little money and

stayed initially with other west Africans living in Harlem.

He quickly moved to Philadelphia and began attending Lincoln University,

the oldest black university in the country,

where he completed BA degrees in economics and sociology in 1939.

And then continued on at the Lincoln Theological Seminary,

where he earned a theology degree in 1942.

Lincoln University provided an important context for

Nkrumah and it was a place that fostered other important black intellectuals,

including Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes,

both of whom graduated just five years before Nkrumah arrived at Lincoln.

While at Lincoln, he formed an African students organization and became a popular

speaker, advocating the liberation of Africa from European Colonialism.

At the same time he was studying at Lincoln,

Nkrumah was also enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania,

where he earned M.A degrees in education and philosophy, in 1942 and 1934.

During his time in the United States,

Nkrumah also preached at black churches in Philadelphia and New York City.

He read books about politics and divinity, and tutored students in philosophy.

Nkrumah lived with black communities in Philadelphia,

worked as a laborer during the summers to save for his school fees and

traveled frequently to New York City and other east coast cities.

During this time, Nkrumah encountered the ideas of Marcus Garvey, and in 1943 met

and began a lengthy correspondence with Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.

Nkrumah later credited James with teaching him how an underground movement worked.

Nkrumah's association with these intellectual radicals,

led the FBI to place him under surveillance by the early part of 1945.

While studying in the United States,

Nkrumah was deeply influenced by his engagement with black Americans and

became, by living in the racially contentious United States, aware and

concerned about the politics of race relations.

It was these experiences, seeing the fight for

racial equality in the United States as it gathered momentum

that fostered his support for Pan Africanism, a global movement that began

in the early 20th Century that sought solidarity between Africans world wide.

Those both on the African continent and in the diaspora.

Pan-African Congresses were held to emphasize the importance

of creating unity between disparate Black populations,

to work toward their economic, social, and political freedom and uplift.

Pan-Africanists believed not only in the shared history of Africans globally,

but that the future success of all these populations required unity among them.

After finishing his degrees in the United States, Nkrumah moved to London in 1945,

to study economics and law at the London School of Economics.

There he met other African intellectuals who were studying and living in England,

including Jomo Kenyatta, who would become the first Prime Minister and

President of Kenya in 1963.

Most significantly, Nkrumah was instrumental in organizing

the Fifth Pan-African Congress in October of 1945 in Manchester.

At this meeting, attended by 90 delegates from around the world,

Nkrumah solidified his Pan-African stance and

drew on his connections to the United States and from Africa.

W.E.B. Dubois, the great American intellectual,

attended this conference as well.

This was particularly important,

as it was Dubois that organized the first congress in 1919, and

he was seen as one of the founders of the modern Pan African movement.

If we return to the image of M.L.K. in Ghana in 1957,

we are left with the idea that it was African independence and nationalism

that was serving as an inspiration for American civil rights leaders.

It is true that the wave of African independence movements that succeeded

in the late 1950s and 60s, was a beacon of hope for

black Americans fighting for equality.

But we can also see that the influence worked in the other direction as well.

It was Nkrumah's experiences in the United States, his exposure to the intellectual

currents that fostered the civil rights movement of the 1950s and

60s, that provided a firm foundation for

his own ideas about self-governance for African Nations.

While many other independence leaders modeled themselves on the colonial

authorities that they were succeeding Nkrumah aligned Ghana more closely

with Pan-African ideals and saw the independence of Ghana

as more than just the freedom of Ghanaians from colonial authority, but

also the future of black self-governance throughout the world.

It is not surprising then that his inauguration attracted such a diverse

array of black intellectuals.

In our next chapter, we'll stay put in Ghana and look again at the interactions

of African Americans and Ghanaians but we'll examine more recent events, mainly

the debate between them over monuments related to the Atlantic slave trade

Chapter 7: African-Americans and Africans in Ghana: Kwame Nkrumah, American Civil Rights, and Ghanaian Independence

America Through Foreign Eyes

Meet the Instructors