Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Writer and filmmaker Hayes here expands and deepens her PhD research, exploring the content, effects, exchanges, and motivations of passionate and idealist Africans and Americans of African descent who were joined in a transnational struggle for self-determination between 1957 and 1974. The book's introduction, nine chapters, and epilogue focus on five liberation groups on the African continent (Algeria's Front de Libération Nationale, Congo’s Mouvement National Congolais, Ghana's Convention People's Party, Guinea’s Parti Démocratique de Guinée, and Tanzania's Tanganyika African National Union) and three groups in the U.S. (the Black Panther Party, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Hayes demonstrates that these groups were mutually invested in varied tactics and strategies to dismantle imperialist subjugation of Black people by Eurocentric white supremacy that used racial hierarchies, segregation, and violence; and that these groups shared a transnational engagement with explicit diasporic connections created by and for contentious social movement politics that were dedicated to meaningful political change by peoples of African descent. This impeccably researched work features interviews and archival material that document how civil disobedience, protest marches, and popular education campaigns developed effective transnational antiracist activism to address racial subjugation as an international human rights issue.