Chapter 10 considers how descendants of nineteenth-century Africans remember their forebearers. It builds on Chapter 6’s discussion on the distinctiveness of liberated Africans by recovering some individual biographies, exploring how they constructed alternative narratives of return, and how the individuals remained close to Africa through their awareness of indentured histories and cultural traditions. These memories form a diasporic consciousness, shared with the descendants of a liberated African ancestor who was the great-grandfather of Malcolm X.

This chapter examines how Islamist dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s in Türkiye, Iran, and the United States mobilized race and religion in their comparative critiques of authoritarian modernization and, in so doing, transformed Islamism into a critical interlocutor on racial justice.

In this chapter three prison memoirs are recalled, detailing the stories of three men that significantly shaped the civil rights revolution during the 1960s. Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote about their lives before prison, during the struggle, in prison, and after prison. They tell the story of the Black Panther Party and introduce the readers to their deepest feelings about life in America as oppressed Black men fighting for liberation. Nonetheless, their history stands apart

from other people who have written about this period simply because their personal journeys led them to prison and jail where these narratives were organized, outlined, and composed

as prison memoirs.

The USA as a prison where Black people are confined inside a barbed wire of stereotypes – an idea memorably articulated by Malcolm X in 1963 – is influentially explored in works by Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, a three-man mini-tradition within prison writing. Circumstances leading to Baraka’s experience of solitary confinement (memorably chronicled in his 1979 poem “AM/TRACK”) are the subject of the first third of the chapter. Etheridge Knight, who in prison forged his own poetic path out of tools provided partly by Malcolm and Baraka, is the subject of the next third. The Knight-inspired Reginald Dwayne Betts, a lawyer-poet who was incarcerated as a teenager, is the focus of the rest of the chapter (except for a brief examination of Baraka’s son, Ras, a significant political leader). All four men articulate secrets of survival in the coils of carceral culture and model alternative ways of imagining justice.

Engaging with the rich complexities of revolution, this chapter troubles the accepted narrative of Black resistance in 1960s America, specifically the uses of violence, and the ways it stretches the movement across space and time. It considers the violence of Black protest in the 1960s in more expansive terms, going beyond the turn-the-other-cheek violence of what often is described as nonviolent protest. Engaging with Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965) and selected speeches, read through the influence of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), this essay reads the two as representative of a global Black model of revolution predicated on outwardly directed violence. This chapter’s counter-narrative challenges the geography, temporality, and structure of Black revolution in the 1960s, decentering the U.S., acknowledging the influence of French intellectualism, and reaching back to acts of resistance of earlier generations, ultimately complicating the linear narrative of nation-bound, peaceful protest that has come to define Civil Rights.

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

Smethurst argues that the Autobiography of Malcolm X has deep roots in earlier African American autobiography, particularly the Christian conversion narrative and the slave narrative, notably the three life narratives of Frederick Douglass. For Smethurst, the defining chiasmus of Douglass’s first autobiographical narrative, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” structures The Autobiography, too — at least until Malcolm’s integration into the structure, theology, and ideology of the Nation of Islam. Smethurst argues that The Autobiography also follows Douglass’s three life narratives in that each of the latter not only retells the story chronicled in the first narrative but also unveils Douglass’s evolving positions, his developing political literacy, through later political moments, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early rise of Jim Crow. The Autobiography does not project an end of the development with Malcolm X’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, but a continuing transition, his grappling with the rapidly changing domestic and international political and cultural environments of the 1960s.

May argues African American autobiography became integral to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic cultural world with the publication of Briton Hammon’s 1760 account of his sea travels and captivity. With Hammon's text, the genre expanded to become a literary, political, and economic phenomenon by the time of the 1789 British publication of Olaudah Equiano’s more comprehensive and popular life story. In fact, 1760 is a year, May contends, that marks the beginning of known literature written and published by Black people living in England and British North America, a wide range of genres engaging life writing including slave narratives, captivity narratives, confessionals, pamphlets, poetry, sermons, and jeremiads. African American autobiography captivated the attention of a general readership until the end of the Civil War, a readership constituted mainly of a growing white middle class and elite reading audience.

The discourse against Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and racism in the 20th century also had important legal successes, such as the work of Thurgood Marshall in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. After the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Movement in many ways resisted segregation, e.g. as led by Martin Luther King. Radical writers and speakers criticized black integration in dominant white society, as was the case in the discourses of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael.

During the year before his assassination, Malcolm X fashioned himself into an ambassador-at-large for black America. His message to leaders of newly decolonized countries in Africa was that black leaders should appropriate the systems (the human rights framework) that had initially been forced upon them but now were theirs as much as they belonged to anybody. But one question is whether such a move adds the insult of intellectual surrender to injuries of subjugation, particularly where local traditions were overpowered relatively recently. For such cases, the account in Chapter 5 must be supplemented. I do so by exploring what it would mean for there to be a genuinely and legitimately global discourse on justice that involves Africa (or other once colonized regions) in authentic ways. The account from Chapters 4 and 5, enriched by Flikschuh’s idea of philosophical fieldwork, allows us to explain what this would mean.