African American History · Unit 5
Intellectual & Geopolitical Alliances
Harlem Renaissance to Negritude, King to Malcolm — the geopolitical loop
How Black American intellectual culture crossed the Atlantic to ignite Negritude, and how African liberation shaped Malcolm X's OAAU.
Learning Objectives
- •Trace how the Nardal sisters translated Alain Locke to launch the Negritude movement in Paris
- •Explain King's 1957 Ghana trip as a structural theological and political alliance
- •Analyze Malcolm X's OAAU as a direct constitutional mirror of the Organization of African Unity
- •Read primary sources: McKay's 'If We Must Die,' Césaire's Cahier, and OAAU founding transcripts
Unit 5 Knowledge Check
Score 70% or higher to complete this unit. Answers stay hidden until you submit.
1. Walter Rodney's central argument in 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' (1972) was that:
2. C.L.R. James's 'The Black Jacobins' (1938) made which argument about the Haitian Revolution and the enslaved workers who carried it out?
3. Frantz Fanon's concept of the 'colonization of the mind' argued that:
4. The Fifth Pan-African Congress (Manchester, 1945) was the decisive turning point in the Pan-African movement because:
5. Edward Wilmot Blyden's concept of the 'African Personality' (1887) directly prefigured which 20th-century intellectual movement?
6. Kwame Nkrumah's concept of 'neo-colonialism' argued that:
7. The Negritude movement was sparked in Paris by:
8. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1957 Ghana trip directly shaped which aspect of his theology?
9. Malcolm X's OAAU (1964) was explicitly modeled on which body?
Globalizing Liberation: Intellectual Circuits of the Diaspora
Document-Based Task · scored with the essay rubric
Analyze the ways in which 20th-century Black intellectual movements—from the Harlem Renaissance to the post-colonial shift in Africa—reconceptualized the relationship between racial identity and political sovereignty. Drawing upon the provided documents, evaluate how these thinkers synthesized local struggles against oppression into a broader, interconnected global framework of resistance. In your response, explain how the exchange of ideas across the Atlantic shaped the evolving strategies for liberation in both the United States and the African continent.
Source Documents
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes (1926)
Primary SourceI Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology by Kwame Nkrumah (1961)
Primary SourceThe Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)
Primary Source