Sankofa: How the History of Black Liberation Movements Prepares Us for This Moment

The past has taught us that progress is not permanent, but the past will also teach us how to fight.

Seattle Black Panther Party on the steps of the state capitol in Olympia, Washington, 1969. (Photo courtesy of the State Governors’ Negative Collection, 1949-1975, Washington State Archives)

Sankofa is a term packed with a lot of meaning, and it means a great deal for Black people today as these MAGA folks are working in earnest to erase us — from history, society, politics, civic life, the economy and all aspects of America. But we have been here before. A Twi word from the Akan people of Ghana, Sankofa means “go back and get it,” or as my Gullah-Geechee folks would say, “Go bak and fetch it.” Aterall, like the proverb says, if oonuh ent kno weh oonuh dah gwine, oonuh should kno weh oonuh come f'um. Translated, this means: “If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you come from.

If we want to understand where we are going, we must know where we've been. The past liberation struggles of Black people provide lessons in how to free ourselves from the latest iteration of MAGA white supremacy, fascism, apartheid, and Jim Crow tech broligarchy.

Some would suggest that America in the era of Trump and MAGA is turning into 1930s Nazi Germany. Making this comparison ignores the reality that Nazi Germany drew its inspiration from the legal regime of Jim Crow. White people in this country want to take it all back to their past, and we as people of a darker hue must draw inspiration from our own past — a history of resistance, struggle, empowerment and movement building. While history does not necessarily repeat itself, it most certainly rhymes. And when we embrace Sankofa and study the blueprints already laid out for Black people to empower ourselves and fight against racial oppression and economic injustice, there is no telling what we can accomplish.

And the struggles we face, and always have faced — to be treated as human beings and full citizens with equal rights in this country — are waged in the Black press. The scribes, truthtellers, reporters, columnists and correspondents in our community have spoken truth to power, held the powerful accountable and articulated the condition of Black folks since Freedom’s Journal was first published in New York in 1827. “We wish to plead our case. Too long have others spoken for us,” the newspaper’s editors, John Brown Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, proclaimed in their first edition.

White supremacy always knew the power of Black journalism. When the white mob overthrew the Black-white Fusion party government in the Wilmington massacre and coup in 1898, the Daily Record was burned to the ground. The white mob drove Ida B. Wells-Barnett out of Memphis, called her a “Black scoundrel” and destroyed her newspaper office for her reporting on lynching.

In a country based on the genocidal enslavement of African people and the genocidal land theft of Native people — all for money — Black folks have used the dollar as a weapon of protest. The Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s helped bring Jim Crow to its knees, and the South African anti-apartheid movement used boycott, divestment and sanctions to destroy the Afrikaner regime. Money is all that America understands, and, once again, we must refuse to participate in our oppression and subjugation at the hands of white supremacy.

And as the ICE Gestapo comes for Black and brown migrants alike, we must remember the history of Black people refusing to cooperate with the slave patrols and paddy rollers. Some waged revolts on the slave ship or the plantation, while others escaped the plantation. Sometimes, the massa they were fleeing was the president of the United States. The Underground Railroad was a network that facilitated the self-liberation of Africans held in bondage. Hundreds of thousands of ancestors fled North to Canada and Mexico.

As Malcolm X said in “The Ballot or the Bullet,” “If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. … Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.” From its founding, America was always a country based on rights for white landowners and democracy for the few. The clarion call of “Make America Great Again” seeks to bring back the rule of the white man, or as Darren Beattie, a white nationalist and Trump State Department official said, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

How do we turn this around short of a radical shift and a revolutionary restructuring, or what Dr. King called a “radical revolution of values”? While the present reality is unsustainable, Black folks must envision and create the future they want for their community. For example, the first public school systems arose during Reconstruction as freed people advocated for education for all. The Black studies and ethnic studies movements were the result of college students protesting, taking over campus buildings and catching beatings and arrests. Known for their guns, the Black Panther Party created a free breakfast program for kids — a true threat to the power structure — along with health clinics and community policing.

History has taught us that progress is not permanent; this country will backslide, and white power will strive to take it all back, as in right now. Look at the bans on DEI and CRT, and realize their real goal is to eliminate the 14th Amendment, and with it our citizenship. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery,” W.E.B. Du Bois said in Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. The times demand that we call out white terror and seize power with the boldness of a Fannie Lou Hamer, not with politeness or respectability.

Meanwhile, as we seek reparations and all the things, Black people cannot forget places such as Haiti, Sudan, Congo and Palestine. Solidarity is not transactional, and the struggle is global and continuous. Lest we forget, Malcolm sought support from African nations to go to the United Nations and take up the case of 22 million Black people whose human rights were being violated in America. And the Black Panthers opened an office in Algiers and embraced the Palestinian struggle.

Finally, Black people should welcome co-conspirators to this fight who show up and put themselves on the line, not allies or saviors. John Brown was most certainly a co-conspirator when he raised up with Black and white people and sought to destroy the slave industrial complex. Yuri Kochiyama — who held the head of a dying Malcolm X in the Audobon Ballroom 60 years ago on Feb. 21 — was another.

Black America, let us learn from the past to create a better future. “We who are Black are at an extraordinary point of choice within our lives,” Audre Lorde said. “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.”