We Are Internationalists
Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt.
For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.
Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.
The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.
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This muscular political biography from historian Biondi (The Black Revolution on Campus) uses the life of activist Prexy Nesbitt to explore America's long and troubled entanglements in southern Africa as well as the "dynamic and evolving ideological character" of the U.S.-Africa solidarity movement. A Chicago native, Nesbitt (b. 1944) became politically active during the civil rights movement, then later in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa as an adviser for the Clinton administration. As he moved from street organizer to state consultant, Nesbitt's sense of injustice expanded and deepened. Biondi shows how Nesbitt's work overseas informed his pivot from "Black nationalist-inflected Pan-Africanism" to a multicultural, anti-imperial politics that centered socialist policies over "simple nationalism." In hyper-detailed if sometimes methodical prose, Biondi makes the case that Nesbitt's template—and specifically his prescient sense of the interconnected nature of anti-imperial struggle—has plenty to teach activists today. Along the way, she spotlights nefarious U.S.-backed efforts in Africa, like those of the 1970s paramilitary group Renamo that bedeviled several nascent African democracies. This rigorous and rousing movement history commemorates an under-celebrated international struggle with an eye to excavating its best lessons.
