EDWARD ONACI: Just like with Imari Obadele, who saw that political power for Black people is incomplete when they don’t control territory, I think a lot of other people saw this. Because they saw the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They saw the ’65 voting act, and then they saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They saw government repression and police violence against people like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. They saw Angela Davis have to go on the run. And these things combined, as well as a very strong Pan-Africanist impulse—they see anti-colonial and independence movements in Africa. These things combined help people really start to think about land and independence.

My name is Edward Onaci. I’m an associate professor of history and African American and Africana studies at a Ursinus College. And my first book is titled Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State.

The New Afrikan Independence Movement is the movement that people have been participating in since 1968 to create an independent Black nation-state here in the current territory that we call the United States of America, taking the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia. So typically I’d tell people that the Republic of New Afrika means a couple of different things. First and foremost, it’s the people who are considered to be the captive Black nation here in the United States of America, or in other words, people that we call African Americans or Black folks. Human trafficking and enslavement and ongoing racist and economic oppression, police terror—because of these reasons, they continue to be victimized by the U.S. empire. So the Republic of New Afrika are those people, but the Republic of New Afrika is also the land: the five states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

There’s a prehistory to this that begins with the first enslaved Africans being held captive on this land, right? This is how people in the movement frame it: as long as there were captive African people who were trying to get free, there was an independence movement. We can look at some more recent history. We can look at things like the UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey. We could look at the African Blood Brotherhood and even the Communist Party, who all had varying ideas about what Black liberation looked like and how it could be achieved. And some of the people who created the New Afrikan Independence Movement were around, and were involved, with these various organizations and formations. So people like Queen Mother, Audley Moore, people like Dara Abubakari—they were around and they maintained the ideas over time and helped people like Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X understand them and repurpose them for the specific context in which they were operating. And so that’s within the context of the Black Power movement. It’s within the context of urban rebellions; within the context of people fighting for civil rights and so-called first-class citizenship. Winning those things, but seeing that as long as they’re under U.S. sovereignty, they can’t actually exercise power.

We get all these histories of organizations. We get histories of leaders: the Robert F. Williams, the Huey Newtons fill in the blank, all of these different big-name people. But I often wonder, what did it actually mean to them to be a part of this movement? How did they actually live according to this movement? And, thankfully, I wasn’t the only one asking these questions. People like Robin C. Spencer and Scott Brown had started to ask these questions as well. And so I wanted to think about that on a deeper level, and this New Afrikan Independence Movement gave me an opportunity, because they had created what they call “New Afrikan Political Science.” And among the various things that I argue make up New Afrikan Political Science, one of them is that in order to have a successful revolution and to achieve the goals that they were pushing for, then people who were part of the movement had to remake themselves.

So the logic was at the moment: people had already transitioned from Negro to Black, but they had to transform even more, from Black or Afro-American to New Afrikan. And that transformation into being New Afrikan really was based on, what is the end goal? And the end goal was self-determination, political independence, territorial autonomy, and reparations. And so that put a different spin on how they were talking about things like Black Power, which everybody else was talking about. Because for them, they could talk about community control, they could talk about, you know, we need African-centered schools. But for people in the New Afrikan Independence Movement, these were steps towards self-determination, and not goals in and within themselves. And when that’s the goal, how one lives—my hunch was that how one lives is going to be a little bit different. And so I decided to look into how people applied these ideas, the New Afrikan Political Science, to their daily lives. And what I learned was that yes, people in social movements do try to live according to their ideas. And in the process of living according to these ideas, they start to rethink and reshape the movement. This is how movements evolve and how people continue to evolve and how culture can be the dynamic thing that we know it to be.

One of the things that I’ve looked at is people’s name choices. And name choices are just one aspect of what I, and one other scholar, Lance Bennett, would call lifestyle politics. And I do have a distinct way of thinking about lifestyle politics, but one of the things that ends up happening is that people—again, 1960s, early ’70s—people started to take on African names, they start to take on Arabic names, and they start to take on names that might not have any clear origin. Of course, people had a number of different reasons for making any choices. But one of the things that they had in common was that they wanted names that they thought empowered them to achieve these goals of New African Independence. Another way that I think about lifestyle politics is through things like family life, educational choices, occupational choices.

But I also look at government repression. So that would be one of the external forces that shaped how people live according to their ideals. People were forced to change how they did things, which is probably not a big secret or revelation or whatever, but government repression put them in a position to help really push the movement on behalf of political prisoners and prisoners of war. They helped give it the momentum that it currently has. So that might not be something that people think of in terms of a lifestyle, but when people are participating in this movement, this New Afrikan Independence Movement, even as they’re thinking about their names, even as they’re debating whether they should celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa or whatever else, they’re also responding to forces that want to disrupt, destroy, and discredit their movement—and in some cases kill them. And if they can’t kill them, lock them up, and move them into exile. And if that doesn’t have an impact on people’s lives, I don’t know what does, right?

When I first began the research, one of the things that made me want to pursue it was...I just thought it was, I thought it was insane. Why would anybody ever try that? That’s not going to work. And what ended up happening with me, now that I look back, was I started to see it as pretty practical. I started to read into the foundational texts. I started reading people’s memoirs. And as I compared and contrasted New Afrikan goals with those of their contemporaries, I started to realize how radically imaginative yet historically grounded the concept of self-determination can be for oppressed peoples.

If we think about the logic of even using the name New Afrikan, it’s partially based on a bunch of lawyers, human rights lawyers, thinking about the 14th Amendment and what that meant and continues to mean. And so the logic is with the 13th Amendment: people who were captives, who were literally captives, were now free as a free people. They then had the autonomy to decide for themselves what to do. But when the 14th Amendment was written and eventually ratified, it wasn’t proposed as an offer. And that’s what the New Afrikan Independence theorists say is the best way to think about the 14th Amendment: as an offer of citizenship. Instead, what happens is they pass the 14th Amendment, say, okay, now you all have birthright citizenship. And you know, that didn’t really work out well for most people. In fact, they didn’t have full citizenship. They weren’t asked what they wanted to do. And, with being forced into another form of captivity, according to the theorists of the movement, they saw overwhelming repression and oppression, racist terrorism through lynchings, the creation of the prison system—it has its foundations in that moment, a new form of slavery.

And so it just started to seem to me as if it was really, really pragmatic, just to think about the choice. What if, what if tomorrow, every Black person in the United States of America was given an opportunity to make an informed decision. And I want to emphasize, because the New Afrikan Independence theorists emphasized informed decision. Time to actually do research, have debates, think carefully about what they want to do. I think that alone, even if everybody decided they wanted to stay in the United States of America, I just think that that alone would change people’s perspectives of what the society means and what their position is within it. In some ways, the current moment is starting to do some of that.