They came by the thousands. A river of Black and Brown humanity, flowing out of Malcolm X Park, down 16th Street NW, then west on U Street. Red, black, and green flags held aloft, carrying signs that read “Africa for the Africans” and “Help Free Angola, Boycott Gulf [Oil],” they staged a raucous protest outside the Portuguese Embassy before splitting into smaller groups to demonstrate outside the Rhodesian Information Center, the South Africa Embassy and the U.S. State Department.
Continuing southward, the three streams of protesters converged at the Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the Washington Monument. There, a broad coalition of the nation’s leading Black political figures, from the Congress of African People’s Amiri Baraka to D.C. congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy, committed themselves to a protracted struggle against colonialism and White minority rule in Africa and at home.
Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of African Liberation Day, one of the most influential gatherings in modern African American and D.C. history. Though rallies were held in dozens of U.S. cities, Canada and the West Indies, the D.C. event was the largest and most consequential. Following the 1972 protest, organizers continued to hold the demonstration, gathering in Malcolm X Park from 1973 until 1991.
D.C. African Liberation Day helped assemble and nurture a potent band of anti-colonial activists in the nation’s capital. In the 1980s, these organizers were critical to African American-led mobilizations against the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the Reagan administration’s support for anti-democratic forces in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique. D.C. African Liberation Day was also an important cultural touchstone for many Black Washingtonians, who convened each year to reaffirm their connection to Africa and the peoples of the diaspora — and to debate how we could all get free.
Since the late 19th century, many African American activists embraced an international vision that identified U.S. racism and inequality as, to quote W.E.B. Dubois, “but a local phase of a world problem.” This understanding of the relationship between conditions at home and abroad again came to the fore of Black consciousness in 1971. That year, the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress moved to import chrome from the brutal White minority regime in Rhodesia, in defiance of U.N. sanctions. The administration also decided to continue providing military aid to Portugal, which was desperately fighting to hang onto its colonies in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau.
These moves outraged Owusu Sadaukai (né Howard Fuller), a lithe, intense Black Power activist and founder of Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham, N.C. Sadaukai had recently visited anti-colonial rebels in Mozambique, who told him that African Americans could assist in their struggle by protesting U.S. government support for colonialism and sending money and material aide.
In early 1972, Sadaukai, joined by Cleveland Sellers, Florence Tate, and other experienced young Black Power organizers, endeavored to do just that, forming the African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee and setting up a headquarters at 2207 14th St. NW. From this storefront, they planned an international demonstration for the last Saturday in May.