An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Black Americans remembered this Indigenous triumph against the Klan
as a significant movement against white supremacy in the South, though
Robert F. Williams, who then was head of the Monroe, North Carolina,
NAACP chapter, wrote that the resistance they led two weeks earlier did not
get the same attention, “We had driven the Klan out of our country into
Indian territory. The national press played up the Indian-Klan fight because
they didn’t consider this a great threat—the Indians are a tiny minority and
people could laugh at the incident as a sentimental joke—but no one wanted
Negroes to get the impression that this was an accepted way to deal with the
Klan.” 9 Williams’s comment suggests that he didn’t respect the Indigenous
resistance. On the contrary, he did. He pointed out a longer history of how
white society viewed Indigenous peoples as a disappearing culture. They
would not garner that level of attention until nearly fifteen years later with
the emergence of the American Indian Movement.
Even though some were advocates of nonviolence, even supporting the
NAACP, Hughes captured the core issues greatly: using the legal system for
gaining more rights was important, even foundational, but forms of forceful
resistance had their place in the pantheon of Black struggle. And Black
Americans, for a moment, were able to look to Indigenous peoples as a sign
of what justice could look like.
The beginning of the 1960s was a tumultuous time for Black and Native
people. Indigenous people were fighting for fishing rights in the Pacific
Northwest. Native American organizations such as the National Congress of
American Indians, founded in 1944, sought to protest the termination of
tribal nations. 10 Throughout the 1950s, and then significantly, in 1961, the
year of the landmark Chicago American Indian Conference, Native
individuals wanted to use the “language of the larger world,” including that
from nations on the African continent and throughout Latin America, to
challenge the US colonial order. 11
Black Americans were struggling for the basic right to sit down at a
lunch counter and order food. They, too, were resisting their oppressive
conditions. However, they didn’t always see themselves in struggle together
with Native people, with a few exceptions. For instance, as noted author
James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “And today, a hundred years
later after his technical emancipation, he remains—with the possible
exception of the American Indian—the most despised creature in this
country.” 12 While Baldwin was not intentionally stating that Black folks