An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

CHAPTER SIX
BLACK POWER AND RED POWER,
FREEDOM AND SOVEREIGNTY
IN JUNE 1976, the Black Scholar published a special issue titled “The Third
World.” While the discourse of third world struggles focused on liberation
efforts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the folks at the Black Scholar
also considered how third world oppression also operated within the United
States. “For the Third World peoples have a common history of
dehumanization and oppression based on race,” wrote the editors. “This is
what binds Afro-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans and
Native Americans to their ancestors and relatives in distant lands.” They
went on to describe the specific histories of what connected these seemingly
disparate socio-historical relationships:
This common history of oppression began with the advent of
European colonialism and its brutal accomplice, the slave system.
Native-Americans found their lands ruthlessly stolen and themselves
decimated by enslavement and European diseases. Millions upon
millions of Africans were torn from their villages, tossed into slave
vessels and transported thousands of miles to be forced to labor in
mines and on plantations in the “New World.” 1
They believed that unity and liberation were possible because of their
shared oppression, their colonial situation. They wrote, “Thus the common
struggle—the struggle of Third World people inside and outside the U.S. for
freedom and independence—is far from completed. No doubt there are
many uphill battles yet to be waged. But a history of unity in oppression has
laid the basis for a new unity in struggle among Third World peoples—and