An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

It is difficult to know how much this opinion affected the Black readers
of the Chicago Defender. But as one of the premier Black newspapers, it
hopefully had some impact on readers and prompted them to think carefully
about the meaning and possibilities of Indigenous sovereignty, and also
reclaim and assert Afro-Indigenous heritage. While some in the Black
media were engaged in the work of solidarity, groups like the Republic of
New Afrika were making their own claims to freedom.
IN SEARCH OF A PLACE CALLED HOME: THE REPUBLIC OF
NEW AFRIKA
The assassination of Malcolm X, on February 21, 1965, remains a sore spot
for Black folks and human rights activists around the world. Scholars still
speculate about the trajectory of Malcolm’s political and social thought and,
although I won’t recount that here, I do want to trace his intellectual
trajectory through those who followed him. It is here that we can see some
of the rhetorical consequences of his rhetoric, in how his self-proclaimed
disciples took up his mantle. The Republic of New Afrika was, perhaps
most notably, the group that took up his masculinist idea of land, and used
Indigenous histories to construct it.
In late March 1968, nearly five hundred Black nationalists convened in
Detroit to discuss Black Power and how they might achieve Black
liberation. Out of this historic meeting emerged one of the more important
groups, which would later be called the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).
The RNA’s mission was straightforward. The wanted to create a
government for Black folks. Beyond ending a common oppression, it would
build a nation within a nation, funded by the hundreds of billions of dollars
that the United States owed them for their exploited slave labor. The RNA
based its argument on the belief that, upon the ending of enslavement,
Black folks were not asked what they would like to do, given the fact that
they were brought to this land as exploited labor.
More importantly, though, the members of the RNA were the ideological
descendants of Malcolm X. Imari Obadele (formerly Richard Henry) stated
in his autobiography that when the RNA was founded, it carried out what it
believed to be the “Malcolm X Doctrine,” which was basically realized
through its program for setting up a nation within a nation in the Deep
South. 22 Obadele stated that this idea for a separation hadn’t existed before: