The fight for Black Liberation did not begin with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland,Mike Brown, or the 1,274 of the Black men, women, and children killed by police officers since 2015. It did not begin with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or the Black Panther Party, all systematically targeted for destruction by the US government. It did not begin with the death of Emmett Till or the 4,743 lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1882-1968.
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The fight for Black liberation started long before the nation was born, at the dawn of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which in the 15th century would force some 12 million Africans into slavery over the next 400 years. By the time the first enslaved Africans landed on the shores of the British Colony of Virginia in 1619, Europeans had already accumulated a century of generational wealth from human trafficking.
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The fight for Black Liberation started with the slave rebellions throughout the Western hemisphere, though American history and media have all but erased its powerful legacy. When Haiti became the world’s first Black republic in 1804 after the enslaved rose up and defeated the French, the West quaked in fear of righteous retribution for their crimes against humanity. The Black Liberation Movement is a response to racism, which is inextricably intertwined with capitalism and imperialism – and it will not end so long as the agents of empire create and maintain systems of power to oppress, exploit, and deny people the universal human rights.
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