The Black Student Movement in a Global Context

This book examines the social, political, and historical factors that supported African Diaspora student movements in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean, primarily from World War II to the 1980s. The focal point of this work is the Black Student Movement in the United States, while also examining overlapping student movements in Ethiopia and the Caribbean. The author highlights understudied movements, such as the role of the Ethiopian Students Union in North America in the watershed event in Ethiopia in February 1974, when it supported and led a radical student movement to overthrow Haile Selassie’s monarchy amid the world oil crisis. The author also explores the impact of radical student organizations and militant student protest at Norfolk State College in the 1970s, with a focus on the Vanguard Party, which was a radical Marxist student group that infiltrated Norfolk State College student government, the newspaper staff, and the college yearbook staff in order to expose the student body to their black internationalist agenda. The two chapters on Walter Rodney and his Black Power activism is a testament of Black Power’s transnational scope. This volume continues to advance the theoretical and practical understanding of the modern-day African Diaspora. The manuscript’s theoretical framework is based on the “Horn Thesis”—a term coined by Erik S. McDuffie, drawing on the internationalist works of Dr. Gerald Horne. The Horne Thesis encourages scholars to explore how anticommunism shaped Black transnational linkages and political development across the African Diaspora and beyond