Creating Connections through Storytelling: The African Diaspora Worldwide and Its Role in Us History

Abstract

Creating Connections through Storytelling: The African Diaspora Worldwide and Its Role in Us History Jessica Smith (bio) On August 27, 1963—the day before various speakers from around the world stood addressing the massive crowd gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and urged civil and economic equity—the world said goodbye to an American-born intellectual and international icon who had made Accra, Ghana, his second home: Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. With his death at ninety-five years of age, Du Bois’s life spanned from slavery to the fight for justice, equality, and cultural identity among members of what would later be collectively known as the African Diaspora.1 When news of the loss reached the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the following day, a moment of silence was given for the activist, sociologist, and pan-Africanist who encouraged the strengthening of bonds between all ethnic groups of African descent, domestic and abroad. That same day, Executive Secretary of the NAACP Roy Wilkins reminded mourners at the march that the fight for social justice had been a long journey and it was Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’s international voice “that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.”2 Among those gathered that day for the cause were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Josephine Baker, both of whom addressed the crowd gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. Of the two, Baker was the first to speak. In her speech, she talked of her “rocky path” and tumultuous times in her birth country of America, the differences between her treatment there and in France, the importance of education, and how her work and the work of many others helped to open doors for “not just the colored people, but the others as well, the other minorities too . . . both those here in the United States and those from India.”3 In harmony with the words of Baker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood and spoke his now well-known words of a dream where his children would live in a nation where judgement would not be based on “the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”4 Though King was heavily involved in the movement for African American civil rights in the United States, he was a firm believer in W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion of the interconnectedness of those of African descent regardless of where they reside, a sentiment that prompted his travel abroad to Ghana and his building of international links in the fight for peace and equality.5 Across the pond in an entirely different region from the American South, Josephine Baker—an American-born French entertainer and war hero—spent years in her adopted homeland as an opponent of racial segregation and discrimination, serving as an agent for the French Resistance during World War II and fighting Nazi occupation and its xenophobic regime in France.6 Despite their living and fighting for the civil liberties of the African Diaspora and [End Page 25] others in two different parts of the world, it was the unified cause of freedom—a cause bolstered by Du Bois’s earlier work—that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Josephine Baker together at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a landmark event credited with helping to make positive changes countrywide in the United States of America, including the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.7 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Josephine Baker were just a few of the players in this pivotal chapter in the story of the African Diaspora and its resistance efforts for change. In the context of the March on Washington, it was the work and words of the aforementioned three figures that not only galvanized a worldwide civil rights movement, but helped to secure and sustain the rights and freedoms currently enjoyed globally by the diverse masses. In order to ensure that the cultural and historical fullness of the March on Washington is captured, it is essential to...