In 2020 the United States was rocked by violent protests centered on police brutality against African-Americans, leading to thousands of arrests and several deaths. The reaction to and solutions for the problem of police brutality vary widely, but the movement we will be talking about today has an elegantly simple solution: Secession!

Early Black Nationalism/Separatism in the 19th century was focused on leaving the United States outright, first being in league with the “colonialist” abolitionists who wanted to repatriate freed slaves to Africa, or the Black American island of Haiti. Martin Delany, the first identifiable Black Nationalist was among these men. His nationalist thought can be summed up in this quote from 1852: “We have native hearts and virtues, just as other nations; which in their pristine purity are noble, potent and worthy of example. We are a nation within a nation; – as are the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, the Welsh, Irish and Scotch in the British dominions..” Eventually this project became the African countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone, but did not bring about any kind of mass movement out of the United States. Colonialism faded away as a popular means to deal with the “Black Question” during and after the Civil War, with Delany himself raising black troops to fight and ending the war as a major, the highest ranking black officer in the Union Army. However, with the failure of Reconstruction to bring about the desired revolution in civil rights, Delany and others like him again supported a return to Africa. Black Nationalism in the US reached its zenith with Marcus Garvey’s foundation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1918. Like the nationalists before him, Garvey, a native of Jamaica, supported emigration from the US and identified the Black nationalist mission in America with anti-imperialist movements in Africa itself. For the Blacks still in America however, Garvey’s plan was to cultivate a powerful black economy with black entrepreneurs, leading by example by founding the Black Star shipping Line and other businesses of varying degrees of financial success. In his Words, “The UNIA appeals to the sober, sane, serious, earnest, hard-working man, who earns his living by the sweat of his brow…UNIA appeals to the self-reliant yeomanry.” Garvey’s insistence that The US was the white man’s land led to his allying with white nationalism as existed in the 20s such as the KKK and men such as Lothrop Stoddard, who agreed with him that the Black man had no place on this continent. After Garvey was arrested in 1923 on mail fraud charges and deported in 1927 back to Jamaica, the UNIA and “Garveyism” declined in popularity. 

 The first major group to support black SEPARATISM, as opposed to black nationalism was the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930 by a former Garveyite, Wallace D. Fard (pronounced Far-OD). A religious group following a very divergent and Black-centric Islam, Fard was succeeded after his unexplained disappearance by Elijah Muhammad in 1934, who expanded their beliefs to include a racial mythology that placed White people as a horrible genetic experiment gone wrong, undertaken by a mad scientist thousands of years ago during a golden age of black power. Like Garvey before them, they promoted a form of black capitalism to bring up black people up from their own efforts. During the 30s the Japanese nationalist group the Black Dragon Society attempted to recruit black nationalists such as Eli Muhammad into supporting a Japanese lead world with promises of racial egalitarianism, and the FBI kept close watch on the NOI during world war two, persecuting them for their anti-draft activities. Their race essentialism precluded any integration between blacks and whites, and supported an all black nation-state (although this was still just an interim measure until African-Americans could rejoin the mother continent). Elijah Muhammad’s closest pupil Malcolm X was converted in 1946, and became the public face of the group in the mid 50s, leading the group to the kind of popularity black nationalism had had in the days of Marcus Garvey, maintaining a network of NOI businesses and a paramilitary defense force, the Fruit of Islam. X later became disgusted with what he saw as Muhammad’s corruption and left the group for more mainstream Islam and universalist socialism in 1964 before his assassination the next year. X’s divorce from NOI led to a decline in interest in the group, and though Louis Farrakhan took over the group in 1977 to a small revival in the 80s and 90s, culminating Farrakhan’s support for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign and the Million Man March in 1995 called by Farrakhan, it never regained its past influence. Meanwhile, In 1968, the Republic of New Afrika was declared, declaring the deep south states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina as the “subjugated national territory” of Africans, and drew up a constitution for an all black government-in-exile. Kuwasi Balagoon, a former member of the Black Nationalist Black Panthers turned anarchist, joined the organization and became calling himself a “New Afrikan Anarchist”. The group’s paramilitary organization, the Black Legion, engaged in several bloody shootouts with American police, but remained fairly irrelevant as an organization. Likewise, the New Black Panther Party (the original Black Panthers of the late 60s had abandoned Black Nationalism for Maoist anti-racism) founded in 1989, also black separatist remained a fringe organization and got little buy in from the actual black community.

What many African-Americans did buy into in larger numbers was the sense of Black Nationalism that had a more autonomist, rather than separatist character. The ideological term Black Power referred to a set of cultural, economic and political policies to increase black participation in the institutions that affected them, from policing, to schooling, to welfare bureaucracy, to the stores they shopped in. The Congress of Racial Equality became part of this push for black empowerment, funding black cooperative farms and trying to leverage political power for bills that provided federal funding for more black-based economic initiatives in the late 60s which ultimately were unsuccessful. Under the more PR-friendly term “community control”, these efforts have continued in black and other minority communities and have seen some success in getting local and municipal governments to allow a larger presence of black/non-white agents in police and other institutions.

With the new era of “white on black violence” inaugurated by the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, black nationalism and black separatism has gained increased interest from African Americans who feel exhausted by the perception that the American State is waging a deadly war against them and has been for centuries. The “Not Fucking Around Coalition” was founded in 2017 and while many black nationalist outfits before have encouraged armed protest, the NFAC put black self-defense as the premier value its members must hold to. They have engaged in armed marches in the same way the open carry and patriot movements in the rest of the US have done, and their leader “Grandmaster Jay Johnson” is currently under indictment for pointing his firearm at police officers during a protest in Louisville after the 2020 Breonna Taylor shooting resulted in no officers being charged. Black separatist ideas, social media groups and organizations have been associated with the cop killings in Dallas, New York and other cities in the last decade.

Black Nationalism, like White nationalism, has problematic tendencies that libertarians should oppose when they conflict with our conception of absolute freedom for the human person. African people in the New World have plenty of reasons to distrust and hate white led institutions and that is their absolute right of self-determination. A black nationalism and separatism that upholds the right of individuals to decide their own fate is perfectly inline with a liberal society. Long live the Republic of New Afrika and may 1000 flowers bloom.