07/03/2025
As one of our followers pointed out yesterday,
the uncanny alignment between the lives of Medgar Evers and Patrice Lumumba reveals a deeper truth about the interconnectedness of Black struggle across cultures and continents.
Even though they were separated by geography, language, and colonizers, these brothers were unified by a shared drive to confront the white supremacist violence that harmed their people so much,
and to realize for their people the right to dignity and self-determination.
Both were born into violently unequal systems, both rose to national prominence by organizing their people against these systems, both were gifted orators whose voices carried messages of liberation,
and both were assassinated at the peak of their influence, cut down by agents of the state.
Their parallel paths teach us a powerful lesson about the global nature of anti-Blackness and the necessity of transnational solidarity.
It was true 100 years ago, and its that much more true today.
Evers and Lumumba remind us that the same systems of imperialism, racial capitalism, and state violence, mutate and manifest differently across the globe,
but are rooted in shared ideologies of European domination.
The thing is, today our capacities to connect, to really see each other across struggles and geographies, is unlike anything the world has ever seen.
The alignment of their lives challenges us to build bridges,
and we have an unprecedented capacity today to bridge the gap between Mississippi and Congo,
to form meaningful bonds of solidarity across countless causes.
Liberation is a human project,
and it's ongoing.
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