History Is Lunch: Edward Onaci,

On March 31, 2021, Edward Onaci presented “Liberating the Territory: Activism, Repression, and the Republic of New Afrika” as part of the History Is Lunch series.

On March 31, 1968, more than five hundred Black nationalists—including Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party director Lawrence Guyot—convened in Detroit. Many concluded that Black Americans' best hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika, which would be created from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

“This decision to ‘free the land’ indicted the United States as unredeemable and uninhabitable for descendants of the country’s enslaved,” said Onaci, author of Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State.

New Afrikan citizens demanded reparations for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The group framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States.

“New Afrikans remade their lifestyles and daily activities to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture,” Onaci said. “The RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles.”

Edward Onaci is an associate professor of history and African American and Africana Studies at Ursinus College. He earned his BA in history from Virginia State University and his MA and PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Onaci’s book Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State was published by UNC Press in 2020.

History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial/.