Jacob Thomas foresaw diaspora-led pan-African unity as the anticolonial answer
Evidence
The intra-African negro is clearly powerless to struggle successfully against personal enslavement, annexation, or volunteer (or fight for) protection of his territory. What we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and attitudes of the extra-Africans: ten millions in the Western hemisphere, dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture. Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one another, for grand racial combination, or will the naturally opulent cradle of their people, too long a place of violence and unholy greed, become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able to conquer or perish under its inspiration. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1164
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- SEED: Thomas’s diaspora question — will the scattered ten million unite or remain isolated — reads as an early articulation of a Black internationalist thesis with an essay waiting to be written.
- XREF: Foreshadows Pan-Africanism articulated later by Du Bois, Garvey, and Padmore.