Event information:

Book Talk with author Prof. Martha Biondi (Northwestern), We are the Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (2025)
Discussant Prof. Peter Alegi (MSU)
Special Guest: Prexy Nesbitt 

Wednesday, October 29 @ 3pm – 4:30pm (virtual)

About the author:

Martha Biondi is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies and Professor of History. A scholar of 20th century African American history, Biondi is the author of the award-winning To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City and The Black Revolution on Campus, which tells the story of the Black student movement of the late 1960s and the rise of Black Studies and affirmative action. Hew new book We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation describes solidarity organizing for southern African national liberation struggles.

About the book:

Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt. 
 
For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.
 
Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.
 
The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.