As part of our revolutionary tribute lecture to the Afrocentric grand master teacher, Dr Runoko Rashidi, on 14 August 2021, I published an excerpt focusing on the sparks of global Black rebellion that ignited during August.
I maintained then—as I do now—that mapping these coordinates of liberation requires deep, specialised, and continuous study.
What follows is an accounting of the critical coordinates in the evolution of radical Black resistance that occurred during the month of September.
These are not merely dates on a calendar; they are historical flashpoints of disruption against the global white-supremacist, capitalist, and colonial world order. This list is a living archive and does not claim to be exhaustive.
The September Roll of Honor & Resistance
3 September (1838) –
This date marks the 188th anniversary of Frederick Douglass seizing his own freedom from the concentration camps of American chattel slavery.
His escape was a direct act of treason against a white-supremacist state, proving that Black freedom is never given—it must be stolen back.
11 September (1961) –
This date marks the 65th anniversary of the founding of Poqo, the insurrectionary forerunner to the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA).
Formed as the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Poqo rejected the reformist politics of negotiation, choosing instead the path of revolutionary violence to reclaim the stolen land.
11 September (1987) –This date marks the 39th anniversary of the martyrdom of Peter Tosh, an uncompromising sonic warrior of the Black revolution. Tosh weaponised Reggae music against the global “Babylon” system, demanding absolute justice rather than peaceful subjugation.
12 September (1924) –
This date marks the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, one of Afrika’s most formidable Marxist-Leninist theorists and guerrilla commanders.
Cabral successfully organised the peasants of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde to wage a victorious war of national liberation, reminding us that we must “tell no lies and claim no easy victories.”
12 September (1977) –
This date also marks the 49th anniversary of the brutal assassination-in-detention of Bantu Stephen Biko, the foundational theorist of the Black Consciousness Movement South AfriKKKa.
Biko recognised that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed, and his murder by the colonial state only immortalised his doctrine of psychological liberation as essential for total liberation.
20 September (1758) –This date marks the 268th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the uncompromising principal leader of the Haitian Revolution.
Dessalines understood that white supremacy could not be reasoned with; it had to be eradicated. By crushing the French empire, he established Ayiti as the world’s first free Black Republic and the ultimate blueprint for total anti-colonial victory.
21 September (1909) –
This date marks the 117th anniversary of the birth of Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost theoreticians of 20th-century Pan-afrikanism.
Nkrumah understood that continental unity was a geopolitical necessity, warning us that Afrika must unite or fall prey to the insidious forces of neo-colonialism.
22 September (1828)-
This date marks the 198th anniversary of the physical departure of uNodumehlezi kaMenzi, uShaka Mlilwane, the legendary military strategist and sovereign of the Zulu Nation (Ilemb’ eleq’ amanye amalembe ngokukhalipha).
His revolutionary restructuring of warfare and statecraft created a formidable bulwark against early European imperialist encroachment.
23 September (1941) – This date marks the 85th anniversary of the birth of Comrade George Lester Jackson, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party and revolutionary prison intellectual.
Jackson transformed the AmeriKKKan carceral archipelago into a site of Marxist-Leninist resistance, proving that the Black radical spirit cannot be caged, even behind maximum-security walls.
23 September (1926) – This date marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of John William Coltrane, a spiritual genius who used avant-garde jazz as a vehicle for Black liberation and cosmic consciousness.
His music shattered the rigid, Eurocentric structures of sound, reflecting the turbulent, radical energy of the Black Liberation Movement.
28 September (1829) –This date marks the 197th anniversary of the publication of David Walker’s radical manifesto, the Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.
This epoch-making text bypassed the polite pleas of white abolitionists, directly calling upon enslaved African people to rise up in armed, bloody rebellion against their captors to reclaim their humanity.
