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(Dr. Klevor Abo). I am from Ghana.
We had no idea back in Ghana what Nkrumah's experience as a
truly impoverished student for 10 years in this country.
We had no idea the influence of him being an impoverished
student in Jim Crow America of the 1930's.
We had no idea that that experience was critical for
what he eventually did in the Gold Coast.
Unlike, all new immigrants arriving from Europe when they
arrived in New York harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty,
they told themselves we have arrived.
For Nkrumah it was the other way around.
When he was leaving the United States in 1945, that is when he
looked at the Statue of Liberty and said Lady Liberty I'm taking
your message back to Africa I'm going to kick the white man out.
But he did it without racial animosity.
You will hear two papers today about white folk who worked with
him at the highest level as Attorney General Geoffrey Bing,
he paid the ultimate price for Geoffrey Bing.
Then there was his private secretary Erica Powell, an
English woman who had the uncomfortable job of being the
buffer between Kwame Nkrumah and the black people he was leading.
Then there was June Milne, white woman from New Zealand who
served faithfully as his research assistant up to
the very, very last minute, April 27, 1972.
So, we are opening this conference to remind ourselves
that yes indeed from the 1400s when the Portuguese encountered
the Kingdom of the Congo and established a diplomatic
relationship between the Kingdom of the Congo and Portugal.
Sometimes the mind boggles that in the 1400s the
Kingdom of the Congo had diplomatic representative
in the court of the King of Spain.
And the King of Spain in the 1400s had
diplomatic representative or representation
in the Congo Kingdom.
All that changed once Brazil was discovered and cheap labor was
required and it's been downhill from there.
Some of our student speakers are not going to
be with us here today.
Oladapo Akindele who was to speak on Nkrumah's first,
his apprenticeship in politics began with a foundation of
the African Student's Association in the 1930s.
He was the first president of the
African Students Association in the 1930s.
And it is that experience that experience of melding together
Africans who found themselves in the United States that set him
going, and it is significant what he did
then even with African Students Association.
There were the conservative Africans who insisted
that the African Student Association would be
open only to registered students.
Nkrumah said no, we have to open it to all Africans because
there are so many other Africans who are around
who were in the position that he was.
Because when Nkrumah arrived at Lincoln University
he had five dollars, five dollars in his pocket.
Yet in 10 years he had two Bachelor degrees,
two Masters degrees, completed a work, coursework for
his doctoral dissertation in philosophy and finished a
draft of that philosophy before he left.
In 10 years, 5 degrees, I just don't know how he did it.
And there were times that he did not even have a place to sleep.
The Philadelphia mine train was his bedroom.
You buy one a train ticket for the night, sleep on the train,
wake up in the morning, pick pieces of coal in the streets
of Philadelphia, sell those pieces of coal to
buy one meal and the train ticket.
Yet in spite of that, two Bachelor's degrees, two Master's
degrees and a PhD work completed.
It took me eight years to finish my PhD, and
Nkrumah did five degrees in ten years.
That gives us the sense that this was an extraordinary man.
But he was not without his faults.
Great men become great not because they are perfect but
because they became great in spite of their circumstances.
And Nkrumah's circumstances from birth until he became leader of
government business in 1952, was nothing to write home about.
He did not know his father.
There is evidence now emerging that
his father may not even have been Ghanaian.
His father may have come from the Liberia.
There were Liberians there who went all over the
West African Coast, who did the most menial of jobs.
David Birmingham wrote the most recent biography of Nkrumah,
in which he suggested that indeed Nkrumah's father
may have been a night soil carrier.
Well, let me explain what a night soil carrier is.
There are no flush toilets in West Africa.
So at night it's somebody else's job
to come and carry the excrement.
Apparently that was what Nkrumah's father was.
Yet in spite of it he rose through the ranks, despised by
those Africans who went to [unclear audio] in England and
got their degrees in law, despised as Bill Clinton was
despised here, and yet in spite of all those odds,
he achieved what he achieved.
He is the only African President that
I know of that had three funerals.
The first funeral was in Conakry, and anybody who was
somebody including Fidel Castro was at that funeral.
Then there was this bizarre tussel between Sékou Touré in
Guinea who had his body and the new government
in Ghana who six years after Nkrumah was
overthrown were already beginning to feel that the
Ghanaian people were clamouring for this president.
So we had this bizarre diplomatic incident in which
Sékou Touré of Guinea is dictating to the government of
Ghana the terms under which his body will be returned
and all these terms were met.
He was buried in his hometown, in his home village.
But his popularity in Ghana even after his death grew so much
that his body had to be exumed and reburied on the very spot on
which he declared Ghana's independence
on March 6, 1957.
And on that day he said to the [unclear audio]
"The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked
up with the total liberation of the African continent."
Of course that did not mean he forgot the diaspora.
So at Ghana's independence he made sure that anybody who was
somebody in the burgeoning leadership of the
Civil Rights Movement was there.
And it was there at Ghana's independence that the leadership
of the United States Civil Rights Movement had its first
contact with the White House in the person of the leader of the
official United States delegation, Richard Nixon.
It was in Ghana in fact I found this nowhere else than in the
Chicago Defender which reported on the the 7th of March, 1957.
The writer, Ethel Payne, sometimes called the Godmother
of African-American journalism wrote, "The independence
celebration in Ghana as a sovereign state was equally
meaningful to America though considerably in different ways."
It was there that Reverend Martin Luther King, leader of
the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, met Vice-President
Nixon at the reception given by Prime Minister Nkrumah.
Nixon, always quick on the trigger, wasted no time.
He promptly and unprecedentedly invited the Reverend King to
come to Washington and talk with him about
the proposal that he, Nixon, visit the South.
Thus King, after weeks of imploring President Eisenhower
and Vice-President Nixon to visit Alabama and speak out on
behalf of desegregation had to go all the way to
West Africa to get a hearing.
"It proves," Ethel Payne writes, "that the straight line is not
always the shortest distance between two points."
I now call on Andre Allen to read his research on the effect
that Martin Luther King's presence in Ghana at Ghana's
independence had on him and the energy that it gave
Martin Luther King to do what he did.
♪ [music playing-- no dialogue]♪♪.