A decades-old photo of Somali women protesting in Mogadishu for the release of Angela Davis in the United States has long served as a symbol of solidarity for a generation of young Somalis.
Hundreds of women are depicted in the black and white photo holding signs reading “liberty” and “innocent.” One holds a placard with Davis’s arrest photo, calling for her freedom. Almost all don white hijabs as they patiently, yet passionately, pose for the timeless photo.
Often shared on International Women’s Day on March 8, many have used the image to capture a sense of Black solidarity, Pan-Africanism, and the fight for the global effort of Black liberation.
Asha Noor shared the photo on Twitter in 2018 with the caption: “Somali women protesting for the release of black liberation activist, thinker, feminist, and revolutionary Ms. Angela Davis—whenever this photo comes on my timeline, it makes me smile.”
Noor followed with another tweet to share an exchange she had with her mother after she shared the picture. According to Noor, her mother replied to her and said, “Did you think we lived in a bubble? We knew of her and others before her like Malcolm, Rosa, Muhammad Ali, and others back in Somalia, and we rooted for them.”
The photo captures this sense of solidarity for many Somalis in the diaspora, especially in the United States, who have come into an identity outside their national identity.
Burhan Israfael, a community activist in Minneapolis, stated that the photo particularly struck him as a member of the Somali diaspora.
“The picture popped up for me in a specific community of left-leaning people who have always been around and who subscribe to politics about internationalism,” he said.
Davis had been arrested in 1970 after being charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder for the death of Judge Harold Haley. Haley had been taken hostage along with a prosecutor and three jurors by 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson in an attempt to free his older brother George who was on trial as one of the Soledad Brothers.
George, along with Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, were dubbed the Soledad Brothers after they were alleged to have murdered John Vincent Mills, a prison guard at Soledad Prison.
While they tried to flee, both the Jackson brothers were involved in a shootout with police. Davis was alleged to have provided the younger Jackson brother with the firearms he used in the attack.
After 16 months behind bars, Davis was released on bail. She would later win her case after receiving a not-guilty verdict in 1972.
During her imprisonment, protests such as the one in Somalia took place worldwide, advocating for her freedom and showcasing a sense of global solidarity.
Israfael stated that Somalia’s Marxist government at the time of Davis’s incarceration played a role in that sense of solidarity due to Davis’s leftist politics.
“Somalia played a role specifically because of our communist and socialist leanings at the time,” he said.
Safia Farole, an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Global Studies at Portland State University, made the connection between Davis’s position as a feminist leader in the activist space playing a role in the solidarity she experienced from women worldwide.
“There’s a lot of solidarity, of course, among women in different countries,” she said. “Figures like Angela Davis were very prominent—Black female civil rights leaders—there’s this transnational connection where women in Africa also see parallels to their struggles.”
Farole, whose area of expertise falls under African politics, spoke about the coinciding of the Civil Rights Movement with the time in which many African nations were gaining their independence from European nations. She pointed to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, all left-leaning Pan-African leaders. Farole also pointed to the engagement civil rights leaders had with the African continent such as W.E.B. Du Bois visiting Ghana or Malcolm X’s trip to Egypt.
“What better place to look for Black freedom and liberation than in societies where the majority of people are Black,” she stated.
Israfael also pointed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s trip to Ghana with his wife, Coretta Scott King, to celebrate the country’s independence in 1957. According to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, “His attendance represented an attempt to broaden the scope of the civil rights struggle in the United States on the heels of the successful Montgomery bus boycott.”
Israefael stated that the recent depictions of King have created a more neo-liberal image of the civil rights leader devoid of his connection to the continent and his view of America being an imperialist nation.
According to Farole, this history is necessary for African immigrants in the United States to understand, given the struggles they will face under the systems made to curtail Black progress.
“I feel that as African members of the African diaspora in the United States, some of us when we came to this country, may not have had full awareness of our role in the United States racial regime,” she said.
Farole stated that the social divisions in African cultures are often along clan lines but shared that once these communities immigrate to the United States, they quickly lose those definitions.
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