The Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was a social movement organization that proposed three objectives:
- The creation of an independent Black-majority country composed of the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina and the Black-majority counties adjacent to this area in Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida.
- $400 billion in reparations for the injustices suffered by African Americans during the slavery and segregation periods.
- A referendum of all African Americans in order to decide what should be done with their citizenry. Regarding the latter, it was claimed that Black people were not given the choice to decide in regard to what they wanted to do after emancipation.
These concessions would then form the basis of an independent Black nation. The Republic of New Afrika’s provisional government was founded at a conference of militant Black nationalists meeting in Detroit in 1968. The conference was convened by attorney Milton Henry and his brother Richard, former acquaintances of Malcolm X who had renamed themselves Gaidi Obadele and Imari Abubakari Obadele. Imari Obadele was elected to the position of “Provisional President.” The group advocated cooperative economics and community self-sufficiency, but also supported limiting political rights and press freedoms, prohibiting trade unions, mandatory military service, and the legalization of polygamy.
The FBI believed the Republic of New Afrika to be a seditious group and conducted raids on its meetings, which led to violent confrontations as well as the arrest and repeated imprisonment of RNA leaders. In addition, the group was a target of the COINTELPRO operation by the federal authorities and was also subject to diverse Red Squad activities of the Michigan State Police and Detroit Police Department – among others.
This collection provides documentation collected by the FBI through intelligence activities, informants, surveillance, and cooperation with local police departments. These documents chronicle the activities of Republic of New Afrika national and local leaders, power struggles within the organization, its growing militancy, and its affiliations with other Black militant organizations. The collection contains 82 manuscripts from the FBI Library with over 14,000 page images.
(Above text drawn, with slight modifications, from Gale’s description of the database)
Note: OCR is unavailable for many of the page images and is uncorrected when present. This renders electronic searching within the documents difficult.