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Politics19 February 1919 (first congress, Paris)

Pan-African Congress

Timed to coincide with the Paris Peace Conference, Du Bois gathered Black delegates from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, who called for African rights and self-government.

A session of the first Pan-African Congress in Paris, February 1919
A session of the first Pan-African Congress in Paris, February 1919

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In February 1919 the African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, helped by the Senegalese-born French deputy Blaise Diagne, held a Pan-African Congress in Paris. The delegates asked the peace conference to protect the peoples of the former German colonies and to give Africans education, land and a share in government. Further congresses met in the 1920s, and at the fifth, in Manchester in 1945, young African leaders such as Nkrumah and Kenyatta demanded full independence, linking the movement to the postwar independence of Africa.

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States at the time
France · host
Places
Paris

People

  • W. E. B. Du Bois1868 – 1963

    leader · African American sociologist and civil rights leader who convened the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919 and led the Pan-African movement

Before and after

Earlier
1919 Paris Peace Conference
Later
1923 Occupation of the Ruhr and German Hyperinflation

Themes that include this event

  • National Movements in Asia and Africa1915 – 1948

    From the Hussein–McMahon correspondence to the founding of Israel — three decades in which India, West Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, swept up in the tide of self-determination after the First World War, pressed toward independence and modernization