In her “Australian Blackness, the African Diaspora and Afro/Indigenous Connections in the Global South,” Aboriginal (Kukuyalanj) Australian scholar Kiaya Aboahye (2018, 72) identifies the continent of Australia as one of the world's oldest living and continuing “black civilization,” with lines of transnational connections that rhizomatically link it to the rest of the global Black world. Creating a rich, cross-cultural network both within and outside of Australia, these connections include, but are not limited to, first and second-generation continental Africans, African Americans, Black Brits, Haitians, people of Afro-Caribbean and Aboriginal descent, Pacific and Pasifika Islanders: “Each of their experiences of blackness have shared spheres of influence, and often a historical connection to Aboriginal Australia.” Most nota-bly is the connection between Aboriginal Australian and African American peoples due to their suffering from almost shared (post)-colonial experiences. Aboriginal and African American political movements of the second half of the twentieth century, including the Civil Rights movement, Freedom Rides, and the Black Power movement, strived to create a sense of racial or “black” solidarity, not only on the national level, but also transnationally, even though the ethnic groups leading them demanded different sociopolitical rights. Whereas land rights have been specific to the struggle of Aboriginal peoples, as for them country has economic and spiritual significance, the wider spectrum of racist practices imposed on Aboriginal and African American peoples are mutually analogous and have enabled these peoples to consider a coalition-based activism. Consequently, Aboriginal Australian and African American political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s transgressed the national borders and were transnationally interconnected.

However, the lifelong history of political struggle between both peoples has been underestimated by many critics and teachers in both countries. In the United States, to begin with, though the exclusion of the African American history from the schools’ formal curriculum came to an end at the beginning of the 1960s, thanks to the efforts of Civil Rights activists (Smith 2003), since then, “[American] [t]eachers tended to present the ‘civil rights movement’ as a distinctly American event, from ‘Montgomery to Memphis,’ with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as its crowning moment” (Spero 2008, 22). Moreover, most of the literature that had been written about the African American Civil Rights movement since the 1960s denied the movement any long history or international impact or interaction.