Pan-African Oil: Natural Resource Management in the U.S. Community Control Movement

• In Event: Environmental Struggles in Africa and the Diaspora

Description for Program

In 1972 the Twenty-First Century Foundation, one of the United States’ two Black endowed foundations, partnered with grassroots organizers in South Carolina to stem the tide of tax sales and foreclosures in the Lowcountry. Simultaneously, the foundation invested a large portion of its endowment in efforts to build an explicitly Pan-African oil trade between Algeria and Secruoser, a new African American-owned oil company. This investment collapsed following the 1973 oil crisis, depleting the foundation’s resources and necessitating the liquidation of at least one thousand of acres of southern land held by its Emergency Land Fund.

Unpacking this brief but consequential episode of Black philanthropic and business history brings natural resource management into the postwar history of Black corporate internationalism, highlighting the contradictions ‘black empowerment’ advocates embraced and the constraints they navigated as they attempted to develop black America. Using the records of the 21st Century Foundation and oral histories with Secruoser associates, this paper provides a Black ecological analysis of the 1973 oil shock.

Author

• Dominique Hazzard, University of Minnesota