Title: Pan-Africanism | History, Achievements, & Facts | Britannica
Headings: Pan-Africanism
Pan-Africanism
History of Pan-Africanist intellectuals
The Pan-African Congress movement
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Pan-Africanism

Content: The Pan-African Congress movement
During the 20th century advocates of Pan-Africanism made many efforts to institutionalize their ideas and to create formal organizations to complement the work of Pan-Africanist intellectuals. The first meeting designed to bring together peoples of African descent for the purpose of discussing Pan-Africanist ideas took place in London in 1900. The organizer was Henry Sylvester Williams, a native of Trinidad. The meeting was attended by several prominent Blacks from Africa, Great Britain, the West Indies, and the United States. Du Bois was perhaps the most-prominent member of U.S. delegation. The first formal Pan-African Congress (the first to bear that name) took place in 1919 in Paris and was called by Du Bois. That meeting was followed by a second Pan-African Congress two years later, which convened in three sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris. The most-important result of the second Pan-African Congress was the issuance of a declaration that criticized European colonial domination in Africa and lamented the unequal state of relations between white and Black races, calling for a fairer distribution of the world’s resources. The declaration also challenged the rest of the world to either create conditions of equality in the places where people of African descent lived or recognize the “rise of a great African state founded in Peace and Goodwill.” After a third Pan-African Congress in 1923 and then a fourth in 1927, the movement faded from the world picture until 1945, when a fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England.