Our Mission
1800s - Present
AAI Timeline
Co-founder William Leo Hansberry and the Winding Recovery of AAI’s Founding Vision
This timeline, which begins with the ignominious “Scramble for Africa” that officially commenced in 1884, was designed as a companion piece to William Leo Hansberry’s Holistic Vision of “World History,” one of the articles featured in the March 2024 newsletter. Framed as an overview of the “Winding Recovery of AAI’s Founding Vision,” the timeline features portions of Hansberry's lifework. The chronology encompasses 140 years of complex of economic, political, social, and cultural events, ideas, and forces—some of which continue to unfold. It includes only a fraction of the people, institutions, and events that have contributed to and shaped AAI’s existence. Nonetheless, our hope is that the vivid detail that it does contain helps to convey the rich historical context from which AAI derives its continued relevance.
• People and events directly tied to AAI
1884
At the Berlin Conference convened by Otto von Bismarck, 13 European powers meet to commence the so-called “Scramble for Africa”—the process of carving up the African continent based on European imperial ambitions rather than existing political and ethnic boundaries.
1894
William Leo Hansberry is born on February 25, 1894, in Gloster, Mississippi—just 31 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and less than 50 years after Liberia declared independence from the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by “a group of white Americans…to deal with the ‘problem’ of the growing number of free blacks in the United States” (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian).
1900
European imperial powers rule roughly 90% of the African continent, up from what had been 10% in the 1870s.
1914
World War I begins.
1915
Filmmaker D.W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation—a three-hour epic film that glorifies the Klu Klux Klan. President Woodrow Wilson hosts a screening at the White House, and the film is credited with the KKK’s twentieth-century revitalization. Black Americans across the U.S. demonstrate and protest against the film’s racists portrayals and distortions of Reconstruction. See "Fighting Lightning with Fire: Black Boston's Battle against 'The Birth of a Nation'” by Paul Polgar to learn more.
1916
In the summer after completing his freshman year at Atlanta University, Hansberry reads and is greatly inspired by The Negro (1915), W.E.B DuBois’s history of Africa in antiquity.