Human history has seen so many incredible movements that have created lasting change and planted the seeds of racial justice that we continue to tend and nurture. Our Movement Moments articles briefly lift up significant movement legacies whose wisdom, strategies, and visions we continue.  The Bandung Conference offers us a legacy of international solidarity.  

The Bandung Conference was a gathering of Asian and African countries that took place in Indonesia for a week in April 1955.  With delegates from 29 countries, the conference was the first in modern history to bring together and center the needs, struggles, dreams and resources of Asian and African peoples and politics, without interference by the US and Western Europe.  Finding solidarity in their struggles as new and emerging postcolonial entities, these countries committed to common economic development beyond colonialism through technological, cultural and humanitarian exchanges.  Notably, the conference condemned racial discrimination and specifically called on South Africa to end its violent practices of racial apartheid.  As historian Kyle Haddad-Fonda remarks, “the [Bandung] Conference must be recognized as an event that encouraged many leaders of developing countries to articulate a vision of global anti-imperialist cooperation beyond their own borders.”  This kind of decolonial Third World international solidarity and coalition building is a key strategy for moving us toward racial justice.

Learn more about the Bandung Conference here.

Read about or listen to histories of African and Asian movement solidarity in the US.

Check out the first season of the podcast The Wedge hosted by Dr. Joyce Del Rosario, exploring AAPI faith-based social justice organizers and their work in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.