It was an era that saw a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiments, tied as they usually are to anxieties stirred by dizzying social and economic change.

In 1924, the government enacted one of the most restrictive immigration laws in American history.

The law established a quota system based on a country's previous immigration numbers.

And you know what that meant?

Northern and Western Europeans were favored.

All of a sudden, new British subjects who lived in the West Indies, places like Jamaica, had to face restrictions on their travel that hadn't existed before.

People can be refused without any kind of explanation.

Caribbean immigrants have been coming to this country since the turn of the 20th century, coming in numbers of several thousand, 5,000, 10,000 per year.

And then after 1924, those numbers sort of fall off a cliff.

Like most people from the Caribbean, the majority of Africans were subject to the quotas assigned to the European countries that had colonized them.

Despite the limits on Black immigration, there was an exception for students to attend American universities as long as they promised to return home when their education was over.

And many African students took advantage of that.

Africans were resisting colonialism and part of that was a resistance to British education or French education.

So, America becomes attractive for that reason.

And I think Black life in the United States, I would argue that that was a draw for many of those students.

They could interact with African American populations.

And the HBCUs reinforced that.

Howard, Lincoln, Tuskegee, Hampton.

In 1935, Kwame Nkrumah, raised in a fishing village in the Gold Coast, received a scholarship to attend historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Few could have predicted the impact that Nkrumah would have on the Black African independence movement.

African migrants come from backgrounds or communities who can support them to do advanced education in the United States.

Kwame Nkrumah's a product of Christian mission schools.

His first ambition was actually to become a Catholic priest, but by the time you insert him into the Jim Crowe United States at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, he's doing things like reading Marx and Ingles.

He's reading Marcus Garvey.

You see in some of their writings, right, discussions of how impacted and how influenced they were by African Americans.

By the 1940s, the African students learning about African American experiences and their politicization in terms of civil rights issues and vice versa.

African-Americans learning about African colonies.

We see these influences that they had on each other.

That's at the heart of Pan-Africanism.

Nkrumah also worked in a factory in Pennsylvania alongside working class African Americans, and that had to have had an influence on his political outlook.

He goes back radicalized.

Impressed by rising Black civil rights activism, Nkrumah returned home determined to push for his country's independence from Great Britain.

There is a new African in the world.

That new African is ready to fight his own battle and show that after all, the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.

In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister of the Independent Republic of Ghana.

Nkrumah's ascendancy to making Ghana the first Sub-Saharan African country to become independent is huge because he takes that Pan-African consciousness and uses Ghana's status as the first country to achieve independence as a platform for the country.

The rise in the political consciousness of African college students was an unintended consequence of their studies at American universities.

A number of these students emerged as leaders of independence movements in their respective countries, including Nnamde Azikiwe who would become the first president of Nigeria.

The fervor that we see in returning African students, we can pick lots of examples who went back and got very active in the nationalist movements in their countries.

They could no longer live under colonial oppression.

These nationalist movements where Africans were starting nationalist parties, it meant political protests, it meant petitions.

African-Americans were also influenced by seeing these newly independent African countries, these countries being led by Black men.

That would've influenced, I think, their understanding of where they were in their political movements.

Just 10 years ago on the African continent, our people were colonized.

They were suffering all forms of colonization, oppression, exploitation, degradation, humiliation, discrimination, and every other kind of -ation.

And in a short time, they have gained more independence, more recognition, more respect as human beings than you and I have.

You and I could study what they had done and perhaps gain from that study.