Draft:Bill Sutherland (Pan-Africanist)

• Comment: I see no reliable independent secondary sources that actually discuss the subject. This, for instance, is not going to help: it's a press release on a website for press releases. The book is not referenced either: you can link the book, but what does that do? What needs to be provided is secondary sourcing that proves this book is worth noting. Drmies (talk) 16:21, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: inappropriate place for large quotes without context that do not contribute to the article. Consider wikiquote instead Addressed. Ongoing guidance and discussion on authors talk page in regards to {{cn}} tags. microbiologyMarcus ^{[petri dish·growths]} 16:09, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

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Bill Sutherland (24 December, 1918 - 2 January, 2010) was an African American pacifist and Pan African activist. In the 1940s he spent four years in prison for being a conscientious objector during World War II. Much of his adult life was focused on supporting civil rights struggles in the United States and peaceful liberation movements in Africa. In 1953 he helped found the American Committee on Africa, which in 2001 merged with other organizations to become Africa Action. He was also active in the Congress of Racial Equality, Americans for South African Resistance, Peace Brigades International, and several other organizations.

In 2000, he published, along with Matt Meyer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation, a book which examined the various anti-colonial strategies in Africa.

Biography

Sutherland's father was Willliam Henry Sutherland, who worked as a dentist, and his mother was Reiter Thomas Sutherland. He had two siblings, Reiter and Muriel. He was raised in Glen Ridge, a predominantly white New Jersey suburb. In an article "The Vaughan Family: A Tale of Two Continents," Era Bell Thompson connects the Sutherlands of Glen Ridge to an African American extended family tracing its lineage to Scipio Vaughan of South Carolina, an enslaved African and skilled ironmonger who not only purchased his freedom but sent two of his sons back to Yorubaland in present day Nigeria to form prominent African branch of his family.

While he recounts instances of racism, he and Muriel were high achievers in academics and successful in extra-curricular activities. When young, his father took him to hear a lecture by an "Indian Nationalist describing Gandhi and the movement for the independence of India." In his teens he began to link civil rights in the United States with the anti-colonial movement and non-violent action and civil disobedience remained an influence throughout his life.

Upon graduating from Bates College in 1940, he joined the American Friends Service Committee's student peace service for a summer stint. He was imprisoned later in the 1940s at Lewisburg Federal Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania for refusing to serve in the US military during World War II on conscientious grounds. Sutherland's time as a Conscientious Objector to war was documented in the film The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It.

During his imprisonment, he would befriend other pacifists with whom he would later organize for nuclear disarmament such as David Dellinger, Ralph DiGia and George Houser. In 1951, in the early days of the Cold War, Sutherland, DiGia, Dellinger, and Quaker pacifist Art Emory constituted the Peacemaker bicycle project, which took the message of nuclear disarmament to both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Sutherland moved to Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) in 1953 in coordination with War Resisters' International. He was an active supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's Pan-Africanist leader. During his time in Ghana, Sutherland worked under then-Finance Minister Komla Gbedema and served as an unofficial ambassador who worked to build bridges between Africans and African Americans. As an influential member of the African American expatriate community and an ardent Pan Africanist, he helped make numerous connections, among others, arranging the important 1957 meeting between Nkrumah and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who were invited to Ghana to celebrate independence from Britain and working with George Padamore on Pan African events and affairs, inadvertently introducing Finance Minister Gbedema first-hand to the segregation that existed in the United States.

In 1954 he married Efua Theodora Sutherland, a Ghanaian playwright, director, dramatist, children's author, poet, educationalist, researcher, child advocate, and cultural activist. They had three children – scholar, educationalist and cultural activist Esi Sutherland-Addy, architect Ralph Sutherland, and lawyer and educator Amowi Sutherland Phillips. In 1963 Sutherland moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he held a number of government posts including Advisor to the Tanganyika Delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations and Refugee and Resettlement Officer in the Vice President's office. He helped develop the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), later renamed the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA). The group campaigned for the independence of the countries of East and Central Africa.

Sutherland continued to connect with leaders throughout Africa such as Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Agostinho Neto, Nathan Shamuyarira, Joshua Nkomo, Sam Nujoma, along with peers in the civil rights and Pan African movements such as Desmond Tutu, Bayard Rustin, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Jesse Jackson, and Prexy Nesbitt.

In 1974 he re-joined the American Friends Service Committee as an international representative. He worked with several of the liberation movements in eastern and southern Africa at that time such as Namibia, Zimbabwe (then Northern Rhodesia), South Africa. Because Sutherland was someone who connected people and ideas, his role with the AFSC at that time was to garner support for the liberation struggles in the Front Line States, which include Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and, from 1980, Zimbabwe. On its website, the AFSC wrote posthumously of Sutherland’s work: "Bill was instrumental in developing a practice of broad dialogue throughout the organization and the US-based peace and justice movements. Bill could be found discussing African liberation with African American workers in the South, Chicano activists in the Southwest and Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Bill's efforts challenged the view that people of color did not bring an international perspective to their community based work."

Sutherland was the recipient of various awards for his activism and peacemaking, including receiving an honorary doctorate from Bates College, his alma mater, in 1983. In 2009 he received the War Resisters League Peace Award.

In 2000, he published, along with Matt Meyer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation, a book which examined the various anti-colonial strategies in Africa. In the forward to the book, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote that "Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people... They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness."