On the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, within the Contemporary and Modern Art wing, I noticed a sphinx’s nose displayed on a shelf in the gift shop. Nearby, ten rooms were dedicated to “Flight into Egypt,” offering a distorted yet compelling lens into the history of Egyptophilia within Black America and across the global African diaspora. I studied the nose with interest: I couldn’t tell if I was intrigued or disgusted.

A Nas lyric swam into the forefront of my consciousness: “Shot off their nose to impose, what basically/still goes on today, you see.” In a later conversation, a colleague reflected, “There are tens, if not hundreds, of conversations happening within the exhibition.” What I saw on the shelf in the gift shop, a disembodied and decontextualized nose, reflected a deep ambivalence to the very real stakes faced by Black artists and communities reaching for Africa, from the time of Meta Warrick Fuller through to contemporary artists like Eric N. Mack and Lauren Halsey. This tension calls to mind the precarious position of early 19th-century Black scholars and artists who dared to claim ancient Egypt as their inheritance at a time when Egypt stood as both a beacon of Black excellence and a cornerstone of the white cultural imagination of civility.

By foregrounding the 19th-century engagement with Egyptology, we can see how notions of Black Power — often associated with militancy, separatism, and Afrocentrism — have always contained intellectual, cultural and historical dimensions that stretch across time and geography.

African Americans turned to Egyptology in the 19th century as a means of intellectual and cultural reclamation, positioning ancient Egypt as both a symbol of Black greatness and a refutation of white supremacist narratives. For Black thinkers like David Walker and Martin Delany, the grandeur of Egypt was not merely an abstract source of pride; it was a strategic intervention in an ongoing historical dispute.

To claim Egypt was to challenge not only the dehumanizing narratives of American slavery but also the very foundations of Western historiography, which sought to erase African contributions from world history.

This ideological struggle would reverberate across time, shaping the intellectual foundation of later movements for Black self-determination — including Pan-Africanism, the New Negro Movement, and ultimately, Black Power. This re-narrativization replaces Africa from the margins to the center of history, and places Black people at the center of our own world — a world in which we could claim membership amongst both royalty and laborers; a world in which we stood, and stand, as people with a past, and thus a future; a world in which power and movement were ours to hold.

At the same time, white scholars and institutions were engaged in their own ideological project, severing Egypt from the rest of Africa to absorb it into a Eurocentric vision of history, claiming that Egyptians phenotypically, socially, and culturally did not belong to the group Europeans had racialized as “Black.” Egypt became a battleground for racial meaning: To white historians, it was proof of Western civilization’s timeless superiority (circularly: because it was not Black, it was great; and because it was great, it was not Black); to Black intellectuals, it was evidence of Africa’s historical grandeur and a counterpoint to the racist assumption that Blackness was synonymous with primitiveness and servitude.

This dynamic can still be seen today. While Egypt is prominently featured in Western museums and academic institutions, it is often presented in a context that distances it from the rest of the continent. Meanwhile, contemporary Black artists and scholars continue to wrestle with the legacy of Egypt as both a site of inspiration and contested heritage. The struggle over history, identity and ownership is not merely academic. It has real stakes in how we Black people understand ourselves and our futures.

“Black Power” is often reduced to a set of easily recognizable figures — Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, or the speeches of Kwame Ture. However, its ideological breadth stretches beyond these familiar icons. The movement was not just about militancy or separatism; it was about sovereignty, labor radicalism and political independence. Three lesser-known case studies — the Republic of New Afrika, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and the National Black Independent Political Party — illustrate the range of Black Power’s ambitions.

The first recorded use of the term “Black Power” in a political context dates back to 1954, when Richard Wright, the renowned novelist, published his book Black Power, a travelogue and analysis of decolonization in Ghana.

Wright used the phrase to describe the process of African nations asserting self-determination in the face of European colonial rule. However, his use of the term did not carry the same militant, grassroots connotations that it later would in the U.S.

For more, including a connection of this argument to the stakes of historicizing Black Power, read the full piece via the Boston Ujima Project’s Ujima WIRE www.ujimaboston.com/blog

Cierra Michele Peters is an artist and writer. Her practice includes video, installation, writing, and experimental publishing. She is the Director of Communications, Culture & Enfranchisement at the Boston Ujima Project, a cooperative business, arts, and investment ecosystem built by and for Boston’s working-class communities of color.