Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies.

Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He left Martinique in 1943, when he volunteered to fight with the Free French in World War II, and he remained in France after the war to study medicine and psychiatry on scholarship in Lyon. Here he began writing political essays and plays, and he married a Frenchwoman, Jose Duble. Before he left France, Fanon had already published his first analysis of the effects of racism and colonization, Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks," in part based on his lectures and experiences in Lyon.

John Henrik Clarke was born in Union Springs, Alabama on January 1, 1915 to humble parents who affectionately called him, Bubba. As the eldest son of Alabama sharecroppers, he was constantly troubled by the aggregate of Southern racists’ behaviors and notions that relegated the humanity of people of African ancestry to a place of ill repute. In many of his lectures and public presentations, Dr. Clarke frequently highlighted a number of questions he did not know how to ask at a tender age. While Dr. Clarke modestly reflected on his own unsophisticated responses, the articulations provided around many of the puzzling questions, led to further inquiry and the subsequent emergence of an intellectual giant, master teacher, historian, literary genius, statesman, spiritual leader, and confidante of African royalty and ordinary peoples on the continent and in the African Diaspora.

Garvey was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Harlem in 1916 at the age of 28. In his homeland he had been an admirer of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of self-improvement for people of African descent and had formed the Jamaica Improvement Association. When he arrived in America his ideas expanded and he became a Black Nationalist. For him, Africa was the ancestral home and spiritual base for all people of African descent. His political goal was to take Africa back from European domination and build a free and United Black Africa. He advocated the Back-to-Africa Movement and organized a shipping company called the Black Star Line which was part of his program to conduct international trade between black Africans and the rest of the world in order to "uplift the race" and eventually return to Africa.