African Liberation Day honors the long struggle of African peoples to free the continent from colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, and to build a united and liberated Africa. Its roots go back to April 15, 1958, when Kwame Nkrumah hosted the Conference of Independent African States in Accra. The eight independent nations that gathered there declared African Freedom Day to mark the progress of the liberation movement and the resolve of the continent's peoples to free themselves from foreign domination. On May 25, 1963, thirty-two independent African states met in Addis Ababa to found the Organization of African Unity. They set up a Liberation Committee to support the armed struggles still being waged against colonial and white-minority rule, and the day was renamed African Liberation Day.

In the years that followed, African Liberation Day became a day of solidarity with the movements fighting for the continent's freedom: the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the MPLA in Angola, ZANU and ZAPU in Zimbabwe, SWAPO in Namibia, and the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress in South Africa. The day crossed the Atlantic as well. In 1972 the African Liberation Support Committee organized demonstrations across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, bringing tens of thousands of people into the streets in solidarity with African liberation. Pan-African organizations such as the All-African People's Revolutionary Party have marked the day ever since.

The struggle African Liberation Day commemorates is not over. Formal independence has too often been followed by neocolonialism, as Nkrumah warned: control through debt, foreign military bases, multinational corporations, and the extraction of the continent's wealth. From the people of Western Sahara still fighting for their independence to the movements across the Sahel and the Congo demanding control of their own resources, African peoples continue to resist. African Liberation Day is a call to complete the work begun by the liberation movements: a free, united, and socialist Africa, and the liberation of African people everywhere.