When a plane carrying African American congressman Mickey Leland crashed in Ethiopia on August 7, 1989, killing him and all fourteen others on board, Leland tragically accomplished in death what he had not been able to in life: normalize diplomatic relations between Ethiopia and the United States. Since the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, which had brought a Soviet-allied military junta called the Derg and its chairman, Mengistu Haile Mariam, to power, relations between the two nations had collapsed.

In response to the Ethiopian famine of 1983 to 1985, however, Leland was able to overcome Cold War politics and one of its leading purveyors, President Ronald Reagan. Drawing on a commitment to internationalism born of his roots in the Black Power movement, Leland — a six-term congressman from Houston — helped pressure Reagan and his own colleagues in Congress to provide Ethiopia with millions of dollars in food aid and funding.

By the time Leland returned to Ethiopia in 1989 — this time to help address a crisis originating in another part of Africa’s Sahel region, the Second Sudanese Civil War — he was lobbying a new US president, George H. W. Bush, to normalize relations with Mengistu. But it was only in the aftermath of Leland’s death, with Ethiopian and US search and rescue teams working together to locate his missing plane, that a direct line of communication between the two countries’ leaders finally opened. Unfortunately, rapprochement would not take black internationalism to new heights but instead signal its high-water mark in US electoral politics.