Before Zohran Kwame Mamdani stepped into New York City Hall to become the city’s youngest mayor in over 40 years, his namesake, Kwame Nkrumah, was actively dismantling British colonial rule in Ghana in the 1950s. The Ghanaian revolutionary spent a decade in the United States and the United Kingdom working alongside political icons like W.E.B. Related: Blackity-Black Things You Didn’t Know About Zohran MamdaniEducation(Lincoln University via Getty Images)In 1934, he applied for his first overseas undergraduate program: Sociology at Lincoln University, the nation’s first historically Black university, and enrolled the following year. During his time in the United States, Nkrumah met several iconic Black intellectuals, including Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, historian C.L.R. Although his political power ended on a sour note, Nkrumah remains one of the most famous and important Pan-Africanists today.