The Iranian Students Association (ISA), the U.S. affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students, contributed to and was transformed by the post-World War II era of social protest and Third World revolutionary consciousness. Beginning just after the 1953 coup d’état, tens of thousands of Iranian students arrived on U.S. campuses with a clear mission: to assimilate American expertise and return home to ‘modernize’ Iran. However, because their access to the ‘land of opportunity’ was the result of Iran’s subverted sovereignty, a minority of these students became fierce critics, rather than dutiful pupils, of American values. Far from home, this militant and raucous cohort organized a powerful transnational movement to expose the links between U.S. empire and dictatorship in Iran. In the process, they came to identify with and participate in other diasporic liberation movements, particularly those against racism and war. This paper focuses on the forgotten history of Iranian joint organizing with African American and African foreign student activists. ISA members fought police, went to jail, and risked deportation not only to oppose the Shah but to fight racism and state repression against Black and other racialized minorities in the U.S. Rather than simply a product of anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that memory, a melancholic relationship to loss, righteous indignation and an irrepressible desire for justice were the terrain on which Afro-Iranian connections were forged in the heat of struggle. Through interviews with former ISA members and archival materials from the ISA, Black radical organizations and student newspapers, I look at how different histories of repression and resistance became articulated through a set of revolutionary affects that could only emerge in the context of a U.S. diaspora. Iranian student revolutionaries in the U.S. situated themselves in a peer relationship to other victims of state-sponsored violence, understanding their struggles as inextricably intertwined rather than separate. The feeling and practice of solidarity that became possible in this context indexes a highpoint of resistance to the expansion of an empire the U.S. continues to disavow. It also places the Iranian freedom struggle in proximity to the histories, suffering, movements and migrations of others, mapping a global web of affiliations and internationalist identifications that have been almost unthinkable in the post-revolutionary diasporic context.