Part IV

“The Dark World Goes Free”

When Kwame Nkrumah traveled to the United States in July 1958 as leader of the new independent state of Ghana, 10,000 African Americans lined the long motorcade’s route to New York’s 369th Coast Artillery Armory on 143rd street and 5th Avenue. The New York Times headline the next day read “Harlem Hails Ghanaian Leader as Returning Hero.”¹ Inside a packed hall, 7,000 more jostled for places and struggled to hear the welcome of Ralph Bunche, the 1950 Nobel laureate and undersecretary of the United Nations.

Luckily, Harold Isaacs, a research associate from MIT’s Center for International Studies was at the armory meeting and taking notes, since none of Bunche’s biographers and interpreters has discussed this public moment of racialism and pan-Africanist pride on the part of someone who had routinely rejected such identifications. In fact, black Muslims in the audience booed him as he took the stage.³ Isaacs concluded that Bunche was most likely responding to the mood of the crowd, because in a follow-up private interview he responded as we might have expected, by deprecating the idea of any “kinship” with African peoples.⁴

Isaacs, who is all but forgotten now in the many recent studies of the Center for International Studies and the putative origins of “development” and “modernization” theory, was then deep into the research project he had launched at MIT, “World Affairs Impact on U.S. Race Relations,” what he would call “The Break Down of the World-Wide White Supremacy System” after 1945.⁵ The study would take him from Little Rock in 1956 to Accra in 1961.⁶

Alain Locke, reliably, had gotten there first. In November 1942, the Survey Graphic, which had published his special number on Harlem seventeen years earlier, published “The Unfinished Business of Democracy.” In the planning meeting, Locke pressed a roomful of people who were thinking in vague terms about how to overcome the ignorance of whites to zero in on the problem Jim Crow posed for any future American effort at world leadership. His introductory essay returned to the idea of global interconnection (“forces which have all but annihilated longitude and latitude”) that had been in eclipse during the world depression. For the United States, the “good neighbor policy,” the “practical altruisms of lend-lease aid,” and the principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter suggested that the prospects were good for “leadership in an emancipated new world.”

Locke ended by outlining the consequences for U.S. foreign policy for a state and society in which the balance of forces continued to sustain the “inconsistent half-way democracy which, before this war, conferred freedom for some and subordination for others.” Postwar difficulties in the Caribbean, the less-than-whole-hearted cooperation of the Pan-American Union (after 1948 the Organization of American States) with the United States, and continued support for colonial imperialism in Asia and Africa would lay “the groundwork for a global color war.”

Locke anticipated Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s argument about racism’s challenge to the “American creed” in The American Dilemma, which appeared in 1944. Myrdal’s last chapter, “America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem,” sounds a lot like Locke too. He emphasizes the costs that continuing white supremacy would exact on American efforts to lead a postwar world in which the “colored races” were bound to increase in numbers and power. In Myrdal’s version, however, the anxiety, similar to the anxieties of the 1890s and 1920s, was palpable, and it is striking that most commentaries then and now fail to note it.⁸ Unless ways were found to live “on peaceful terms with colored people,” then fueled by their own “race prejudice,” they would be “satisfied only by the whites’ humiliation and subjugation.”⁹

We can trace writings in both sober and apocalyptic registers through the 1950s and 1960s. St. Clair Drake, a sociologist at Roosevelt University, said that the structural position and global ambition of the United States at the time of the Korean War explained the repudiation of racism, similar to what was happening with colonial powers who were conscious of their less-than-secure hold on their dependencies. South Africa, on the other hand, which had no global position to defend, appeared to pursue its apartheid policy with impunity.¹⁰ Drake also recognized the possibility for reversals if the world crisis sharpened. “Whether or not espousal of ‘civil rights for Negroes’ becomes separated, in the popular mind, from ‘Communist agitation’ may be a decisive factor.”¹¹ Conflating the two was in fact a basic part of the South’s defense of the status quo for the rest of the decade.¹²

Fifteen years later, and in the wake of the brutality unleashed on demonstrators in Selma and Birmingham, C. Eric Lincoln returned to the international system’s effects on the fortunes of the civil rights movement in “The Race Problem and International Relations.”¹³ He traced the impact of World War II and the Cold War on the transformation of what had been a common international system of exploitation of nonwhite peoples (“we were all members of the same club”) into a major foreign policy problem for the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Lincoln suggested that a civil rights movement by itself couldn’t explain recent policy changes because African Americans had never stopped struggling for liberation since Plessy v Ferguson. Lincoln also underscored the limitations of reforms that were pursued on strategic rather than ethical (“justice”) grounds, as was the case with the Truman administration’s civil rights commission report, To Secure These Rights, that nonetheless were intended to win over the hearts and minds of “the peoples of the world.” Such efforts fueled the cynicism about U.S. foreign policy pronouncements in an era of support for the white minority regimes in southern Africa and war in Southeast Asia.¹⁴

More of the popular, scholarly, and policy writing and pronouncing of the time, however, illustrates the problem of “threat inflation,” specifically of the race war that putatively threatened one or more parts of the Anglosphere (when it still included South Africa) and thus of “civilization.”¹⁵ The argument almost always took the same form. Darker people, who typically although not necessarily were mobilized across colonial and later national boundaries—or in the U.S. case across state lines—would band together in a campaign of cataclysmic violence against whites. Most saw the abnormal psychology of subjugated peoples and the racialism and “rabid” nationalism that feelings of inferiority, alienation, and hatred for whites produced in them as the driving forces behind (or primary causes of) the future war. In addition, communist organizing and propaganda played a part in turning these latent forces into lethal ones.

These ideas appear in the memoranda of countless colonial and state department bureaucrats posted in the Caribbean, the Gold Coast, Burma, and elsewhere.¹⁶ Issues of Foreign Affairs in the 1950s and 1960s include matter-of-fact descriptions of the hatred for whites that drives decolonization and the psychological impairments that communists so masterfully exploit. For example, Francis Sayre, a retiring U.S. representative on the UN Trusteeship Council, made the case for providing aid for development in Africa even where “feelings of racial inferiority…offer serious hindrances to Western attempts to build bulwarks for freedom” lest whites “reap the whirlwind.”¹⁷ In the New York Times, foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger wrote repeatedly about race wars that were allegedly already under way, for example in Algeria, and were on the horizon throughout the 1960s.¹⁸ One problem is that the officials and intellectuals who came to the defense of U.S. policy found themselves rebutting charges that the wartime and Cold War administrations were themselves conducting race wars against Japan in the 1940s and in Korea in the 1950s. Thus, Douglas MacArthur insisted in an interview in the country’s influential African-American daily, the Pittsburgh Courier, that great efforts by U.S. enemies were under way to provoke “racial war.”¹⁹ FDR’s former advisor and president of the Twentieth Century Fund Adolph Berle Jr. insisted the same about the Soviet strategy after the 1954 covert U.S. overthrow of the government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala. Soviet propaganda “sets up the United States as the enemy of the Indian in this hemisphere. This is a plain bid to let loose a race war far wider than Central America…to create another Malaya or Indochina in great parts of this hemisphere.”²⁰ A few years later, he wrote in his diary that “we shall have pretty soon, not one Cold War but two or three: Communist against non-Communist; Negro against White; possibly Asian against them all. The mills of the gods of hatred may grind slowly but they grind terribly.”²¹ If more proof is needed that the concept of race war formed part of the international common sense of the Anglosphere, consider economist and pioneering game theorist Thomas Schelling’s seminal 1958 article “The Strategy of Conflict: Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory.” His interest was in “the non-zero sum games involved in wars and threats of war, strikes, negotiations, criminal deterrence, class war, race war, price war, and blackmail” for which traditional game theory had not yielded much insight or advice.²²

Unsurprisingly, the versions of race war theory African Americans favored saw the root causes of the impending crisis differently. The long era of imperial exploitation of so-called darker peoples, underpinned by ideologies of master and subject races, had produced the seeds of its own destruction. However, whites placed too much weight on the psychological by-products (resentment, inferiority) among those they had subjugated and not enough on their own largely intact arrogance and sense of superiority. The chief danger was not reverse racialism but the quite natural, albeit tragic, resistance whites exhibited to the notion of relinquishing power.

When African American economist Robert S. Browne published Race Relations in International Affairs in 1961, the press added an introduction by Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the head of the oldest human rights organization in the United States, the International League for the Rights of Man. Baldwin conceded the point about white supremacy being the crux of the problem but added that “darker peoples, too, are guilty of racial superiority, discrimination and domination among themselves” and suggested that the “world struggle” was not “quite so wholly the white vs black problem.”²³

No one tried harder to anticipate and rebut arguments about the role of imperialism and white supremacy in the new rising tide of color than Sunday Times editor H. V. Hodson in his important 1950 address “Race Relations in the Commonwealth” at Chatham House. The onetime editor of the journal of British imperial relations, the Round Table, began with the thesis that race conflict threatened the survival of civilization even more than the struggle with communism, and he ended with an appeal for the creation of a new institute of race relations.²⁴ In between he sought less successfully to salvage, despite the evidence from biologists, his belief in the inherent inequality between the races (“I daresay you cannot tell a greengage chemically from a plum, but they are different, and some may consider the one superior to the other, at least in some respects”) and, in disagreement with advocates of “one man, one vote,” prospects for a “liberal and enlightened form of apartheid.” Although it was true that imperialism’s “alinement” with race—which was “to some extent accidental and by no means necessary”—might have amplified the race problem, the days of imperialism were numbered. Something else called “color consciousness,” which Hodson distinguished from “race,” not least because without it he had no way to explain conflict between the “brown people” of South Asia who were part of the same race as their antagonists the “white people,” was another force multiplier, and it mattered more because it was “inescapable,” as old as history.²⁵

The prospecting for race war intensified in the aftermath of the April 1955 meeting of leaders of twenty-nine North African, Middle Eastern, and Asian states at Bandung, Indonesia, where nationalist forces had fought some of their most bitter battles against the Dutch in the late 1940s. For those primed to see it, the Asian-African Conference, or, as it is more commonly remembered, the Bandung Conference, brought the world’s colored peoples together and thus hastened the coming Pan-Asian or Afro-Asian or Black or Brown-Yellow or Third World–wide war against the white man. Thus, according to one memo to Nelson Rockefeller, the U.S. president’s special advisor for psychological warfare and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s representative in the small group that coordinated clandestine operations, a basic goal was to counter “colored vs. white” movement, which was allegedly led by Red China, and “prevent Africans and Asians from ganging up against the United States.”

The problem with all the pre- and post-Bandung accounts of the threat (or, for some, hope) of the unity of the colored peoples, the bandwagoning of the yellow, brown, and black races, and so forth, is that it presumed the validity, that is, the universality, of this particular world view. The delegates at Bandung never argued that what united otherwise disparate religions, regions, and commitments was something called race or color. Color was a fact for some and not for others, but for no one was it what united them. On the contrary, many rejected the idea that color mattered. They called it racialism and warned against appealing to it as a dangerous and retrograde step. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, for one, detested such talk.²⁷

The Howard school’s Merze Tate wrote one of the only two critiques I know of the exaggeration of color consciousness in the decolonization era in the form of a review of the novelist Richard Wright’s book on Bandung, The Color Curtain.²⁸ All the race war analyses of the 1950s and 1960s rested on the same exaggerated belief in the significance of racial identification. When Arnold J. Toynbee, one of the most famous historians of the era and the head of studies at Chatham House for two decades, wrote a long and sober assessment of the likelihood of conflict between the white race and a “coalition of all the other races” for the New York Times Magazine, a reader wrote in to challenge a key assumption. Toynbee “calls Pakistan and India ‘non-white’ states, and says their peoples are of the same ‘non-white’ race. This is absurd. If he differentiates strictly on skin color, then he must also consider the swarthy people of Mediterranean lands as non-white. If it isn’t skin color, then what is his criterion?”²⁹

As we will see, Isaacs’s Center for International Studies study, published as New World of Negro Americans (1963), stands out as the most sophisticated—and certainly the most detailed—analysis of the impact of the end of empire and white supremacy. Isaacs is the only instance I know of someone challenging the misleading assumptions (and deep-seated fears) that underpinned the varieties of race war theory on offer, as is evident in his article “Color in World Affairs” in Foreign Affairs (1969). The problem is that neither he nor other scholars ever took seriously the degree of threat inflation involved when the case for African American freedom was harnessed to America’s hegemonic ambitions, as if the alignment strategies of leaders and the “hearts and minds” of the masses of dozens of new Third World states and states-in-the-making would actually turn on the fate of Jim Crow in the U.S. South. I’m afraid that Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who got so much else wrong in the 1950s, was right about the emerging international order.

“Why just this week,” Faubus told Isaacs in 1956,

That exaggeration or threat that racism at home would somehow act to undermine the hegemonic ambitions of the United States (or, if you prefer, “containment”) of course also rested on a false belief about the powerful pull that racial identification or color had on the foreign policy practices of Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Saudis, and others. Thus, President Eisenhower opposed the use of military force to “break” the renegade Egyptian ex-client Gamal Abdel Nasser after he nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, fearing that intervention would recoil against the United States, because Nasser “personified the emotional demands of the people in the area…for slapping the white man down.”³¹

Finally, it is important to emphasize what one of Isaacs’s friends and colleagues from the earliest days of the Center for International Studies, Donald Blackmer, told me. No one else at MIT and nearby Harvard thought of Isaacs as a proper international relations scholar. No article or book by any of those more readily identified this way at the time ever discussed let alone spoke so powerfully about racism’s role in the post–World War II state system. It was as if department, center, and institute heads had all received the same strategy memos as the Anglo-American diplomats who were charged with depoliticizing the issue.³² However, the academics operated within the same racial frame. For example, Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann listed race as a primary unifying factor of the North Atlantic zone of peace (“its inhabitants are predominantly white”).³³ As we will see, the main exceptions to the informal “see no evil” (save totalitarianism) norm, predictably, were the two new conservative institutes of the era, the Foreign Policy Research Institute founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and the old Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford, which was given a new profile and a new identity as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in 1957. Their scholars made the late case for colonialism and, more notoriously, for the biological basis of a world order of racial superiority and inferiority.