BETWEEN
HOMELAND AND
MOTHERLAND

Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America

Alvin B. Tillery Jr.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For Maferima and Norah, who live between America and Africa, and keep my heart with them in both places

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. “Not One Was Willing To Go!”: The Paradoxes of “Liberia’s Offerings”

2. “His Failure Will Be Theirs”: Why the Black Elite Resisted Garveyism and Embraced Ethiopia

3. Protecting “Fertile Fields”: The NAACP and Africa during the Cold War

4. “The Time for Freedom Has Come”: Black Leadership in the Age of Decolonization

5. “We Are a Power Bloc”: The Congressional Black Caucus and Africa

Conclusion

Notes

Preface

This book is about the complex ideational dynamics that shape the behavior of black politicians, social movement activists, and intellectuals as they engage with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. My journey to complete this project was rooted in some of the same ideas that pushed the subjects of this study to either embrace or reject an association with the continent of Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Fortunately, I always had the benefit of several dense networks of support as I confronted the dialectic process of understanding the ties that bind black Americans to their historical motherland.

There is no doubt that my initial interest in Africa was stoked by the many reassuring and rich conversations that I had about race relations with my immediate family in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, I first discovered that I was both black and a descendant of Africa when my parents, Alvin B. Tillery Sr. and Jacquelyn Peterson Tillery, sat me down in the living room of my maternal grandparents, Millar (“Jack”) Peterson and Thelma Peterson, to watch the premiere of the Roots miniseries on ABC. Even more vividly than the gruesome depiction of the “seasoning process,” in which the overseer forces LeVar Burton’s character, Kunta Kinte, to adopt the name Toby, I remember that the miniseries evoked long-buried oral traditions of African ancestry among my family members.

I carried these stories of my African nobility back to my school in the integrated Penrose Park neighborhood of West Philadelphia the following week, where they eventually blended in with the narratives my cohorts brought to school in the run up to St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day. Ironically, it was not until my parents, seeking better housing options, moved our family to a suburb in New Jersey that my African ancestry reentered the forefront of my consciousness. This time, however, my real connection to the continent emerged through the perpetual chants of “spear chucker” that I heard throughout the day from those who resented my presence in their formerly all-white space. I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents for countering this psychological assault by exposing my brother, Julian Ethan Tillery, and me to very tangible information about the realities of Africa through books, museums, and art in our home.

My formal education about both black politics and Africa began at Morehouse College in 1989. At Morehouse, I was fortunate to encounter highly competent and caring professors in both these fields. Professor Tobe Johnson taught me what it meant to do serious empirical research on the black presence in U.S. political institutions and was the first person to encourage me to view political science as my vocation. Professor Hamid Taqi, who was himself a political refugee from Sierra Leone, gave me my first sense of the realities of African postcolonial politics and economics.

I was also fortunate to encounter many faculty members at Morehouse who embraced modes of thought about racial identity in the United States and Africa that challenged the mainstream paradigms of my two primary mentors. Professor Hassan Crockett was the first person to expose me to ideas that now fall clearly within the field of black diaspora studies. I also owe a debt to Professor Aaron L. Parker, who sprinkled important readings on the debate over Afrocentricity into his courses on religion and philosophy. These experiences prepared me well for the robust debate that I would find raging over these issues when I arrived at Harvard University to begin my doctoral studies.

My interactions with classmates and friends at Morehouse and the entire Atlanta University Center opened my eyes to how deeply ambivalent black Americans were about both their status as Americans and relationship with Africa. Indeed, daily debates would break out on the “yards” of Morehouse, Spelman College, and Clark-Atlanta University about whether we as a people in the United States should call ourselves Black, Afro-Americans, African-Americans, or Africans and what obligations we owed to the race and the motherland. We never really resolved any of these issues, but the fact that we took as much joy from Nelson Mandela gaining his freedom as we did watching Douglas Wilder, the grandchild of slaves, win the governorship of Virginia in 1990 points to our shared baseline orientation toward pan-Africanism. I thank William O. Generett Jr., Brian Nelson, Edward Thomas, Melvin D. Smith II, Julian Tillery, Nicole (Hunt) Strange, Jennifer (Williams) Ben, Otis Moss III, Michelle (Hughis) Flagg, Shaka A. Rasheed, Ardythe (Williams) Mitchell, Thomas Espy, Lawrence Humphreys, Jamal Bryant, Deidre Bailey, Seldon Peden, Afi Davis, Philip Edmonds, Torre Jessup, and Nima Warfield for helping me navigate these debates.

When I entered Harvard University to pursue my doctoral studies in political science in 1993, my plan was to study comparative politics with a focus on state formation and democratic transitions in Africa. I am thankful for the warm reception and excellent training that I received from the distinguished Harvard community of Africanist scholars: Robert Bates, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martin Kilson, Jennifer Widner, and Emanuel Ackyeampong. I am particularly grateful to Professor Bates for becoming my primary advisor as I prepared a proposal for a study of the restoration of traditional monarchies in transitional Uganda and pursued a grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to fund the project. Moreover, the support that I received from Professor Bates when I finished in the “honorable mention” pile of the SSRC competition gave me the courage to stay in the Ph.D. program and shift directions to the project that ultimately became the foundation for this book.

I also thank Professor Bates for urging me to ask Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, who had collaborated with him during their overlapping tenures at Duke University, to serve on my committee for the project. Professor Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) had been the key text in helping me (and most of my cohorts in the Harvard African studies seminars) shed essentialist thinking about Africa.

As any graduate student knows, just because one has the option of working with a faculty member does not mean that it will happen. I thank Professor Appiah for taking me on as a student in the midst of his frenzied schedule as a writer, teacher, and public intellectual. Whatever I know about the historiography of the Pan-African movement, I learned from him. I am also grateful to Professor Appiah for maintaining an open-door policy with me as I finished the project and for continuing to provide encouragement as I generated the revisions that led to this book. Finally, I am deeply indebted to him for providing me with a host of professional development experiences during my Harvard years, including my first teaching assistantship and lecture opportunities.

Whereas Professors Bates and Appiah helped me nail down the dimensions of the project in terms of African politics and Pan-African history, Professor Michael Jones-Correa was the one who ensured that this project fit within the subfield of American politics. Indeed, it was through my interactions with Professor Jones-Correa that I gained exposure to the core theories that animate the study of U.S. racial and ethnic politics. His multimethod approach to these issues in U.S. politics was also a great source of inspiration. Moreover, the almost daily conversations that I had with him about the project and his meticulous attention to my chapters kept me on pace in the final stages of writing. Finally, I owe him thanks for urging me to reconceptualize (and not abandon) the project when it became clear that two important works published in the same year that I graduated from Harvard mirrored my approach.

I also thank Professors Louise Richardson, Peter Hall, Richard “Dick” Neustadt, Morris Fiorina, Ken Shepsle, Keith Bybee, Peter Berkowitz, and Nathan Glazer for supportive comments and conversations during my six years at Harvard. Interactions with my cohort—Eric Narcisse, Jason Needleman, Kira Sanbonmatsu, Claudine Gay, Joao Resende-Santos, J. P. Gownder, Ben Berger, Kanchan Chandra, Stephen Marshall, Shirley Thompson-Marshall, Naunihal Singh, Lawrence Hamlet, and Jacques Hymans—during my Harvard days and beyond have also enriched the project. Finally, I would have never survived my days in Cambridge without the support of Daniel Victor Alexandre, Jimmy Price, Allison Carter-Marlowe, Bit (Bingham) Alexander, Betty Bingham, Hafsat Abiola, D’yetra (Hall) Mendes, Pamela Boone, Carter Morse, Giana Eckardt, Chris Douglas, and Ayanna (Hudson) Higgins.

I completed most of the research that gave this project new life during my six years as a junior faculty member at the University of Notre Dame. Obviously, the most significant experience of my time at Notre Dame was meeting my wife, Maferima (Touré) Tillery, a native of Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. Merging our two families and bringing our daughter Norah into the world has only reaffirmed my belief that Africa is a second home front for black Americans. I thank Maferima and Norah for their enduring patience as I worked through many evenings and weekends to complete this book. I also thank Mariam (Mama) Touré for providing so much support to all of us during this time.

Beyond my family, I am also grateful for the many supportive voices that I found among my faculty colleagues during my Notre Dame years. I am particularly indebted to Rodney Hero, Eileen Hunt Botting, Layna Mosley, Peri Arnold, David Nickerson, Alexandra Guisinger, Ruth Abbey, Dianne Pinderhughes, Michael Zuckert, John Roos, Richard Pierce, Hugh Page, Neal Delaney, Toni Irving, Tom Guglielmo, and Emily Osborn for their feedback and encouragement. Angela Ingram, Maria Mota Monteiro, Christy Fleming-Greene, Alan Greene, T. D. Ball, Mariana Sousa, Anabella Espana-Najera, Cheri Gray, Keir Lieber, Carolina Arroyo, Kathy Johndrow, Gina Shropshire, Reanna Ursin, Josh Kaplan, Shawtina Ferguson, and Charles Hedman provided me with a dense social network of support. Finally, the Notre Dame McNair Scholars program and Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts provided me with funding to hire an excellent corps of research assistants that included John Biel Henry, Michell Chresfield, Meagan Brittain, William David Williams, Andrea DeVries, Shanida Sharpe, Angela Huang, Jazmin Garcia, Vanessa Allen, Dagoberto Garcia, and Cora Fernandez.

During my fourth year at Notre Dame, I was fortunate to win the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The center provided me with generous financial support and space to complete the archival research that distinguishes this book from the original project. I am grateful to James Jackson, Kevin Kelly Gaines, Penny Von Eschen, Lori Brooks, Julius Scott III, V. Robin Grice, Derrick “Chuck” Phillips, and Don Simms for their incredible hospitality during my year at the center.

I completed the book during my transition to a teaching post at Rutgers University. Conversations with my new colleagues, Jane Junn, Dennis Bathory, Lisa Miller, Dan Tichenor, Beth Leech, Rick Lau, and Kira Sanbonmatsu, kept me focused and filled with confidence in these last days. I also thank Hanes Walton, Paul Frymer, Janelle Wong, Shayla Nunnally, Niambi Carter, Chrissy Greer, Dorian Warren, Ira Katznelson, Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, John Skrentny, Dennis Chong, Desmond King, Phil Klinkner, Mark Sawyer, Reuel Rogers, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for insightful and supportive comments on the work.

I would be remiss if I did not thank Roger Haydon, Peter Wissoker, and Michael McGandy for shepherding the manuscript through the process at Cornell University Press. I am also grateful to Candace Akins, Julie Nemer, and the incredibly efficient Cornell University Press copyediting and production team. Finally, I thank Reanna Ursin, Julie Brunneau, Jennifer Molidor, and Sophie Cox for the freelance copyediting services they provided at various stages in the development of the manuscript.

Part of the section in chapter 3 titled “Keeping Africa Safe from the Reds” is drawn from my essay “G. Mennen ‘Soapy’ Williams and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa: Rethinking the Origins of Multiculturalism in U.S. Foreign Policy,” which appears in Hanes Walton and Robert Louis Stevenson, eds., The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007). Similarly, the sections in chapter 5 titled “Welcome to the House” and “The Diggs Plan” were published as part of my article “Foreign Policy Activism and Power in the House of Representatives: Black Members of Congress and South Africa, 1968–1986,” which appears in Studies in American Political Development 20, no. 1 (2006): 88–103.