4
“THE TIME FOR FREEDOM HAS COME”
Black Leadership in the Age of Decolonization
The liberation struggle in Africa has been the greatest single international influence on American Negro students. Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break Jim Crow.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “The Time for Freedom Has Come,” New York Times Magazine, 1961
I thank the NAACP for giving me a chance to fight back. Were it not for the NAACP, I might have been a Mau Mau or a Black Muslim, and I thank God for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
—Lucien H. Holman, President of Illinois NAACP, speech delivered before the Fifty-Fourth Annual Convention, July 3, 1963
On February 17, 1961, Ralph Johnson Bunche addressed the delegations of the member states to the United Nations General Assembly. Although Bunche, who became the first black person to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1950 for his role as a mediator between Israel and the Arab states on behalf of the UN, had addressed the General Assembly many times before, this was undoubtedly one of the most difficult speeches that he had to make in his career.1 This was so because Bunche, who was then serving in the capacity of undersecretary for special political affairs, took to the floor to apologize for the conduct of eighty-five black Americans who had disrupted an emergency session of the UN Security Council a day earlier.
The meeting had been called by Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations, to discuss the rising tensions in the Congo in the wake of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, its democratically elected president, at the hands of a rival faction of the Congolese elite backed by Belgium, the former colonial ruler of the Congo.2 The protesters were part of a tiny yet global community of people so moved by Lumumba’s murder and outraged by the role played by Belgium that they felt compelled to engage in protest activities.3
Unlike the protests that took place without major incidents in the capitals of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the UN demonstration did not go as planned. On the contrary, the protest ended in a brawl between the demonstrators and UN security forces that left more than two dozen people, including some of the guards, with injuries.4 The protesters, who counted James Lawson, a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among their ranks, claimed that they had been merely standing in silent protest during a speech by the U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson when the UN security forces set on them. Lawson also acknowledged that, despite their training in nonviolent tactics, a few of the protestors in the group had retaliated with violence.5
In the aftermath of the initial confrontation, the UN removed all visitors from the building and, for the first time in the sixteen-year history of the organization, suspended its meetings for the rest of the day. Later in the day, roughly two hundred (mostly black) protesters marched along 42nd Street to demonstrate against both the actions of the Western powers during the Congo Crisis and the UN security guards earlier in the day. Although the protesters were marching peacefully and silently toward the UN, police officers, citing their lack of a permit, ordered them to halt. When they refused to comply with this order, the authorities called in mounted police officers to disperse the marchers. Despite the fact that no further demonstrations emerged from the community, the UN secretary-general took the precautionary measure of closing the UN campus for the next two days. Moreover, when the building reopened on February 19, 1961, visitors now found a beefed-up security detail that included officers from the New York Police Department.6
The reports of the incident that ran in the mainstream media presented a narrative in which the UN was under siege from violent black revolutionaries. The New York Times reported that the “mostly American Negro” protesters had “set off the most violent demonstration inside United Nations headquarters in the world organization’s history.”7 The United Press International (UPI) alleged that the protesters, who appear in the period photographs wearing business suits, entered the Security Council chamber like a street gang to attack the UN guards with their “fists and chains.”8 The Washington Post dedicated most of its coverage to the New York Police Commissioner’s charge that “Black Moslems” and “Black Nationalists” were the “two general categories of Negro groups” behind the riots.9
The mainstream press reports also warned that the protests were part of a communist insurgency. Despite the fact that a black communist at the scene of the riot told their reporters that the other protesters had barred him from participating because of his views, the New York Times, in an editorial entitled “Hoodlums,” concluded that the protest was “in keeping with what Communists and their dupes have been doing in widely separated parts of the world.”10 Similarly, the Washington Post reported that the State Department believed that the events in New York were “Communist-inspired.”11
Beyond being an outstanding diplomat and world leader, Bunche was also a “race man.” The first black American to earn a PhD in political science from Harvard University, Bunche had devoted much of his early career as an academic to studying U.S. race relations.12 Moreover, throughout his career Bunche was a member (and frequently a leader) in a number of organizations dedicated to uplifting the black race in the United States. In light of the fact that he held these commitments, there is no doubt that Bunche was exhibiting the traditional paternalism of the black elite when he took to the floor of the General Assembly on his own accord to reassure the delegates that the protesters were “misled” and “did not represent the thinking and conduct of the American Negro.”13
Although Bunche’s apology fit into the standard narrative of the black elite’s traditional defense of the civil rights movement from both the excesses of the lower classes and the Reds, the response to the speech in the black community was anything but standard. To be sure, several black elected officials, especially those serving on the local level in New York City, praised Bunche’s move and stepped up to condemn the protests in their own words.14 Roy Wilkins, remaining true to the centrist path that the NAACP had charted for decades, tried to convey support for the protestors while simultaneously co-signing Bunche’s point that they “did not represent the sentiment of tactics or the American Negroes.”15 Bunche also received strong support from the editorial boards of two of the four most widely circulated black newspapers.16 For example, Percival L. Prattis, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, chastised the participants in the “violent demonstration” for “embarrassing their country” before the world community.17
Other commentators broke ranks with the Bunche statement. James L. Hicks, a columnist with the New York Amsterdam News, chided Bunche and other black leaders for rushing to condemn the demonstrators. “I certainly do not agree with Dr. Bunche,” Hicks wrote in his “Another Angle” column on February 25, 1961, “that this [protest] was something that he had to go apologizing to white people for on behalf of Negroes.”18 Hicks’s criticism of Bunche was not just about domestic racial politics. On the contrary, his main point was that the protest action by black Americans was “warranted” because of the grave nature of the Congo Crisis. Hicks closed the piece by suggesting that either Bunche get busy protesting the injustices that were being perpetrated against blacks in Africa or “stay on the sunny side of the street with whites.”19
Hicks’s column received a torrent of positive commentary from the readers of the Amsterdam News. Warren Hall of Wyandanch, New York, for example, joined Hicks in condemning the “professional apologists” who make “the dubious claim of representing the views of the average American Negro.”20 Similarly, Grace Johnson wrote to tell Hicks that his column “said exactly what I felt when I heard of the gentlemen making apologies.”21 One final example came from D. Parker, who wrote in to tell Hicks that his column was “a masterpiece in guiding correct thinking and a contribution to the liberation of the Negro’s mind.”22
James Meriwether has argued that these responses were emblematic of a “rising tide of domestic militancy and interest in broader pan-African ties.”23 There is no doubt that Meriwether’s statement provides an accurate summation of the times. In this chapter, I identify the sources of these ideational commitments. Of course, other scholars have devoted intellectual attention to this important question. As it now stands, the consensus view among historians is that two factors were particularly important in fomenting this third wave of Pan-Africanism among the black masses: generational change and a shift in the way that black Americans conceptualized Africa.
Generational change is the factor that scholars cite most frequently to explain the growing solidarity of the black masses with Africa in the 1960s. This argument holds that figures such as Malcolm X and the young lions in groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party spread this new militancy throughout the black community.24 There is no doubt that the rise of these more leftist figures played an important role in pushing the line that black Americans and Africa were inextricably linked in struggle against domination by whites in the 1960s. It is a mistake, however, to conclude that they were the primary source of this third wave of Pan-Africanism to sweep across the black community. As the UN riots demonstrate, the black masses had been revising their notions of their relationship to the continent even before these figures took center stage in the black counterpublic.
The second factor that scholars point to is a positive shift in the way that black Americans conceptualized the continent of Africa and its people. In other words, in the late 1950s and 1960s, black Americans finally shook off all of their old pejorative views about Africa as a Dark Continent. In this new context, it was easier for black Americans to see Africans struggling against colonialism as kith and kin in a global fight against white supremacy. The problem with this argument is that it tramples on the importance of the two earlier narratives we have discussed—the Italian-Ethiopian conflict and the Liberian Labor Crisis—in which the black community embraced Africans as equals worthy of respect and sympathy.
In this chapter, I demonstrate that the entire context of black politics shifted in response to decolonization movements that swept across Africa beginning in the 1950s. The intense attention that the black press devoted to these nationalist movements in Africa was the primary vehicle through which this shift occurred, fomenting a sense of black American identification with the continent. The press also provided a venue for both the black masses and members of the elite to respond to these events. One of the central aims of this chapter is to reconstruct public opinion in the black community through quantitative analyses of these statements.
As in previous chapters, my goal is to determine whether the black masses and the elite shared a similar vision of issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa and how much the elite deferred to the masses in trying to serve its interests. Both the black elite and the masses rewrote their prevailing notions of black authenticity in response to the decolonization movements in Africa. This new black authenticity emerged from the realization that Africa was no longer just a Dark Continent ripe for their missions; instead, it was a place to look for models to challenge white supremacy in the United States. As a result of this transformation, black Americans now saw their collective fate as linked with the new nations in Africa.
Although both black elite and rank-and-file members of the community generally agreed about the terms of this new authenticity, the paternalistic notion among the elite that they were in control of the civil rights movement did sometimes lead to disconnects—such as the riots and Bunche’s subsequent apology at the UN—between these two segments of the community. These occasional breaks, however, were far less frequent than scholars suggest was the case. Indeed, for the most part, there was widespread agreement in the black community that independence movements in Africa were inspiring models for the domestic movement by the close of 1960, which the United Nations declared the Year of Africa to celebrate decolonization on the continent.
The Authenticity Blues
Stanley Crouch, social critic, has written extensively on black authenticity. For Crouch, the central dilemma of black authenticity revolves around the chasm that has arisen between blacks, like himself, who have made it into the American mainstream and those who have not. Moreover, in Crouch’s view, blacks in the former category often suffer from a type of blues because the majority of both black and white Americans tend to define the cultural and social productions of downtrodden blacks as authentic.25
As we have seen, class tensions have often figured prominently in the history of black Americans’ engagement with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. For the most part, however, the authenticity blues that black leaders who tried to shape U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the interwar period had been most worried about revolved around their connection to Africa. In other words, black leaders fretted over how much they could and should speak for Africa in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. The internal debate that took place in 1945 between W. E. B. Du Bois and leading members of the NAACP about sponsorship of the Fifth Pan-African Congress provides an excellent example of this dilemma.
The NAACP board of directors had extricated itself from the business of sponsoring Du Bois’s Pan-African congresses after the 1927 gathering because the conferences did not yield enough dividends for the organization in the domestic environment. In 1945, Du Bois believed that the time was ripe for him to push the organization to revisit its stance toward his movement. Du Bois’s viewpoint grew out of the fact that the NAACP had exhibited a burgeoning commitment to anticolonial politics during World War II. In April 1945, for example, the NAACP convened a conference with the leaders of other black organizations (including the CAA) to discuss ways in which black civil rights organizations could help those living under the yoke of European colonization to advance toward freedom.26
On April 6, 1945, more than fifty people gathered in Harlem for the conference. The delegates, who came from Barbados, Burma, Gold Coast Colony, Guiana, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, and Uganda, all agreed that they should press the great powers to make decolonization a priority in the new world order that was emerging in the wake of World War II.27 The conferees voted unanimously in support of a resolution to send a delegation to the upcoming San Francisco Conference on the United Nations Organization to convey this sentiment to world leaders and demand representation in the new body.28
There is no evidence that a delegation of attendees of the NAACP conference on colonialism ever made it to San Francisco. The NAACP did send Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Du Bois to San Francisco to lobby for an agenda that was virtually identical to the one the delegates had agreed on in New York. But, despite their best efforts, the NAACP delegation did not achieve any of its goals in San Francisco. On the contrary, the colonial powers and the American delegation under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. made it clear that the language of self-determination in the UN Charter did not apply to the citizens of the subject territories.29
Even though the NAACP delegation failed to influence the proceedings at the San Francisco Conference, Du Bois came away from the experience with a renewed sense of optimism about the organization that he had helped to found in 1909. Indeed, Du Bois saw the decision of NAACP leaders to commit resources to the conference as a sign that they had finally shed the parochialism for which he had pilloried the organization in the black press in the 1930s.30 Moreover, the time in San Francisco provided Du Bois and Walter White with the opportunity to thaw the chill that had existed in their personal relations since Du Bois had resigned from the NAACP in 1936.31 It was in this context that Du Bois decided to try to get the NAACP to sign back on to the Pan-African Congress movement.
Du Bois’s plan called for holding the Pan-African Congress—the fifth since 1900—six months after the defeat of the Axis Powers.32 Du Bois, hoping to head off competition from a group of activists from the Caribbean and West Africa under the leadership of George Padmore, asked the NAACP to commit resources so that black Americans would not lose their leadership position in the movement. “If we do not lead the way,” Du Bois wrote in a report on the Pan-African Congress movement to the NAACP board of directors, “there is nothing to hinder them [the Caribbean and West African activists] from forming a Pan-African movement of their own without the participation and guidance of American Negroes.”33
Du Bois’s arguments obviously moved the NAACP directors because they appointed a committee to examine the possibilities of both sponsoring and hosting the conference.34 On July 12, 1945, the committee, chaired by Louis Wright and comprising Ralph Bunche, Elmer Carter, Russell Davenport, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Hastie, Rayford Logan, Arthur Spingarn, Channing Tobias, Roy Wilkins, and Walter White, gathered to discuss the key issues entailed in taking on the responsibilities of holding a new Pan-African Congress.35 Although Du Bois had hoped that the meeting would focus purely on logistics, according to the documentary record substantive differences quickly emerged among several members of the committee.
The first point of disagreement was over the name of the conference. Obviously, Du Bois wanted to call the conference the Fifth Pan-African Congress to retain the continuity of the movement that he had started with Henry Sylvester Williams nearly half a century earlier. But a subset of committee members, led by Rayford Logan, Howard University historian, wanted to call the gathering Dependent Peoples’ Conference to signal that the delegates would speak to colonial issues beyond the experiences of Africans and blacks living in the diaspora. Many other committee members expressed concerns about how much hosting the conference would cost and whether delegates from Europe and Africa would be able to get passage to the United States given the constraints that the war was placing on the shipping industry. When the members of the committee were unable to resolve all of their differences about these important issues, they decided to adjourn and leave the planning in the hands of a subcommittee consisting of Du Bois, Bunche, Hastie, and Tobias.36
It was at the meeting of this subcommittee that Du Bois’s hopes that the NAACP would host the Fifth Pan-African Congress went up in smoke. Apparently, during the five days between the first committee meeting and their gathering, both Hastie and Bunche had developed strong objections to the Pan-African Congress model. In their view, Pan-Africanism, with its emphasis on racial solidarity over social class or subject status, was both passé and morally dubious.37 And it was the Hastie-Bunche line that the leaders of the NAACP ultimately embraced.38 Although there was vague talk of hosting a Conference on Colonial Problems at an NAACP board meeting later in the year, the organization never set aside the resources to bring such a plan to fruition.
The NAACP board of directors did vote, however, to send Du Bois as its representative to the Pan-African Congress that Padmore and his associates had organized in Manchester, England.39 For Du Bois, who never really understood how the NAACP could reject Pan-Africanism, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Indeed, although he dutifully attended the proceedings in Manchester on behalf of the NAACP, his correspondence from the period shows that he suffered from a bad case of the authenticity blues. “The NAACP has taken no stand nor laid down any program with regard to Africa,” a frustrated Du Bois wrote to White on his return from the conference. “Individually, I have done what I could,” he continued, “but I have neither the funds nor authority to accomplish much.”40
As we have seen, Du Bois and the NAACP parted ways in the late 1940s because of the stance of the organization on the Truman doctrine; it is important to note that Du Bois’s frustration with his colleagues’ refusal to privilege Africa in their anticolonial activism provided part of the backdrop for this later decision to quit the NAACP and join the CAA. Du Bois was substantially ahead of his time in advocating the position that the relationship between black Americans and Africa was special. Indeed, both the black press and the masses vindicated and embraced Du Bois’s vision of Pan-Africanism in the next decade. Moreover, in response to this shift in political context, even his old foils at the NAACP had to alter their positions to remain effective representatives of their constituents on the home front.
Writing Revolutions in Africa
The independent black press played a crucial role in shaping and aggregating black public opinion on U.S. foreign policy issues related to Africa. As discussed in chapter 3, most of the black editorialists and correspondents that published in these newspapers at the height of the Cold War attempted to achieve a balance between portraying the black community (and Africans) as loyal foot soldiers in the confrontation of the West with communism and speaking out against the evils of colonialism in Africa.
Racial identity was also a dominant theme in stories about Africa in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course, this will not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the literature on the rise of globalism among black Americans during and immediately following World War II.41 Most of these studies conclude that the treatment by the black press of world affairs—particularly colonial issues—evinced a shift in which the black community came to see itself as one among many peoples of color struggling against white domination. In short, much of this scholarship advances the notion that the self-conception of the U.S. black community—as gauged by the stories that ran in black-controlled newspapers—moved away from the narrow Pan-Africanism of Garvey or Du Bois toward the people-of-color model advanced by Hastie and Bunche.
James Meriwether’s groundbreaking study of black America’s engagement with modern Africa between 1935 and 1961 challenges this theory. He does not deny that black Americans embraced to some extent a people-of-color model in the post–World War II period, but at the same time, Meriwether argues that the continent of Africa held special significance for black Americans within this model. In short, he asserts that the anticolonial struggles that emerged on the African continent in the middle of twentieth century pushed black Americans to embrace both modern Africa and their own “Africanity” in new ways. To substantiate his claim, Meriwether relies on impressionistic examinations of black print sources and archival materials.
Although I concur with Meriwether’s baseline hypothesis, there are, nevertheless, stark differences between our accounts. For example, in Meriwether’s view, black Americans developed their new self-identity and awareness of Africa quite gradually in the period between 1935 and 1961. Moreover, he contends that the process was sometimes a painful and that conflicts between members of the black elite and the masses often emerged as they worked to shake off their ambivalent feelings about their ancestral heritage in Africa.42 Although there is no doubt that these dynamics were part of the process through which black Americans remade themselves by embracing modern Africa, the evidence shows that the shift in authenticity occurred much more smoothly than Meriwether suggests. Indeed, my quantitative content analyses of the depiction of three major events in African history by the black press between 1935 and 1960 shows that the black counterpublic had fully embraced Africa well before Meriwether indicates.
This is an important point for several reasons. First, it allows us to adjudicate the debate that Du Bois and the Hastie-Bunche faction engaged in over black authenticity in the 1940s. If the ultimate goal of black leaders is to represent the interests of their constituents in the domestic environment, then we can show that Du Bois’s vision of a Pan-African Congress in which race was still front and center would have come closer to achieving this end.
Second, the findings of my content analyses help us adjust the historiography of Pan-Africanism. As discussed, most scholars see the rise of the third wave of Pan-Africanism as a function of the generational shift that occurred in the civil rights movement in the wake of a decade of decolonization.43 Under this view, these younger activists spread Pan-Africanism through the community by preaching that African independence movements were important referents for the struggle on the home front, in much the way that Marcus Garvey fomented second-wave Pan-Africanism in the 1920s. Although several studies have challenged this conclusion by pointing to the behavior of the civil rights establishment in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena, the link between this behavior and the representational environment on the home front has not yet been thoroughly explored. My analysis fills this gap in the literature by showing that mainstream black leaders had to act because their constituents were demanding a more expansive notion of blackness that incorporated ties to the realities of modern Africa.
The content analyses presented here reconstruct the visions of Africa held by the black community before and during the high point of African decolonization. The focus is on gauging editorial and public opinion about four historical events that had a major impact on black America’s identification with the African continent—the Defiance Campaign in South Africa (1951), the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (1952), the emergence of Ghana from colonial rule (1957), and the Congo Crisis (1961). The analyses gauge the tone of the articles, editorials, and correspondence that appeared during 1935–1960 and generate measures of affinity with and disassociation from the continent that are implicit within each item. For each analysis, I first provide a brief sketch of the event to give the reader a richer sense of the context in which these media accounts emerged. Although the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation-state occurred after both the Defiance Campaign in South Africa and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, I deal first with this event before moving on to treat the other cases in chronological order because of the singular importance of Ghana as the first independent nation to emerge from the white supremacist world order that the European powers created at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885.
On March 6, 1957, the British colony Gold Coast morphed into the independent nation of Ghana. Despite the fact that black Americans were deeply engaged in their own struggles for domestic equality in the late 1950s, the black community took considerable notice of the independence celebrations in Ghana. According to both the Hastie-Bunche line on Pan-Africanism and the consensus within the literature on black engagement with world affairs, this enthusiastic response of the black community was more a function of its commitment to anticolonialism than to Pan-Africanism. If this theory really holds water, then a content analysis comparing the black community’s response to the decolonization of Ghana and other significant moments in anticolonial politics should reveal continuity in both the levels of coverage and tone.
I use the decolonization of India in 1947 as a comparison case in this analysis for several reasons. First, black Americans had long regarded India as an important colored nation whose people were fellow travelers with Africans and blacks in the diaspora in terms of their experiences of exploitation by whites and their history of resisting white supremacy.44 Second, India was the first major nonwhite nation to gain its independence during the postwar period. Finally, many black Americans revered Mahatma Gandhi, the principal leader of the Indian resistance movement, for his strong statements against racism and his commitment to nonviolent social protest.45 Thus, if any decolonization movements outside Africa had garnered the attention of the black press, India would be at the top of the list.
My analysis shows that the black press devoted far more attention to the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation than it did to India. Indeed, there are 352 items focusing on Ghana that appeared in the four largest black newspapers, almost double the 189 items that these papers devoted to India. It is important to note that a companion analysis of coverage in the mainstream press revealed just the opposite trend. The New York Times, for example, ran 963 items about decolonization in India between 1947 and 1949 and 504 items on Ghana between 1957 and 1959.
The volume of coverage is not the only difference in the way that the black press treated the independence of India and Ghana. Figure 4.1 charts a comparison of the expressions of linked fate in the positive coverage about the two countries that appeared in the black newspapers. As we can see, more items saw the future of black Americans as bound up with Ghana than with India.46 Indeed, even though 67 percent of the items that ran in the black press about Indian independence expressed the sentiment that it was a positive development for global race relations, only 12 percent portrayed the fate of black Americans as linked to the success of India. By contrast, 54 percent of the positive items that ran in the black press about Ghana suggested that the fate of black Americans was tied to the success of the new nation. These findings suggest that black reporters and commentators saw the racial identity that they shared with the Ghanaians as a relevant factor in determining how the decolonization experience would shape their lives.
The relatively high level of expressions of linked fate that appear in the Ghanaian-independence items undermines Meriwether’s claim that black print sources contained many stories revealing black Americans’ tendency to embrace stereotypes about Africa as a savage continent. There is no doubt that some black Americans continued to hold on to images of Africa as a Dark Continent well into the 1960s. Coretta Scott King makes reference to this fact when writing about attending Ghanaian independence ceremonies with her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1957. “We realized,” King writes after they encountered the modernity of the capital of Ghana, Accra, “that we ourselves had been the victims of the propaganda that all of Africa was primitive and dirty.”47
FIGURE 4.1 Percentages of positive news coverage and expressions of linked fate in positive news coverage of India and Ghana, 1947–1959
Sources: Atlanta Daily World; Chicago Defender; New York Amsterdam News; Pittsburgh Courier
Content analysis of the coverage devoted by the black press to the second Italian-Ethiopian War and Ghanaian independence shows that language portraying Africa as a savage continent devoid of civilization was much rarer than previous reports indicate. Only 22 percent of the more than 3,000 items about Ethiopia that ran in the black press between 1935 and 1938 contain language that evokes negative imagery of Africa. My analysis also reveals that this figure had improved dramatically by the time that the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation made headlines in the black press. Indeed, only 9 percent of the 352 items related to events in Ghana during the year it emerged as an independent nation contains such language.48
This does not mean, of course, that black Americans had completely abandoned the language of savagery and civilization when talking about Africa in the decade of decolonization that followed Ghanaian independence. On the contrary, these frames emerged with great frequency when black editorialists and correspondents began to write about the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Before black Americans turned their gaze toward Kenya, however, another uprising on the continent took center stage in the black press.
South Africa was an important flashpoint in the global confrontation between white supremacy and black equality during the 1950s and 1960s. Like Kenya, South Africa was a settler colony, where a tiny white minority controlled vast tracks of land and the industrial economy. Moreover, beginning in 1948, the South African government, under the leadership of Daniel Malan and his Nationalist Party, codified its traditional system of racial segregation and oppression of the black majority into apartheid laws.49 This made South Africa one of three nations in the world where there was de jure segregation of blacks and whites. Like their counterparts in the other two nations—the United States and Rhodesia—the black citizens of South Africa constantly challenged their oppression through nonviolent social protests.
The Defiance Campaign of 1951 was the first significant, nationwide protest against apartheid in South Africa. The Defiance Campaign grew out of the 1951 convention of the African National Congress (ANC).50 At the convention, the ANC, working in conjunction with groups representing South Asians and mixed-race peoples, decided to press the government to repeal six of the most discriminatory apartheid laws on the books. After the conference, the ANC sent a letter to Prime Minister Malan requesting that he repeal these laws or face a massive protest campaign, setting April 6, 1952, as the final deadline for compliance.51
Of course, Malan, who had swept into power on muscular promises to defend the Afrikaner position against all challenges, flatly rejected the ANC ultimatum. On the contrary, he promised the ANC and its allies that he would retaliate using the full force of the South African security forces. As the deadline approached, the ANC and its coalition partners began to worry that they had not properly trained enough of the protesters to prepare for the massive retaliation that Malan promised that he would unleash against the movement. In light of these concerns, the coalition announced that it was postponing the protest date to June 26, 1952.52
When the appointed day came, the ANC-led coalition was ready for direct action. The primary goal of the coalition protests was to defy all six laws that they had asked the Malan regime to repeal. Under the direction of Nelson Mandela, thousands of black, Asian, and mixed-race people marched into the “whites only” sections of public places in the major South African cities of Pretoria, Durban, and Johannesburg. The protesters also violated the incredibly restrictive government curfew laws.53
Although Malan hinted at the use of widespread violence, the government responded to the Defiance Campaign largely through police actions. By the end of the first week of the protests, the government had arrested several hundred people. Hoping to create a breakdown of governmental capacity, the coalition instructed the protesters to remain in jail rather than pay the fines for violating the segregation laws. After one month, the police had placed more than 1,500 protesters in jails throughout the country.54 As the Malan government jailed protesters, others stepped up to take their place. For three months, the government and the ANC coalition engaged in this dance. Indeed, by the middle of October more than 5,000 protesters had taken their place in South African jails.55
Although there is no doubt that the Defiance Campaign created a nuisance for the Malan government, it did not generate the crisis that the coalition had hoped it would. This was because the government demonstrated as much commitment and ingenuity to finding new ways to jail the protesters as the protesters did in staging their challenges to South Africa’s white supremacist laws. The Defiance Campaign ended when riots roiled the cities of East London, Elizabeth, Kimberly, and Johannesburg between October 18 and November 10, 1952. Although, the ANC-led coalition immediately disavowed responsibility and urged South Africans of color not to participate, the Malan government used the riots as a pretext for violently cracking down on the Defiance Campaign. By December, the Malan government had effectively crushed the Defiance Campaign and passed a series of tough new laws that criminalized virtually all forms of organizing and protest activity.56
Although the Defiance Campaign did not achieve its ultimate goals, it did have the positive effect of shining a bright light on the conditions in which nonwhites lived in South Africa and on their demands for equal citizenship. The United Nations, with its growing bloc of member nations that had just recently thrown off the yoke of colonialism, condemned the Malan government for its actions and threatened an investigation.57 Moreover, both the mainstream and black presses in the United States reported widely on events as they transpired.
We see clear evidence that black Americans supported the Defiance Campaign and were beginning to exhibit a sense of linked fate with black South Africans in the black press coverage of these events. Of the eighty-six items on the Defiance Campaign that ran in the four leading black newspapers between 1951 and 1954, fifty-four (63 percent) had a positive tone when describing the protesters and their cause. By contrast, only 3 of the items that ran during this period had a negative tone. The remaining twenty-nine items reported on the events with a neutral tone and mostly described events on the ground as they happened.
In contrast, coverage in the black press of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya was far less favorable. The Mau Mau uprising began on October 7, 1952, when a group of insurgents assassinated Chief Waruhiu, a prominent member of the traditional Kikuyu elite and a collaborator with the British government.58 These insurgents, who were also of Kikuyu background, called themselves Mau Mau fighters. The movement had started in the late 1940s to organize young Kikuyu men and demand that the British colonial government reform its land tenure and immigration policies. In short, this burgeoning population wanted its fair share of land for farming and a halt to the policy of the colonial government of ceding vast tracts of productive land to white settlers from England.59
There is no doubt that the Kikuyu were justified in their demands. After all, from its inception, Kenya was one of the worst examples of settler colonialism on the continent. Between 1902 and the beginning of World War I, the British government simply nullified African property rights and gave land titles to any whites willing to make the trip from England.60 As several historians have pointed out, the British government also designed this policy to force the indigenous peoples into cities, where it would be easier to control their movements and facilitate the capitalist exploitation of their labor in industrial factories.61
The Kikuyu had something of a reprieve from this pattern during the interwar period because the global depression after the end of World War I slowed the pace of settlers streaming into Kenya from England. Because the colonial government was extremely dependent on agricultural exports for economic growth, it encouraged the indigenous population (particularly the Kikuyu) to fill the void through squatting and tenant farming on European holdings.62 This policy worked remarkably well as a stopgap measure during the depression and throughout World War II.
What the colonial government had not foreseen, however, was that this policy also created a renewed sense of ownership within the indigenous communities. In fact, the government believed that it would have no trouble dispossessing the indigenous Kenyans when immigration from England picked up again after the war. Part of the reason for this view is that the government believed that the traditional chiefs that it had brought into the government through their policy of indirect rule would be able to maintain social control. The problem was that the chiefs had become a symbol of the colonial government and its corrupt practices because of the huge land grants that they received for their collaboration. Indeed, when the Mau Mau movement started in the late 1940s, the chiefs were the primary targets for the violent outbursts of the insurgents.63 Thus, it is not surprising that Chief Waruhiu was the first casualty of the 1952 insurgency.
By the middle of October, there had been so many additional attacks against the chiefs that the colonial government had to respond. On October 20, 1952, the colonial governor declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 150 Ken-yans who he claimed were instrumental in fomenting the Mau Mau moveent. As part of this roundup, the colonial government arrested Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the nationalist movement in Kenya, despite the fact that he was not a driving force behind the uprising.64 Instead of breaking the Mau Mau insurgency, this overreach gave many indigenous Kenyans who would have never considered joining the movement a reason to fight.
Indeed, for the next four years, the incredibly underequipped Mau Mau fighters waged a guerrilla war against a force that included multiple battalions of the British army, several squadrons of the Royal Air Force, and the homegrown colonial government militia.65 The casualty numbers speak volumes about the nature of the conflict between the insurgents and the British forces. Over these four years, the Mau Mau fighters killed 58 white settlers and 1,880 indigenous Kenyans whom they deemed to be collaborators with the government. By contrast, the colonial government forces reported killing 12,590 Mau Mau fighters.66
The coverage of the Mau Mau in the black American press suggests that the community was more ambivalent about this movement than they had been about the Defiance Campaign in South Africa. Indeed, only 27 percent of the more than four hundred items that appeared on the Mau Mau in the four black newspapers with the largest circulation between 1952 and 1954 had a positive view of the insurgents. By contrast, 32 percent of the items were decidedly negative in their appraisal of the insurgency. The remaining coverage offered mixed assessments that tended to empathize with indigenous Kenyans but condemn the Mau Mau insurgents for turning to violence. Moreover, the black press was particularly critical of the Mau Mau fighters’ attacks on other blacks.
A comparative analysis of the expressions of linked fate in the black press coverage of the Defiance Campaign and the Mau Mau also suggests that there was greater uncertainty about the latter movement in the black counterpublic. Whereas 41 percent of the items that ran in the black press on the Defiance Campaign contained an expression of linked fate, only 7 percent of the items on the Mau Mau had such content. This finding suggests that black Americans used heuristics derived from their own experiences on the home front to expand their notions of black authenticity in the 1950s.
This does not mean, however, that all the old models that black Americans developed during the postwar period to confront Africa and the rest of the world remained stable. An examination of the Congo Crisis, the fourth major event that demonstrates the burgeoning affinity of U.S. blacks with Africans, helps to drive this point home. The murder of Patrice Lumumba by his Belgian-backed rivals for power, the event that triggered the UN riots described earlier, was the grim closing chapter of a tense struggle for control of the central African nation between 1958 and 1961. The U.S. black press carved out a distinctive voice in its coverage of the crisis.
Belgium, whose record in the Congo made it the most predatory and abusive of the colonial powers, was reluctant to begin the process of decolonization, and this gave rise to the crisis. By the middle of the 1950s, both Great Britain and France had greeted the fact that the sun was setting on their empires with a realism that allowed them to forge working relationships with the indigenous elites who would form the independent governments that replaced their colonial administrations. These relationships typically allowed Britain and France to preserve lucrative economic ties to their former colonial possessions. Belgium, by contrast, greeted the demands of indigenous Congolese for independence with considerable resentment.
This is not surprising given the evolution of the relationship of Belgium with its lone colony. King Leopold II of Belgium had established a claim that the vast territory of the Congo was his personal property during the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which the European powers met to forge a common understanding about how they would exploit the continent of Africa. In the wake of the conference, King Leopold leased the mineral rights and control of the Congo to several Belgian companies in return for a 50 percent share of all the wealth that they extracted from the colony.67
Together these companies and the Belgian military forces that provided them with security and muscle raped the Congo for the next two decades. The concession companies forced the indigenous peoples to work in the extraction of natural resources without compensation; they also frequently maimed or killed those who tried to resist or failed to meet the quotas that they established.68 Conditions in the Congo were so bad that they attracted the attention of several reformers, including George Washington Williams, a pioneering black historian from the United States whose riveting exposés shocked and outraged the global public. It was in this context that King Leopold ceded control of his personal colony to the Belgian government in 1908.69
There is no doubt that conditions in the Congo improved when King Leopold handed over control of the colony to the Belgian legislature. The new colonial administration halted the forced labor practices and wanton slayings that had led to a 60 percent reduction of the population of the Congo between 1885 and 1908.70 At the same time, the Belgian government continued to see the Congo simply as a point of capital extraction and the indigenous populations as facilitators of this process. As a result, the metropolitan government spent almost nothing on services for the colonial population. Moreover, the government intentionally limited educational opportunities for the Congolese in hopes of stifling the development of nationalist movements.71
Although the Belgians could limit the formal education of the indigenous people, they could do nothing to prevent them from learning the lessons of the African nationalist movements that were sweeping the continent in the 1950s from popular media sources and word of mouth. In 1956, a group of Congolese activists published a document entitled Conscience Africaine that advocated independence from Belgium within thirty years. This very conservative appeal for decolonization, which was widely circulated in Leopoldville, scandalized the colonial government at the time. Within two years, however, it would long for the days when the black population of the colony talked about a thirty-year timetable for independence. Between the publication of Conscience Africaine and the close of 1958, dozens of political parties formed to press the Belgians for an immediate withdrawal.72 Within another two years, the Congo joined sixteen other nations in the celebration of their independence from their former colonial masters during the Year of Africa.
This quick transition shocked the Belgians, who had come to see the Congo as an idyllic experiment in civilization after the legislature took control of the colony in 1908. Patrice Lumumba’s very frank assessment of the horrors of their rule on Congolese Independence Day only further cemented the Belgians’ sense of loss and resentment.73 Lumumba, who had come to power through his ability to build the only political party in the nation with multiethnic appeal, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), dressed down the Belgian delegation, which included King Badouin, for the “humiliating bondage” that Belgium had forced on the Congolese.74
Although Lumumba had an accurate read on the experiences of the Congo under Belgium, he did not have a government capable of controlling all of the centrifugal forces—many of them set in motion by Belgium—that immediately challenged his ability to hold his fledgling nation together. This became painfully obvious to Lumumba (and the world) just one month after his fiery speech. On July 5, 1960, soldiers in the Congolese Army rioted after their Belgian commander, General Emile Janssens, told them that the officer corps would remain an all-Belgian club and that they were to receive neither promotions nor more pay because of independence. A furious Lumumba hurried to the barracks, which were 90 miles outside of Leopoldville, to announce that Janssens no longer had the authority to make such decisions, that all Congolese soldiers would receive a one rank promotion and pay raise, and that the officer corps would be Africanized.75
Despite Lumumba’s best efforts, general disorder spread throughout the Congo. On July 8, 1960, both the British and the French governments evacuated their embassies. Two days later, the Belgian government, responding to grossly exaggerated stories that ran in the press about the plight of expatriates, sent troops to reinforce its bases in the Congo. By the end of July, Belgian troops had engaged in twenty-one separate police actions throughout the Congo. The fact that he had authorized only one of these actions made Lumumba exceedingly nervous; indeed, in his view, these interventions stood as proof that Belgium continued to view itself as the legitimate government of the Congo. Moreover, the fact that Belgium had responded to the requests for intervention issued by Moise Tshombe, his chief rival and president of the mineral-rich Katanga province, reinforced Lumumba’s concerns.76
It was at this stage that the Congo Crisis emerged as an issue in the Cold War. Dissatisfied with the support that he had received from the United Nations, Lumumba, who described the Cold War position of his MNC party as one of “positive neutrality,” decided to reach out to the Soviet Union for help restoring order in the Congo. Although the Soviet Union was supportive of Lumumba’s position, it was not eager to engage in a hot conflict with the West over the Congo. Thus, the Soviets joined a coalition with the Western powers and the UN to send peacekeepers to the Congo.77
The UN coalition did finally succeed in getting the Belgian army to stand down and leave most areas of the Congo. Katanga, which had become Lumumba’s primary concern at this point because it was the most economically viable province in his young nation, was a different story; the UN-led peacekeeping forces, under the direct command of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, refused to accede to Lumumba’s requests that they use force to preserve the territorial integrity of the Congo.78 After it became clear to him that the UN would not act in this capacity, Lumumba requested that the Soviets provide him with weapons and supplies so that he could launch an invasion of Katanga. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, realizing that he now had to live up to all the lofty Soviet rhetoric about supporting the newly emerging states in Africa against the encroachments of the Western powers, did finally agree to send a limited package of military aid to Lumumba.79
Lumumba never launched his invasion of Katanga. Shortly after the aid package from the Soviets arrived in Leopoldville, Lumumba became embroiled in a bitter fight for control of the government with Joseph Kasavubu, his former ally. Although he successfully quashed this challenge to his authority, his overtures to the Soviets had made him a marked man in the West. While Lumumba was preoccupied solidifying his power base in the capital, the U.S. and Belgian governments recruited Joseph Mobutu, his private secretary and chief of staff of the army, to wrest power from his patron. In October 1960, Mobutu seized power and placed Lumumba under house arrest. Two months later, he transported Lumumba to the breakaway Katanga province, where Katangan and Belgian troops tortured and executed him. Not until two years later, at the behest of Mobutu, did a UN coalition lead an invasion of Katanga to restore the province to the Congo.80
The coverage of the Congo Crisis in the U.S. black press illustrates the transition that black Americans were undergoing vis-à-vis their relationships with modern Africa and the old Cold War coalition on the home front. Whereas the dominant theme in the coverage presented by the New York Times and the Washington Post was the possibility of the crisis leading to the communist infiltration of the Congo, the black press saw these events through the lens of black-white conflict. At the same time, it is clear that the specter of communists taking over the Congo limited the connections that blacks felt they could make to Patrice Lumumba during the crisis. Indeed, a content analysis of 439 items that appeared in the black press between 1958 and 1962 shows that the percentage of items that framed Lumumba negatively increased markedly after he invited the Soviets to intervene in the crisis. Whereas only 3 percent of the items that appeared in the black press before Lumumba courted Soviet intervention framed him negatively, 46 percent of the items that ran after he sought help from the Soviets presented negative frames of his actions.
Globalizing Black Linked Fate
Mainstream U.S. black leaders have typically used the domestic context as a heuristic for determining how to engage African issues in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. In short, defending the home front has historically been the top priority for members of the black elite when they respond to events in Africa. Throughout most of the history of black America’s contact with the African continent, black politicians and activists had the luxury of focusing on one or (at most) two issues at a time. These very limited contacts made it easy for black leaders to form a consensus around key issues: emigration, loans to Liberia, or the Italian-Ethiopian War.
This does not mean, of course, that dissenting viewpoints have been absent from the black counterpublic. On the contrary, every period has had outliers—for example, Bishop Tuner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson—who provoked serious debates within the community and challenged the consensus within the black elite. It is also true that these dissident voices have typically had very little success in shifting the opinions of their fellow black leaders or shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Africa unless they had the broad support from the black masses, as in the response of the black community to the Italian-Ethiopian War.
The rapid changes that took place on the continent between 1945 and 1960 (the UN Year of Africa) shifted these dynamics in two ways. First, black leaders no longer had the luxuries of dealing with Africa one issue at a time and working to build internal consensus before presenting a unified front to their constituents, the U.S. government, and white Americans. Second, the steady diet of stories about the emerging nations gaining freedom from their colonial masters that the black press fed rank-and-file blacks heightened community identification with the continent and its peoples; in other words, the ways that the black press reported on decolonization domesticated the issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa as never before in the black community. As a result of this dynamic, U.S. black leaders faced more demands from their constituents to take stands on developments on the continent.
Several historians have argued that the black elite members’ commitment to anticommunism served as their primary heuristic for this new era.81 There is no doubt that anticommunism remained an important guiding principle for black leaders as they struggled to keep pace with changes on the continent. Moreover, it is clear that this commitment was strengthened by the fact that southern members of Congress and other proponents of Jim Crow laws renewed their efforts to paint the civil rights movement as Red in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is also clear that black leaders relied on other models to navigate these uncharted waters. In particular, black leaders also remained true to their traditional ideational commitment that blacks were Americans first and foremost. In other words, the black elite continued to push the line that the United States was the black Americans’ permanent homeland. This commitment sometimes brought more established black leaders into conflict with younger activists and politicians who had come to see their roots in Africa as a more attractive basis for forging a positive self-identity than the traditional narratives about black contributions to the development of U.S. society.
Historians have seen the ascendency of this younger generation in the 1960s as the fount of a new black authenticity centered on Africa. As we have seen, the black community was well on its way to redefining itself through its connection to Africa even before the rise of the black power movement. And, even though they were constrained by their ideational commitments, mainstream black elites also worked to build this new black authenticity. Indeed, the old guard black leaders in the 1950s and 1960s consistently used their public pronouncements on foreign policy issues to reinforce the notion that black Americans shared a linked fate with their kith and kin in Africa. We can illustrate this by recovering the ways that black leaders responded to three of the events—the Defiance Campaign in South Africa, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation—we have already discussed.
Despite its weakened position as a result of U.S. government persecution, the CAA was the first black organization to respond to the Defiance Campaign. Indeed, Paul Robeson, now the primary CAA leader, issued the first statement by the organization of support for the ANC-led coalition on February 25, 1952.82 When the Defiance Campaign started on April 6, 1952, the CAA organized solidarity protests in front of the South African mission to the United Nations in New York City.83 Moreover, Robeson urged black Americans to follow the model of the Defiance Campaign in their own struggle. In the February edition of the CAA’s Spotlight on Africa, for example, Robeson asked black Americans to “imagine” following the South African example by “joining together in a great and compelling action to put a STOP to Jim Crowism in all its forms everywhere in this land.”84
Although there is no evidence that the CAA ever tried to build such a coalition to confront the forces of Jim Crow on the home front, it did attempt to forge alliances with other groups to support the protesters involved in the Defiance Campaign. On March 21, 1952, for example, William Alphaeus Hunton wrote to the leaders of the Americans for South African Resistance (AFSAR) about forming an alliance in support of the South African protesters.85 The AFSAR was an integrated group of scholars, activists, and clergy members to which notable black leaders such as Charles S. Johnson, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin belonged. But because these men, and their white colleagues, intended the AFSAR to serve as an anticommunist counterpoint to the CAA, they flatly dismissed Hunton’s calls for collaboration.86
Despite the fact that the AFSAR activists rejected the CAA’s overtures, they shared the fundamental assumption of the organization that Americans—and particularly the black community—should support the Defiance Campaign by staging their own nonviolent social protests in the United States.87 Indeed, on the day that the Defiance Campaign began in South Africa, AFSAR staged a giant rally at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the pulpit of AFSAR board member Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-N.Y.). During the rally, Powell spoke in terms that evoked a new authenticity when he urged his fellow black Americans to stand with black South Africans.88
In independent statements they made in the black press during the Defiance Campaign, other black leaders reinforced the notion that black Americans and South Africans were linked together in a common struggle against white supremacy. In her weekly column for the Chicago Defender, for example, Mary McLeod Bethune stated plainly that apartheid was the “counterpart” of the “insistence on segregation in the United States.”89 Although Bethune acknowledged that she was generally enthused by the rising “resistance of the colored peoples of the world to the pressures of racial discrimination,” she was particularly heartened by ways that black Americans and South Africans were challenging their subordinate positions in their respective countries.90
As the response of the civil rights establishment to the Defiance Campaign demonstrates, the parallels between the experiences of blacks living under apartheid and those living under Jim Crow continued to support the notion that these two communities of color shared a special relationship. This does not mean, however, that black leaders had the luxury of focusing exclusively on South Africa. On the contrary, the rapid pace of change on the continent in the age of decolonization meant that the black activists and politicians faced a constant learning curve as they tried to merge their commitment to winning in the domestic arena with the dictates of third wave Pan-Africanism.
The first indications the black elite had that this learning curve could be incredibly steep came in the wake of Kenyan Mau Mau insurgency. As we have seen, the black press portrayed the Mau Mau in ambivalent tones. On the one hand, the press painted the uprising as a function of white oppression and sympathized with the desires of the indigenous peoples to own land and be rid of white domination. At the same time, black editorialists condemned the Mau Mau insurgents’ use of violence to achieve these ends and their assaults on fellow blacks. The response of the mainstream black elite was similar. Some black leaders joined the press and the black masses in making public statements that placed the blame for the conflagration squarely on the shoulders of the settlers and demonstrated great empathy for black victims of the violent crackdowns by the colonial government as reprisals for the insurgency. For example, when news of the violent crackdowns by the British government on Kikuyu insurgents reached him in Washington, D.C., Adam Clayton Powell took to the House floor to sponsor a resolution calling on the U.S. government to cut foreign aid to Kenya to prevent the colonial government from using the money to continue its “massacres” of the indigenous Africans.91 Similarly, A. Philip Randolph, who had spent so much of his early career fighting Marcus Garvey’s variant of Pan-Africanism, used his position as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to push the AFL to pass a resolution condemning the “arrogant and ruthless domination of the white colonial government officials and greedy white settlers” in Kenya.92
By drawing a clear link between the exploitative nature of colonialism and the “fires of nationalism that are raging and sweeping across the continent,” the BSCP resolution minced no words.93 This does not mean, however, that Randolph and his fellow union members condoned the violent tactics used by the insurgents. “The leaders of the African natives [in Kenya],” Randolph wrote in a letter to President Eisenhower that clarified the BSCP’s position on the Mau Mau, “must be prevailed upon to see that violence and bloodshed cannot constitute a solution of their social, economic, and political problems.”94
Not surprisingly, the NAACP, which had been committed to nonviolent civil disobedience since its inception in 1909, also walked this middle path. In 1953, the organization passed a resolution at its annual convention that simultaneously condemned the “terrorist methods” of both the British and the Mau Mau insurgents.95
Again, James Meriwether has argued that part of the black elite’s response to the Mau Mau uprising was a “reluctance to be linked with ‘savage’ Africa.”96 Although there is no doubt that some black leaders saw the Mau Mau movement as evidence that Africans remained less civilized than their black American counterparts, this was by no means the dominant mode of thought among the black elite.
What, then, led the black elite to take such a cautious stand on the Mau Mau uprising when they faced a political context in which at least some constituents demanded that they embrace the revolution as a model for overthrowing white supremacy? According to the historical record, two factors were at work. First, the vast majority of black politicians and activists who advocated for black civil rights in the New Negro period and in the middle of the twentieth century simply did not believe that violent tactics would produce positive change for blacks in the United States. Indeed, although groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE gained wide recognition for their use of nonviolent social protests beginning in the 1950s, an ethos of nonviolence had already permeated the entire civil rights movement in the previous five decades. It was a commitment to this ethos that compounded the frustrations that members of the black elite felt over Garvey’s wild pronouncements about confronting the European powers in Africa and reinforced their already deep skepticism of communism. Thus, the last thing that black leaders wanted to do with their pronouncements on the Mau Mau uprising was to suggest that the violent tactics of the insurgency might be an acceptable model for blacks in America.
Second, the tactics employed by their enemies in the United States also shaped the way that black leaders responded to the Mau Mau uprising. As discussed in chapter 3, southern politicians and their allies frequently attempted to smear the civil rights movement by claiming that communists were behind the protest actions that blacks initiated. This, however, was not the only rhetorical strategy that racists employed to try to discredit the movement or generate white resistance to civil rights gains. Indeed, as the historian Thomas Noer has demonstrated, the segregationists often evoked images of the “savage” African as a trope in their campaigns to convince the nation that blacks were not yet ready for full citizenship rights.97 Thus, it was very important for black leaders to inoculate the domestic movement from associations that could play into the hands of those using this rhetorical strategy.
Whereas the Mau Mau uprising challenged the ability of mainstream black leaders to stay in synch with both the opinion makers who controlled the black press and a black public that was growing increasingly militant, the emergence of Ghana as an independent nation provided an opportunity for the black community to come together in celebration of a historic milestone. Indeed, while the black community was enthusiastically following the Ghanaian independence ceremonies in the pages of the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and other leading black newspapers, several prominent black leaders made the trip to Accra to witness the proceedings in person.98 It is clear from the statements that these figures made to the press during and after the trip that they joined the broader community in seeing the transition of Ghana to independence as a crucial marker in the emergence of a new black authenticity that incorporated an identification with the independent states of modern Africa as a component of black identity in America.
Ralph Bunche, for example, who had so frustrated Du Bois when he refused to support his vision of a Fifth Pan-African Congress built around black racial identity, told the press that Ghanaian independence was an important marker of progress of both black Americans and Africans.99 Similarly, A. Philip Randolph hailed Ghana as a “modern miracle in statecraft” that pushed his mind “back to the first Pan-African Conference called by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, great scholar and prophet of the new Africa.”100 Randolph’s excitement about the transformation of Ghana even led him down the unlikely path of reconsidering his position on the nationalist dimensions of the Garvey movement. “I, also, in retrospect,” Randolph told the readers of the New York Amsterdam News, “reconstructed the massive demonstrations for the cause of Africa for the Africans by the improbable crusader and organizer, Marcus Garvey.”101
The black leaders who attended the festivities in Accra were also quick to use the transition experience of Ghana as a frame of reference for the black struggle in the United States. Randolph, for example, praised Ghana for showing the black world that it is possible to bring about political transformations without “recourse to violence and bloodshed.”102 “What has impressed me the most,” John H. Johnson, the wealthy publishing magnate and civil rights activist, told the Atlanta Daily World, “is how Ghana achieved its freedom without bitterness.” Johnson concluded his interview by stating that he saw “Martin Luther King’s efforts in the South” as the “counterpart” to what Kwame Nkrumah had engineered in Ghana.103
King had just come from his major victory leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott using nonviolent direct action, so it is easy to see why Johnson made this connection. Moreover, King, whose success in Montgomery had vaulted him into the national spotlight with a cover story in Time magazine, was by all accounts in the black press the star among the U.S. delegation in Accra. Indeed, for many in the black press and back home in the United States, King’s face-to-face meeting with Vice President Richard M. Nixon was the major story to come out of the first few days of the celebration.104 In the wake of the Ghanaian independence ceremonies, King, who was then just thirty-six years old, emerged as one of the strongest voices for the new black authenticity and third-wave Pan-Africanism in his generation. This was because of King’s ability to remain committed to the practice of nonviolence in United States while simultaneously accepting that the struggles against colonialism in Africa sometimes required alternative means of resistance. This, in turn, made him a perfect broker between the activists who came of age in the New Negro period and the black power generation.
Indeed, it was through the intervention of King that the old guard civil rights activists came to realize that the calls of the next generation for black power both on the home front and in Africa were really a call to move from protest to political empowerment through the electoral system and self-help projects. By the time of King’s death in 1968, the phrase black power had become a slogan embraced by most black politicians.
Nothing reflects this unity more than the black political conventions of the late 1960s. The delegates to the conferences were in general agreement that the Voting Rights Act provided the black community with an unprecedented opportunity to impact the U.S. electoral system through voting-bloc behavior and the slating of candidates for office.105 This course was pursued so vigorously in the closing years of the 1960s that, by the time black politicians and community activists gathered for another national conference in 1972, the famed Gary Convention, significant electoral gains had been made on both the local and national levels. As discussed in the next chapter, even though the black elite had reached the pinnacle of political power in the United States, U.S. foreign policy issues toward Africa continued to provide black politicians and activists with unique opportunities to serve their constituents.
• • •
The political context of black politics shifted in response to the decolonization movements that swept across Africa beginning in the 1950s. Indeed, both the black elite and the masses rewrote their prevailing notions of black authenticity in response to these decolonization movements. This new black authenticity was grounded in the notion that Africa was now the place to look for models for challenging white supremacy on the home front. As a result of this transformation, black Americans now saw their collective fate as linked with the new nations in Africa.
Although, the black elite and the rank-and-file generally agreed about the terms of this new authenticity, the paternalistic notion held by the black elites, that they were in control of the civil rights movement, did sometimes lead to conflict between these two segments of the community. These occasional breaks, however, were far less frequent that scholarship suggests is the case. Indeed, for the most part, there was widespread agreement within the black community about the importance of Africa for the domestic movement by the close of the UN Year of Africa.