Journeys for Peace
An African American Abroad
There is a wonderful picture of Bob Browne, taken when he was perhaps five years old. It must have been close to 1929, when the United States was on the verge of the worst economic depression in the country’s history. You would not know it, though, from this sepia-toned image. Browne is dressed to the nines, clearly marking him as the child of a comfortable, even well-to-do, family. Almost everyone who lived in “Bronzeville,” the segregated black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, went to Mr. Jones to have their picture taken.1 Most children found their nicest outfits to be uncomfortable. Furthermore, Mr. Jones brooked no nonsense. Browne’s half sister Wendelle, who was nine years older and in her early teens, recalled her sense of intimidation before the photographer’s commanding presence.2 In contrast, her brother did not want to be posed. Out of sheer spunk, he asked if he could show Mr. Jones how he wanted to stand. So the final image shows the young boy as he wanted to express himself. In addition to his dapper clothes, he wears a huge, confident smile as he looks directly into the camera. Looking at this picture, one thinks, “Look out world, here he comes!”
Robert Span Browne, whose life bridged nearly eight decades from the 1920s to the early years of the twenty-first century, circumnavigated the globe several times as he traveled and lived in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.3 Growing up during the Great Depression, he reached adulthood during World War II and spent the middle decades of his life in the midst of the Cold War, the black liberation struggles in the United States, and the decolonization movements of the so-called Third World.
Figure 1. Bob Browne as a young boy. Personal collection of the Browne family.
Browne was on the front lines of these dramatic social changes. During the crucial years of 1955–1961, when the United States escalated its military, political, and economic commitment to containing communism in Southeast Asia, Browne worked as an American aid adviser, first in Cambodia and then in South Vietnam.4 Upon his return to the United States, he became a leading and not yet fully recognized figure in two of the major movements of the 1960s and 1970s: the protests against the U.S. war in Southeast Asia and the black power movement that sought economic, political, and cultural autonomy for people of African descent, both in the United States and in the broader black diaspora.5
Despite Browne’s political accomplishments, he is not acknowledged among the pantheon of antiwar or black liberation leaders.6 His omission is rather striking, because he was a key and visible figure in the antiwar movement. As he reflected, “I was the one Black who had been connected with that movement before prominent Blacks like Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Dick Gregory eventually spoke out.”7 In fact, Browne’s absence from the historical record renders the peace movement even more “white” than it actually was. Not only are Browne’s contributions as an African American activist slighted, but his personal and political partnerships with Vietnamese individuals also receive little historical attention. Examining Browne’s political contributions sheds light on African American and Asian peace activism that shaped the broader U.S. antiwar movement.
African Americans have long had internationalist aspirations. Their marginalized status in the United States fostered not only desires for full citizenship but also an interest in linking their struggles for equality with those of racialized and colonized others on the global stage. Yet as various scholars remind us, African American internationalism waxed and waned based on historical context. Also, like all complex political ideas and movements, various individuals and organizations espoused different analyses and goals. Bob Browne’s early life, then, provides a window into how a member of the black middle class developed an internationalist outlook as he came of age during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War.
Historian James Meriwether, in his study of African American relationships with Africa, identifies three main explanations for African American internationalism. The “bad times” thesis suggests that “African Americans promote stronger ties with Africa when they feel more alienated in the United States.”8 In contrast, what might be characterized as the “good times” argument posits that “as blacks in America increase their confidence in their status as Americans, they feel greater comfort in looking to Africa.”9 Meriwether critiques these two arguments for focusing exclusively on the U.S. context. In contrast, he suggests that historical developments in Africa during the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly the efforts to resist colonization and obtain independence, changed the perspectives of African Americans toward their ancestral continent.
Browne’s early life in the United States and abroad indicates that all three explanations help to explain his internationalist outlook. As a member of the black middle class coming of age during World War II, Browne had aspirations for and some access to educational and professional achievement. At the same time, the persistence of Jim Crow, in both the North and the South, eventually led Browne to leave the United States out of frustrated hopes. As an African American overseas, he faced constraints and also gained access to unique opportunities in the context of the early Cold War. Furthermore, Browne’s gender facilitated his ability to embark on world travels. And, through his experiences while traveling in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in the early 1950s, Browne developed a deeper appreciation of American race relations, international politics, and the possibilities for his life and career.
In many ways, Browne’s early life qualified him as a member of the “talented tenth.” This term, coined by scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois, describes the educated elite among African Americans who provide leadership and service to their people. Browne grew up in a segregated but vibrant community, the South Side of Chicago, where he absorbed a love of politics and people.10 Coming of age in the Great Depression, he also developed a fascination for economics, a social conscience, and a sense of social responsibility.
Bob Browne’s father, Will Browne, was born in Buffalo, New York, but had become a longtime resident of Chicago by the time his children were born.11 Bob described Will Browne as “a modest functionary of the municipal government.”12 His half sister Wendelle explained that their father was a “civil service employee. . . . In those days, if you paid your water bill personally, you had to meet him. He was in room 101, City Hall.”13 Will’s position was secured through the widespread practice of political patronage in Chicago, which operated primarily among the city’s white residents but extended, to a much smaller degree, to African Americans.14 Like many African Americans at the time, the Brownes were Republicans because that was the party of Lincoln. The Democrats, on the other hand, represented “the Southerner . . . the oppressive lynchers of black people.”15 Although black voters began shifting their support toward President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Republicans tended to dominate the Illinois elections and hence patronage networks. Even so, Will Browne was among a small black elite to benefit from these political connections. He seemed to have a deep interest in politics, though, beyond the financial remuneration of a civil service position. Will Browne did not attend college, but his daughter described him as “a political analyst” with “a very excellent mind. . . . Every time when I saw him, which was about two or three times a month, he would tell me about what was happening in the nation.”16
Browne seemed to have absorbed this love of politics from his father. In high school, Browne “became an avid reader of The Chicago Defender,” a premier black newspaper in the country.17 Through the paper, Browne “soaked up” news about “the indiscriminate lynching of blacks, especially in the South”; he also learned of the “non-life-threatening injustices inflicted upon blacks, both in the South and the North.”18 In addition, the Defender introduced him to black literature. When Richard Wright’s novel Native Son was released in 1940, Browne read it “within months of its publication”; the novel “held a special attraction . . . because its locale was just a few blocks from [his] home in Chicago.”19 The Defender also exposed Browne to the leading African American political figures of that time: Mary McLeod Bethune, a member of the so-called Black Cabinet who advised President Roosevelt on issues related to race; the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter White; the renowned scholar and NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; and the Renaissance man—athlete, actor, singer, and activist—Paul Robeson.20
While Will Browne shared his passion for politics with his children, Julia Browne, Bob’s mother, made sure that her children learned manners, “a strict, inflexible code of moral conduct,” as well as a love of people.21 Remembered as “a very attractive and highly stylish woman” by her son, she not only focused on the appearance of her children but also wanted to shape their character and behavior.22 Julia was from the South. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina, she came to Chicago as part of the great migration of over a million and a half African Americans who moved to northern urban centers between 1910 and 1930.23 They came seeking better economic opportunities and hoping for better lives, away from Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and sharecropping. Julia Browne did not come from the poorest family. Wendelle believes that “they were better off than the average,” because Julia “was able to go to boarding school.”24 Even so, “her memories of the South were very, very bitter. . . . She had seen things . . . that made [her never] want to . . . go back.”25
In Chicago, both longtime residents and newer migrants continued to be shaped by racial discrimination, as evidenced by the pattern of residential segregation. Bronzeville, swelling with the influx of new migrants, became the “second largest Negro city in the world” in the 1940s, second only to Harlem.26 With limited housing options beyond the South Side, Bronzeville became home not only to working-class African Americans but also to the middle- and upper-middle classes, who collectively constituted approximately one-third of the population.27
Class was tangible in ways that Bob Browne recognized. Although he described himself as being “born into a lower middle class black family,” Browne recalled that his family “had a telephone, which many people in the neighborhood did not. In fact, a couple of our neighbors would regularly come over and ask if they could use our telephone.”28 In addition, they had a car, which his mother drove, a “somewhat . . . daring practice for a woman in the mid 1920s.”29 Wendelle described her father and half siblings as living in the Woodlawn section of Bronzeville, close to Washington Park, where families tended to own their own homes and “the cutest kids came from.”30 Bronzeville residents used to think, “Well, if you lived in Woodlawn—nice, nice.”31
In Bronzeville, Julia was known as a gracious hostess, and Bob Browne inherited his mother’s affinity for cultivating positive social relationships. As his stepsister recalled, he was “interested in people. . . . He just liked to know people.”32 In Browne’s youth, his social network mainly included other members of the black middle class in South Side Chicago. Although he worked a variety of odd jobs to earn pocket money and even to help support his family after his father’s death, Browne described himself as leading an “appallingly bourgeois” life: “My teen age crowd was used to throwing and attending lavish formal dances several times a year, for which we rented tuxedos and/or tails, bought our dates corsages, and behaved pretty much as we felt middle class white folks did, except that our music was infinitely better.”33 His cohort of black middle-class teenagers included individuals who would become prominent intellectuals and artists. Jewel Plummer Cobb became “the first black woman to be named president of a major white university,” namely California State University, Fullerton. Browne also socialized with the family of “Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun.”34 Hansberry’s parents were known for throwing “fabulous New Years Eve” parties. Browne recalled Lorraine criticizing “the glamorous displays of conspicuous consumption such as these super-parties exhibited”; he, in contrast, reveled in these occasions, particularly for the opportunities to mingle with celebrities like Paul Robeson, “who usually stayed with the Hansberry family” during visits to Chicago.35
Despite his relatively privileged background, Bob Browne recalled that coming of age during the Depression years made economics particularly fascinating to him. In his memoir, he describes in great detail:
One recollection from this period which has never dimmed over the past seven decades. It inflicted a scar on my brain which shaped my every economic decision and stalked my every expenditure, at least until the time of my retirement. The precipitating event must have taken place about 1932 or 1933, during the early years of the great depression, when I was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. I was aware that times were very hard, that there were many people who did not have enough to eat, and even that people were being put out of their homes because they had no money to pay the rent. One heard about such happenings on the radio and they were spread across the newspapers and the movie house newsreels. But walking home from school one day, passing a small apartment building which I had passed dozens of times before, I found four generations of a family sitting forlornly in their front yard on their living room furniture, with dressers, beds, mattresses, mirrors, tables, kitchen furniture and utensils, clothing, luggage, bulging boxes of goods, in fact, the family’s entire belongings, all spread along the sidewalk. I instantly realized that this was a family which had been evicted and which had nowhere to go. It would soon be getting chilly, and dark, and I sensed they would still be sitting there. I couldn’t fully comprehend why they were there, what they would do at nightfall, or why no one seemed to be helping them. . . . That evicted family was a specter which never left my subconsciousness.36
This personal encounter with the deprivations of poverty raised troubling questions for Browne about the causes and solutions for such suffering. He recalled receiving little helpful information to help him make sense of the Great Depression:
One evening I saw a newsreel at the local movie house which showed the government dying a massive mountain of raw potatoes a deep blue color. Widespread poverty was at that moment subjecting millions of Americans to severe hunger and undernourishment and the streets were filled with beggars, so it made no sense to me that the government would be deliberately rendering vast tonnages of food inedible. The reporter described the action as a means to support higher potato prices so as to aid ailing farmers. I could not grasp this reasoning and when I asked my mother for an explanation she could only reply that it had something to do with “economics.” . . . I think it was at that moment that I decided that I would probably major in economics in college.37
Browne pursued the subject when he enrolled at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1941.
Economics was a vibrant field during the Great Depression and World War II. In college, Browne studied “the social security program, the agricultural program, fair labor legislation, and the newly approved National Labor Relations Act.”38 In a 1970s interview, he explained that the periods of the Great Depression and World War II were eras of economic experimentation: “These were issues of great concern at that time. . . . The whole idea of setting prices and rationing became the issues people were wrestling with and that was what we studied in school.”39 Despite the compelling nature of the topics studied, out of the over one hundred African American students enrolled at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Browne was the only one majoring in economics. When he graduated in 1944 with honors, it was a noteworthy accomplishment. At the time, few in his home community of Bronzeville had gone beyond the sixth grade, and the number of college graduates constituted “about two in every 100 individuals.”40
During his college years, Browne also joined the black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, an organization whose membership included such luminaries as W. E. B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr.41 His decision to become a member of the fraternity was partly motivated by practical reasons, though. The dormitories were for whites and this policy did not change until a year after Browne graduated, when a popular black football player enrolled at the school. In addition, “the University’s host towns of Urbana and Champaign were strictly Jim Crow communities.”42 The Alpha Phi Alpha House, “a run down frame structure . . . [that was] sparsely furnished” and poorly heated, was one of the few places where black male students could live, since they were not allowed to reside in the dormitories.43 Furthermore, “virtually all the fellows at the Alpha House worked as waiters in the many elegant fraternity and sorority houses which lined the major campuses [sic] roadways.”44 Browne was among this crew, who tended to receive their payment in meals. He worked as a waiter because so few economic opportunities were available for African American students. According to a 1940 report, “The University of Illinois Negro Students,” they “seldom found employment in University offices, libraries, laboratories, shops and Physical Plant.”45 With these professional, clerical, or skilled positions closed to them, members of the black elite were forced to turn to positions of servitude. This lesson was repeatedly taught to Browne as he searched for additional educational and professional opportunities in both the Jim Crow South and the Jim Crow North.
Browne’s rise through the academic ranks was initially interrupted in 1944 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.46 World War II had started just three months after Browne matriculated at the University of Illinois, and he recalled hearing Roosevelt’s famous speech on the radio after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. In response, “a couple of [his] upper classmen buddies rushed home the next day to enlist in the armed services.”47 Even before the start of World War II, African American leaders launched the Double V Campaign to draw attention to the need for victory, not only against the Axis powers but also over racial prejudice in the United States. African Americans who served their nation, either through the military or on the home front, generally had raised expectations of what a land of democracy might offer its citizens. The eager young men who enlisted were among the over 2.5 million African American men and women who served in the military. This was their opportunity for recognized national public service, which could bring symbolic recognition as well as material rewards.48
In contrast to his classmates who readily enlisted, Browne initially had a more measured and mixed response to the prospect of serving in the war. He possessed a strong streak of independence and “just hated the thought of entering the army, where [he] would be entirely under the control of others.”49 He also expressed skepticism about the fight against fascism when people of color in the United States received so little respect and so few rights. Year later, he recalled that during the war “the bitter cynicism of America’s blacks had been stretched to within a whisker of the breaking point.”50 African Americans throughout the country were well aware of the 1943 three-day race riot in Detroit that resulted in thirty-four deaths. They discussed reports circulating about how “Nazi prisoners” in the South were accorded “eating and recreational facilities which southern Jim Crow practices denied to blacks, even to blacks wearing the US uniform.”51 Browne also recognized the discrimination directed against other racial minorities. In his memoir, which was written much later, he recalled the “unforgivable humiliation and racism” experienced by Japanese Americans who were interned en masse in camps by the U.S. government during World War II.52 Because of their Japanese heritage, these individuals were suspected and treated as enemies of the United States, regardless of their individual beliefs or behavior. Browne initially tried to delay military service but eventually served for two years in segregated units that stayed stateside.
After two relatively uneventful years in the military, Browne’s honorable discharge in 1946 allowed him to utilize the G.I. Bill to obtain additional educational training. His ability to access the benefits of this federal legislation was somewhat unusual, considering the ways in which the allocation of the G.I. Bill, like other social service programs, tended to privilege white male recipients.53 Browne’s residency in the North as well as his educational background granted him certain advantages. In 1947, he graduated with an MBA from the University of Chicago, the elite private institution on the South Side, located close to his family’s home. His class included an unprecedented number of five African American students.54 In his opinion, “this surpassed the cumulative number who had been so honored since the University’s founding and set a precedent that would not be repeated for another four decades.”55 The same year that Browne received his MBA, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major-league baseball.
Browne’s academic successes could not surmount the racial barriers against African Americans in the early post–World War II era. He later recounted the “traumatic experience” of searching for a position: “Because of my race the University was unable to obtain an interview for me with a single prospective employer amongst the numerous banks and brokerage houses which were interviewing the graduating class.”56 Forced to seek his livelihood elsewhere, Browne initially relocated to the South, where he both worked as an accountant for Dillard University in New Orleans and taught economics as an instructor there from 1947 to 1949. Browne recalled that of his four African American classmates, two others also found employment at black colleges and a third worked for a black bank. He had no information about the fourth graduate. In other words, their education at an elite and predominantly white school simply paved the way for their return to their racial communities.
Given his mother’s background and the coverage of Jim Crow conditions in northern black newspapers, Browne found “the mere prospect of going to Dixie . . . paralyzing.”57 He discovered, though, that Dillard was more gracious than he expected. He enjoyed the society of the students and other faculty members on the idyllic campus and after some initial hesitation also explored the segregated city of New Orleans in his recently purchased 1946 Ford convertible. Browne even became involved with an interracial political campaign to support Henry Wallace’s Democratic bid for president in 1948 but encountered “some difficulty with the [university] administration” when he participated in an effort to form a labor union on campus.58 Browne recalled that the president of Dillard University “did not fire me, but instead informed me that a dear friend of his . . . , the president of a local black life insurance company in Houston, Texas, was desperately in need of someone with my skills to fill a vacant executive position. . . . I realized that I was being eased out of my job.”59
Browne “lasted there less than a year. Living outside the cocoon of a college campus [he] found the daily battle with racism to be oppressive and inescapable.”60 A routine traffic stop led to “an altercation with the white police [and] resulted in [Browne] being briefly imprisoned.”61 The officer had addressed Browne as “boy,” a common racial practice in the South. In response, Browne, who was in the company of a woman, requested the officer’s “name and badge number, informing him, when he asked ‘why?’, that I planned to report him for disrespecting me.”62 In jail, Browne was taunted and threatened with violence. Luckily, he was able to secure his release through his employer’s connections and to leave Houston before suffering any physical harm. Other African Americans had been mutilated and lynched for similar and even lesser offenses. Browne was tired of the routine humiliations required by the racial status quo. Soon after his release, he decided to leave the South. He was relieved and happy to be driving back north in the spring of 1950, he said, “whistling and singing aloud to myself as I sped along US 61 with my top down.”63
Chicago offered little reprieve. While Browne could easily reimmerse himself in the rich social world of Bronzeville, he still faced limited prospects for obtaining a job commensurate with his training and aspirations. He eventually found a position with the Chicago Urban League as an industrial field secretary. Incorporated in 1917, just as the United States entered World War I, the Chicago chapter of the National Urban League espoused the “mission of promoting the social and economic advancement of Chicago’s African American citizens.”64 Robert E. Park, the University of Chicago sociologist who became renowned for his studies of urban race relations, had served as the league’s first board president.
Browne embraced the opportunity to challenge racial wrongs. He decided to organize, in his words, “a campaign to get Blacks employed in the banks. Obviously, this was a personal vendetta from my days at the University of Chicago.”65 Despite his planning and persistence, he ran into a thick and impenetrable glass ceiling. After much effort, he obtained “an interview with the chairman of the board of the First National Bank of Chicago, one of the leading and most powerful banks in the country.”66 The chairman not only flatly refused Browne’s request but also patronizingly explained that he financially supported the Urban League. Browne recalled the banker saying: “Don’t think that I have any ill will toward your people. I contribute to the Urban League. I’m prepared to make contributions to pay your salary so you can come here and ask me to do this, but I have no intentions of doing it. And incidentally, just to show you where my heart is, you know that green carpet that’s on the floor of your director’s office? That carpet used to be right here in my office and when I redecorated my office I sent my old carpet over.”67 Fifty years after the fact, Browne recalled the conversation “vividly,” particularly since he remembered “biting hard on my lip so as to hide my emotion”; he went “home nearly in tears” and feeling totally “demeaned.”68
Shortly afterward, Browne decided to go abroad. He had reached his breaking point; he had had it with Jim Crow America. Even with the advantages of his class status within the black community, his educational accomplishments, his personal social skills, and his increasing interest in political change, he could see few prospects for racial improvement in his home country. Certainly there were glimmers of hope, but Browne felt frustrated and depressed by the glacial pace of change. He could not foresee the massive rise and impact of the civil rights movement just a few years later. Perhaps Browne felt akin to a laboratory test subject, finally freed to explore the world around him, only to discover a maze of dead ends. Tired of the obstacles, he chose to leave the American racial labyrinth.
Browne recounts that he always had a desire to travel internationally. His wanderlust stemmed partly from his early interest in racial politics on the global stage. In his 1961 publication Race Relations in International Affairs, Browne recalled, “My most vivid recollections of adolescent reading [were] not the exciting adventure stories of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Zane Grey, but news accounts in the Negro press [most notably the Chicago Defender] of atrocities, insults, and injustices being inflicted by white men on colored persons everywhere.”69 To experience life abroad, Brown liquidated his assets in April 1952 and traveled for a year on his own throughout Europe and North Africa. As he recalled: “I thought, why not do it now. I was still single. My family and friends thought that I was nuts. I had a good job, a fairly nice car, all the things people were after in those days, and I guess they still are. It wasn’t certain that I would have my job when I got back, but I was willing to get rid of the car, turn all the little assets I had into cash, and take all the risks. . . . It was the greatest thing I ever did in my life.”70
Browne’s desire for global exploration reveals the influence of a variety of factors. His repeated run-ins with Jim Crow America fueled a sense of alienation from and frustration with his home country, thereby fostering a desire to engage with other societies and cultures. In interpreting his life experiences, Browne refers consistently to the black press as an institution that fostered a broad sense of racial and anticolonial consciousness.71 In addition, the global events of the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly World War II, and the anticolonial critiques of racial domination encouraged Browne’s interest in overseas affairs. Furthermore, his status as a member of the talented tenth instilled in Browne a desire for professional and social advancement as well as a sense of social responsibility—or, in the words of historian James Meriwether, a belief that “integration and rising cultural nationalism are not mutually exclusive developments.”72 In fact, it was Browne’s assets as a member of the black middle class that financed his explorations abroad. Finally, Browne’s gender facilitated his mobility as well. He was a single man, without familial responsibilities and also not in need of supervision. As a bachelor, Browne could roam the world on his own. However, being African American abroad raised the stakes in era of the Cold War, decolonization, and civil rights.
In the years after World War II, Americans had unprecedented access to travel. Their ability to do so was intimately connected to war, both hot and cold. The U.S. economy bounced back from the Great Depression because of the production, expenditures, and markets necessitated by World War II. The national recovery continued as the United States engaged in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and other socialist powers. In order to stem the tide of communism globally, the U.S. government invested in what President Eisenhower described as “the military-industrial complex.” In the post–World War II period, the United States committed a significant portion of the national budget to the military as the size of the armed forces increased to prepare for potential conflicts almost anywhere around the world. In addition, the government prioritized the improvement and construction of the national transportation infrastructure, committing twenty-six billion public dollars to create the interstate highway system. These roads, deemed a national security priority, prepared the country for defense. To make the United States more competitive in the arms and space race, the government also invested nearly nine hundred million dollars in higher education as well as the science and technology industries.
The national growth in the overall economy meant that average citizens, particularly those of the white middle class, had more savings or access to credit for personal consumption.73 They not only purchased houses, appliances, and cars but also financed trips. The postwar period witnessed the proliferation of roadside motels and diners as families and individuals took to the expanding highway system to explore America. Jack Kerouac’s famous novel, On the Road, captures the spirit of that era. Kerouac wrote this semiautobiographical work in 1951, the year after Browne drove back to Chicago in his Ford convertible and the year before he decided to walk away from the perks of his black middle-class lifestyle to go abroad. Finally published in 1957, On the Road offers a glimpse into a subculture of people, eventually dubbed the Beat generation, constantly on the move. For those attracted to experimentation, the road, even if it was financed by the U.S. government for strategic security interests, could still represent freedom and rejection of conventionality.
Americans took not only to the road but also to the air and the seas. The millions of U.S. soldiers stationed abroad during World War II and the Cold War came back with colorful stories of their exploits in foreign countries. Browne, who never had the opportunity to travel overseas with the military, recalled hearing these “tales of fabulous adventures, real and imagined. Most envied were those chaps who had been fortunate enough to have participated in the liberation of Italy. . . . Even after we had made allowance for the blatant exaggeration which we secretly hoped characterized their narratives . . . we [still] lapped it all up.”74 Stories like these inspired Browne and many others to venture beyond U.S. borders.
In addition to the personal thrill of travel, civilians going abroad also could perform patriotic service for their country.75 To stem the worldwide spread of communism, the United States formed international alliances with countries, people, and movements more inclined to support American policies. These relationships, though, came with a hefty price tag. When Browne decided to travel abroad in 1952, the United States was just completing the Marshall Plan or European Recovery Plan. Instituted from 1948 to 1952, this package alone siphoned thirteen billion U.S. dollars from the national budget. Concurrent with this economic aid, the United States committed its troops to the Korean War, the first conflict in which integrated military units were deployed. After fighting over a period of three years, 1950–1953, the war ended with a stalemate, the loss of over fifty-four thousand American lives, and fifty-four billion dollars in expenditures.
In this tense political context, international travel fulfilled multiple goals. By physically moving beyond the borders of their country, Americans could meet new people, experience unfamiliar cultures, perhaps even learn foreign languages, and hopefully gain a greater awareness of the world. The U.S. government promoted this international sensibility, even among those who did not travel abroad, by investing in foreign language training and so-called area studies, academic fields that analyzed the history, culture, society, and politics of mostly non-Western regions of the world.76 To encourage Americans to go beyond armchair travel, the U.S. government invested in what historian Christopher Endy has characterized as the “military-tourism complex.”77 Public funds, including a portion of the Marshall Plan, were allocated to strengthen the international transportation infrastructure and subsidize the tourism industry. The U.S. government and its global partners hoped that this new knowledge that Americans gained through travel and study would help them to develop a deeper understanding and commitment to the rather costly international policies necessitated by the Cold War. In addition, Americans when abroad could serve as informal diplomats by personally speaking about the advantages of the U.S. way of life. Upon return, they could help educate their neighbors, friends, and family as well. In other words, American travelers had the potential to bring the United States to the world and the world back home.
Being an African American traveler, in many ways, raised the stakes. Racism was America’s Achilles heel during the Cold War. The United States represented itself in the international arena as a land of democracy and equal opportunity. However, America’s Cold War enemies focused on the inequalities, the segregation, and the denial of citizenship rights experienced by African Americans as examples of the hypocrisy of U.S. political rhetoric.78 This debate about race was particularly significant in the scramble for international alliances. From 1945 through 1960, forty nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, representing a quarter of the world’s population, threw off the yoke of colonialism and achieved independence. As formerly colonized subjects, these newly formed nations were attuned to issues of racial inequality and hence were “susceptible” to communist-inspired critiques of the U.S. racial order. To win the “hearts and minds” of these potential allies, America had to present a better impression abroad. President Eisenhower created the United States Information Agency in 1953 essentially to enhance America’s public image and promote U.S. interests to the world community.79 At times, international considerations forced the federal government to place pressure on certain segments of U.S. society, particularly those in the South but even in the nation’s capital, to actually make changes in racial policies and practices. Presenting a cleaner appearance overseas also required monitoring who traveled abroad and how they represented their country.
Bob Browne almost never had the chance to leave the United States. Uncertain of his itinerary, he filled out in his passport application that he intended to visit countries around the world, including “virtually all the nations of Europe as well as a dozen or so countries in Africa and the Middle East.”80 Browne had studied several European languages, including French, Spanish, and German. He also had read about Africa and the broader struggles against colonialism in newspapers like the Chicago Defender. His request to visit Africa, however, immediately sent “a red flag . . . up in the State Dept”; at the time “all of Africa except for Liberia, Ethiopia, Libya and Egypt, was still in colonial status. Visitors from other than the colonizing power were not generally admitted to the Africa colonies. . . . To the leadership class, the very concept of an unattached roving, black American visiting the French, British, Belgian or Portuguese colonies was preposterous.”81
Expecting his passport, Browne received instead a letter requesting his attendance for an appointment: “I of course complied with this instruction and when I arrived I was ushered into a small, drab, room painted a sickly green and sparsely furnished with a metal, government issue desk surmounted by a lamp, and flanked by two grey steel chairs. After a brief delay, a solemn-faced white man with a middle-age paunch entered the room carrying two or three file folders.” After explaining the necessity of obtaining additional information before Browne’s passport application could be processed, the interviewer “settled comfortably into an inquisitorial mode. . . . He began, slowly and solemnly, to read off organizational names, peering accusingly at me over his iron-rimmed glasses after intoning each name, asking if I had ever been a member thereof.”82 Browne’s interrogation exemplified the tactics advocated by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the early Cold War. Seeking to expose and denounce “reds” in American society, McCarthy demanded formal investigations of people in positions of political, cultural, and educational leadership. His accusations of communist subversion also fomented a broader culture of suspicion and paranoia. At the end of this McCarthy-style interview, Browne was still uncertain of his prospects of obtaining a passport. Only after he traveled to Washington, DC, to enlist the support of his congressional representatives did he finally receive authorization to go abroad. Notably, his passport was valid for only four countries in western and northern Europe.
Browne was fortunate to receive permission to travel at all. The State Department had revoked the passports of Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois in 1950 under the McCarran or Internal Security Act, accusing both black leaders of being communist agents and denying them the ability to leave the country. Their passports were only reinstituted in 1958, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that political beliefs or associations could not constitute the basis for denying U.S. citizens the right to travel.83
Various scholars have argued that this era of Cold War repression led liberal African American leaders and organizations to shift their call for human rights to civil rights. While previous events, like Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, inspired passionate anticolonial politics among African Americans, McCarthyism narrowed the range of black political expression in the United States. While African American leftists tended to be marginalized, liberals adopted anticommunism in order to advocate for equality within the U.S. nation-state.84 Even as Browne was subjected to political intimidation, he was not a recognizable civil rights leader. Consequently, he did not face the same degree of pressure as Robeson, DuBois, or Walter White of the NAACP. Browne’s middle-class background and family involvement with Chicago politics no doubt assisted his efforts to obtain permission to leave the United States. Traveling as an independent citizen, he embarked on an effort to experientially understand the Cold War and the era of decolonization by traversing highly charged geopolitical boundaries.
In the spring of 1952, Browne boarded a luxury ocean liner with a third-class ticket. It offered the “cheapest means for making a transatlantic crossing,” for “in the 1950s, only the very rich crossed the Atlantic by air.”85 Even in third class, Browne found his accommodations and means of travel exciting and exotic. He seemed to appreciate the slower pace in transportation. He had enrolled in a summer term at the London School of Economics, but other than this commitment, there were no specific places he needed to be. He intended to travel at his leisure until his savings of twenty-five hundred dollars were exhausted. As Browne journeyed throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, he eagerly sought opportunities to learn new languages, meet new people, and gain fresh perspectives about race relations. He came from a country that prided itself for being innovative and modern, but as an African American he experienced the United States as deeply entrenched in social conservatism. Ironically, Browne traveled to regions characterized as “the Old World,” “tradition bound,” or even “primitive” to gain insights about the possibility of social transformation.
Browne used Paris as his base in Europe. France was the premier destination for tourists during the post–World War II era, and it maintains that status even today.86 He visited famous sites, which he preferred to do “unhurriedly and in some cases repeatedly.”87 He also spent weeks attempting to converse in French and reading French newspapers in Parisian cafés. He tried as much as possible to meet the locals and use whatever language skills he had in their native tongue. This took some effort, since it was usually much easier to stay among other Americans or other English-speaking people. He recalled, “whenever the opportunity presented itself, I would insinuate myself into the company of any native French speakers whom I could find (and who were not aspiring to learn English!), and inflict upon them whatever my verbal skill level was at the time, while clinging attentively to their every syllable and laboriously attempting to decipher what they were saying.”88 Over time, Browne developed a comfortable fluency in French. He also spent a significant amount of time in Madrid, attempting without as much success to improve his Spanish.
Over the course of the year, Browne mainly drifted from place to place with no fixed itinerary. Although his initial passport was valid only for certain countries, he eventually succeeded in removing the restrictions and was able to travel widely. On Browne’s application for foreign service in 1955, he stated: “I traveled at my own expense in each country of Western Europe with the exception of Ireland, Finland, and Portugal. I also visited French North Africa, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey.”89 In his travels, Browne discovered that “most of Europe was still largely in ruins.”90 After all, World War II had ended just six years before. He also was curious to visit socialist countries, despite or perhaps because of the red scare tactics that he had been subjected to before he was allowed to leave the United States. He crossed the “iron curtain” for brief trips to East Berlin and Yugoslavia.
What excited Browne most about his travels, though, was the opportunities to meet and talk with people. He recalled that the “real joys came from the random interpersonal contacts which bounced into one’s life virtually every day . . . new people from new places with new (to me) ideas. It was chaotic and bewildering and wonderful. Most of the people whom I came into close contact were between 20 and 40 years of age, were bumming around Europe on tight budgets, were people-oriented, and were sharing and supportive of one another.”91 It was not just Europeans or other Americans that Browne encountered: “The Asian, Arab, African and Latin American floaters were not inconsiderable also.”92
One of the highlights of Browne’s journey was meeting and conversing with writer Richard Wright in a sidewalk café in Paris. Browne had long admired the author. He recalled: “Wright would have been about 44 years old when we met in Paris. He was robust, witty and relaxed. He welcomed extended discussion on whatever topics his fans wished to introduce and although his interlocutors tended to be younger and far less informed than he, he was at pains not to be overbearing in his interactions with them.”93 Wright was part of a “small colony of African-American expatriates who were discovering the joys of Paris.” Browne describes Wright as “being seduced by the relatively greater freedom which he had found in France.”94 Browne discovered this as well in his travels.
Europe was certainly not devoid of racism. When Browne traveled to Germany, he described “the German ambiance [as being] far closer to the American . . . particularly with regard to orderliness, respect for authority, and something so intangible that I can only think to call it ‘whiteness.’ ”95 In addition, European powers were still heavily invested in maintaining their colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The French, in fact, were waging ruthless and ultimately unsuccessful wars in Vietnam and Algeria to protect their empire. Even so, Browne discovered, “for the first time in my life I found my brown skin to be a help rather than a hindrance. In Europe it brought me special favors.”96 As American leaders feared, being “a member of America’s most famous oppressed minority, I seemed to be received with particular warmth by most of the European vagabonds and my words seem to carry disproportionate weight when America was under discussion.”97
When Browne ventured outside of the so-called Western world, his brownness served as an asset for a different reason. “In Africa and the Middle East it enabled me to blend into the peoples and to share their lives a bit more than could white visitors.”98 In future years, Browne would repeat this statement about racial commonality to describe his relationship with the Vietnamese. During this trip, though, Browne expressed a particular affinity for Africans. When he traveled by boat from Spain to Morocco during the early weeks of 1953, he recalled “pausing briefly at the Rock of Gibraltar to enjoy the exciting vista of looking to my right to see the Europe which I was leaving and then turning my head to the left to see the Africa which awaited me. A palpable tension began to build up within me over the next hour as the boat transported me south from the Rock, and it exploded in an emotional burst when the boat reached Africa and I finally planted my foot on the homeland.”99
Not only did Browne claim Africa as his homeland, he was misrecognized as an African or Middle Easterner, which sometimes placed him in an awkward position. In some ways, Browne had a greater ability to maneuver and travel in Europe, both because of his language skills and because he was an obvious outsider. In addition, he developed relationships with a community of fellow travelers and expatriates in Europe. In North Africa and the Middle East, regions less frequented by tourists, Browne was assumed to be an insider. However, he did not necessarily have the social knowledge to truly be one. When he was in Tangiers, he became lost in the “Moorish quarter” and
attempted to disguise my growing panic with an external demeanor of composure and self-confidence. . . . At one point my foot inadvertently brushed against an old lady’s slipper, knocking it off her foot, and she accosted me in Arabic. Instantly, every one turned instinctively toward the disturbance and stared at me, curious to see how I would reply. My probable ethnicity was already proving to be an unending source of great curiosity everywhere I went in the region and I could already anticipate that it would be an on-going issue throughout the Arab area because I so resembled many of the local people. . . . I smiled at my victim in a pained manner and grunted several unintelligible sounds which, I hoped, might pass for an apology in the dialect of some Arab tribe. . . . I seized on their puzzlement to quickly turn and stride away.100
Other incidents like these led Browne to resolve, “I would make a serious effort to learn spoken Arabic before I ventured again into this part of the world.”101
Browne’s desire to pass as a native, despite his lack of language skills, was reinforced by a chance encounter with U.S. troops stationed in North Africa. Browne had been receiving money and letters throughout his journey, but his mail was inadvertently sent to another American with the same name:
In the course of trying to retrieve these letters I was obliged to ride a US military bus out to the camp and the conversation which I heard on this bus, and the attitudes expressed by the US soldiers about the local people, were virtually unbearable to me, and the southern drawl of several of the speakers upset me even further. The ignorant observations, atrocious English and foul language were familiar to me from my own military experience, but the arrogance and the feelings of superiority which oozed from these characters raised real concern within me as to the wisdom of having such folks representing the US abroad. My travels of the past several months, throwing me into contact with mainly middle class and better educated Americans, had somewhat expunged from my memory how repulsive many Americans really are. I think I had never before seen Americans in such a bad light. The soldiers had nothing but contempt for the poor people whom they were supposedly assisting.102
U.S. leaders shared Browne’s concern about arrogant and rude Americans presenting a rather “ugly” image of their nation to the world. The Office of Armed Forces Information and Education issued a booklet, Pocket Guide to Anywhere, in 1953 to educate the members of the military, who “find themselves for the first time among alien people, whose ways are not our ways, whose language and customs are different from ours, whose religion maybe different [and] whose skin may be of different color.”103 The diplomatic danger posed by the behavior of Americans abroad would receive widespread public attention when the book The Ugly American became a best seller after its publication in 1958.
The racism displayed toward North Africans by U.S. soldiers abroad echoed the practices of Jim Crow in the United States. Even if Browne experienced a cultural and social disconnect with the natives of North Africa and the Middle East, he felt a racial affinity and a political connection to their struggles against Western imperialism. In his travels in this region, he had the “opportunity to see colonialism in action [which] strengthened [his] urge to participate in its burial.”104 Browne also visited nations that were newly formed, such as Libya, Egypt, and Israel. He gained new insights into the complexities of nationalism, most powerfully demonstrated by the conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis over the same land. Browne was particularly interested in the Middle East because African American leader Ralph Bunche, as the key United Nations (UN) representative, negotiated a truce between the Israelis and Palestinians in 1948. To the degree that Browne was able to communicate in English and French, he attempted to enter into dialogue with local residents about these volatile issues.
Browne encountered other African Americans who were engaged in international initiatives during his travels in North Africa and the Middle East. During a stop in Derna, Libya, he met by chance another African American, “a Mr. Jones, [who was] an agricultural specialist working for the US Point Four program (a predecessor of the American aid program).”105 This individual, like the U.S. troops, was in North Africa as part of America’s Cold War mandate. Instead of supplying military aid, Jones was offering technical expertise to assist economic development in Libya. Perhaps his racial background also helped him to view the people he was seeking to help in a more sympathetic light than the soldiers that Browne encountered. This meeting may have planted the seed of Browne’s subsequent career as a U.S. aid adviser in Southeast Asia. He spent the night with the Jones family: “[Jones] and his wife had a comfortable six room house and they extended me the royal treatment, including such long missed delicacies as hot corn muffins, strawberry preserves, applesauce, mayonnaise, and hot water to bathe in. It was heaven.”106
After a year abroad, Browne was ready to return home. In the spring of 1952, he boarded another ocean liner and came back, he said, “a vastly richer person than I had been a year earlier. Unquestionably, this had been the most rewarding year of my life, the most pleasant and the most defining.”107 The opportunity to see new sights, meet new people, observe different societies “broadened my perspective considerably and also made me quite eager to see other parts of the world which I had not yet seen. The visit also enabled me to question the way in which many things were done in the United States.”108
When Browne finally returned to Chicago, the Windy City with its provincial racial hierarchies was too limiting for him. Inspired by his year abroad, Browne wanted to offer his professional and intellectual skills for international purposes. He quickly relocated to New York City, where he hoped to secure employment through the United Nations. Established in 1945 as World War II was ending, the UN sought to promote “international peace and security” by advancing “the principle of equal rights and self-determination” and “human rights . . . for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”109 Browne frequented the UN and found the “headquarters . . . a very welcoming place”; because security was not as much a concern in the 1950s, he had ready access to “the delegates’ lounge,” where he “passed many an afternoon . . . sipping tea or coffee and engaging in fascinating discussion with statesmen and diplomats whose pictures were appearing in the daily press.”110 Browne was not alone in his attraction to the “bustling international atmosphere which permeated the UN’s premises.”111 Other African Americans, most notably civil rights leaders and organizations, also had approached the UN, lobbying for the platform of human rights to advocate for protection and equality for black Americans.112
Despite Browne’s persistence, no work prospects appeared to be forthcoming from the UN.113 Due to the racially discriminatory job market, he only succeeded in obtaining a “dull administrative job” as an accountant for New York City’s Housing Authority.114 In his hours away from work, Browne volunteered his time to support the decolonization efforts of Africans. He worked with the newly formed American Committee on Africa, an organization founded in the early 1950s to support “the African colonial peoples who were petitioning the U.S. for independence.”115 One of the people whom Browne assisted was Julius Nyerere, eventually the first president of Tanzania. At the time, Nyerere was a “completely unknown school teacher from the British colony of Tanganyika, who had been sent to . . . present a petition imploring the UN to compel Britain to present a plan for granting independence to Tanganyika within 25 years. He had arrived in NYC without the slightest idea of how to tackle his task, and someone brought him to our attention. We promptly scurried around to find him the specialized legal and other support which he so desperately needed for preparing the petition.”116
Browne’s relationships with the founders of the American Committee for Africa and his familiarity with the UN would become valuable assets for his future involvement with the antiwar movement. Cora Weiss and her husband, Peter Weiss, a lawyer and cofounder of the committee, both worked with Browne to support African decolonization.117 During the U.S. war in Vietnam, all three expanded their efforts to Southeast Asia.
Beyond Browne’s political commitments in the early to mid-1950s, he still faced the challenge of finding meaningful work. His time spent around the UN eventually bore fruit when a chance encounter with a Chicago African American leader gave Browne an opportunity to go abroad again. Given the international attention focused on U.S. race relations, “President Eisenhower had continued President Truman’s practice of routinely including a black person in the US delegation to the UN General Assembly each year. In 1954 that person happened to be Rev. Archibald Carey, a minister from a prominent Chicago church whom I knew slightly.”118 When Browne ran into Carey at the delegates’ lounge, their conversation led to Browne expressing his interest in working in international affairs, preferably abroad. Upon hearing this, Carey’s “face brightened. He had that very morning flown into town seated beside Harold Stassen, the head of the US foreign economic aid program, and had learned that that agency was actively seeking personnel to go to Indo-China to work in a US aid program. . . . French speakers were particularly being sought.”119 Following his father’s footsteps, Browne applied for a U.S. Civil Service position. In his application, dated 30 May 1955, he indicated that he would be willing to accept an appointment anywhere outside of the United States but left the query about positions inside the United States unchecked.120 Soon thereafter, Browne “was high above the Pacific” and traveling to what was then a little-known part of the world: Phnom Penh, Cambodia.121
Browne’s year abroad in the midst of the Cold War, decolonization movements, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement solidified his aspirations for a career in international relations. In many ways, he was pushed out of the United States by its entrenched racism. At the same time, as the American government and various international institutions slowly shifted their racial practices to respond to internal as well as external pressures, Browne also found an opportunity to serve as an authorized representative of his country. As a male member of the black middle class, he had the contacts, the training, and the mobility to assume this internationalist role. Browne’s entry into the U.S. government was part of a larger group of African American political leaders, civil servants, and military personnel who gained greater opportunities during the post–World War II era. In the context of the Cold War, the era of decolonization, and the emerging civil rights movement, Ralph Bunche, Archibald Carey, Mr. Jones in Libya, and Bob Browne created niches for themselves as agents of the U.S. nation-state. Historian Michael L. Krenn’s study of African Americans and the State Department points out that government accommodations to demands for racial access and equality were made reluctantly and at a glacial pace.122 Nevertheless, the slight openings allowed African Americans to anchor themselves to the American Cold War mandate in exchange for positions that provided possibilities for professional advancement. At the same time, having the opportunity to spend an extended period of time abroad gave individuals like Browne the experiential basis to develop critical perspectives of U.S. global policies.