African American Anticolonialism

AFRICAN AMERICAN ANTICOLONIALISM. During World War II, as European hegemony crumbled, African American anticolonial activists forcefully argued that their struggles in the United States against Jim Crow were inextricably bound to the struggles of African and Asian peoples for independence. From the time of World War I, nationalists and Pan-Africanists had trenchantly critiqued and debunked myths of white supremacy and the civilizing mission as well as challenged the political and economic order on which they rested. In the 1930s especially, the scholarship of C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois had placed Black liberation at the center of world events. As the anticolonial movements gathered momentum, these ideas took on a new urgency and meaning. Anticolonial efforts in Africa and Asia were supported by organizations such as the Council on African Affairs (CAA), founded by Max Yergan and Paul Robeson and also led by Alphaeus Hunton, Eslanda Robeson, Charlotta Bass, and Du Bois; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Walter White; and the National Council of Negro Women, led by Mary McLeod Bethune. In addition to showing support, activists in these organizations argued that the independence of new Asian and African nations would help Black Americans in their struggles for political, economic, and civil rights.

The CAA was founded in 1937 as the International Committee on African Affairs (ICCA). The early ICAA represented a cross-section of interwar Left and liberal politics, including social gospel Christians and corporate philanthropists; the reorganization of the group as the CAA in 1942 and the addition of W. Alphaeus Hunton as its educational director in 1943—he would later become executive director—marked a distinct shift to a militant Black international diaspora consciousness as well as a shift to independent Black leadership. Anticolonial activists built on and reshaped the visions of Pan-Africanists, from Martin R. Delany to Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison as well as reshaped the thought and practice of Left internationalism. Their work also drew on the rich Black oppositional politics of the 1930s, including opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Scottsboro defense, and Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns. Invigorated by the portrayal of anticolonial challenges in the pages of a lively international Black press—where, for example, the Trinidadian-born George Padmore publicized African anticolonial work, trade union activity, and the work of the London-based International African Service Bureau on a weekly basis in the largest Black American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender—activists created a Black popular front. Crafted by the Left but embracing the full ideological range of Black America, including liberals, church leaders, and professional and middle-class organizations, and steeped in a world of Black popular culture, it endured until the dawn of the Cold War. Through W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP as well as Henry Lee Moon of the political action committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, African Americans participated in and supported the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. During World War II, while lobbying the US government for a stronger anticolonial policy, the CAA organized support for a free India, and following the war, it supported African trade union efforts such as the 1946 Nigerian general strike and the Nigerian fight against the British suppression of the press.

The formation of the United Nations in 1945 provided an especially important focal point for anticolonial efforts. With the imminent independence of India (1947) and a promise of a number of new Asian and African states in the foreseeable future, the possibilities of winning political and economic rights for Black and colonized peoples through international strategies looked very different than they would after the onset of the Cold War. As a host of new international forums and plans for the United Nations emerged in the later years of the war, the possibility of redefining political sovereignty and human rights on an international scale became a reality. African American activists from the CAA, the NAACP, churches, fraternities, and nurses’ associations saw these forums as hopeful sites for their own struggles, bringing a profound vision of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Alphaeus Hunton and the CAA worked especially closely with South Africans in the South African Passive Resistance Campaign and the African National Congress (ANC), and with the interim government of India in 1946 and 1947 at the United Nations, to challenge the attempts of the South African government to annex South-West Africa (Namibia) and to protest discrimination against Indians within South Africa.

With the onset of the Cold War, the broad anticolonial alliances of World War II disintegrated as many African American liberals retreated from criticism of US foreign policy, fundamentally altering the terms of anticolonialism and effectively severing the Black American struggle for civil rights from the issues of anticolonialism and racism abroad. At the same time, the US government prosecuted the CAA for its ties to the South African ANC, the Nigerian Mine Workers Union, and the Kenya African National Union. Despite the disruptive prosecution, the ties of these African American activists to South African allies such as Walter Sisulu, then secretary general of the ANC, deepened as the CAA supported the South African Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws. As Left anticolonial activists such as Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and W. E. B. Du Bois were marginalized in African American politics, and after the disbanding of the CAA in 1955, the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), established in 1953, became the major American political group concerned with Africa. But while decades later the ACOA’s politics would come to resemble those of the CAA, at its birth in the Cold War era the organization not only lacked the relationship to the Black community and a radical civil rights movement that had characterized the CAA, but also exemplified the new anticommunist anticolonialism.

Through the 1950s, some African American activists continued to fight for the visibility of anticolonial and antiracist struggles against a bipolar framework that rendered the oppression of Black peoples a secondary issue, supporting, for example, the 1955 Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung, Indonesia. The independence of Ghana in 1957 under the leadership of its first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, greatly encouraged the regeneration of African solidarity movements against the constraints of Cold War repression. Drawn to Nkrumah’s vision of a democratic, nonaligned, unified Africa and the Organization of African Unity, hundreds of African Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Alphaeus Hunton, relocated to the new nation while thousands more renewed anti-imperialist solidarity efforts on behalf of movements throughout the continent of Africa.

As African American activists protested the complicity of the United Nations and the United States in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the independent Congo, new organizations such as the Patrice Lumumba Coalition were formed. Activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party increasingly turned toward an anti-imperialist politics, and activists also began to forge new alliances with democratic movements in the Caribbean. Other 1960s flashpoints prompting anti-colonial mobilization and consciousness included Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) as a white minority rule government. The tepid protest of the US and Senegal to the UDI and both countries’ prompt recognition of the military regime that had overthrown Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, in February 1966, led to widespread protests. African American anti-colonial activists boycotted the April 1966 First International Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal; those boycotting included novelist James Baldwin and singer, actor, and activist Harry Belafonte, the writer Ralph Ellison and actors Ossie Davis and Sidney Poitier.

Anti-colonial politics had long been a consistent feature of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, and later, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 1957, King regaled his congregants with an enthusiastic account of the independence ceremonies in Ghana, viewing the new West African nation’s triumph over British colonialism as an inspiration for Black American freedom struggles. In London in 1964, King linked the US civil rights movement to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, recalling the nonviolent protests at the heart of the Montgomery movement against segregated public transportation and the Defiance Campaign against racist pass laws. King’s opposition to the US war in Vietnam first became public in 1965. King condemned the devastation of Vietnam as “deadly western arrogance,” arguing that the US made “peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” King’s anti-war and anti-imperialist views, epitomized by his utopian vision of a “world house” uniting humanity in peace and shared prosperity, were roundly condemned by his former establishment allies, leading to political isolation before his assassination on 4 April 1968.

Crises such as the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa provided a catalyst for African Americans to link struggles against Jim Crow with the struggle against apartheid. The presence of South African visitors to the United States—including Bishop Desmond Tutu, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches; Oliver Tambo, president of the ANC; and David Sibeko, Pan-African Congress representative to the United Nations—further encouraged ties between the communities. In the same period of the surge of Black Power in South Africa, US college students and African American labor groups led a divestment campaign demanding US corporations to cut off all ties with the apartheid regime. In the last two decades, organizations such as TransAfrica, the Black United Front, and the National Black Independent Party have supported democratic movements and opposed military dictatorships throughout the continent. Similarly, Black activists and elected officials have opposed US government and corporate opposition to democratic movements in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. Some of these groups also supported democratic projects in the diaspora, such as the socialist Michael Manley government in Jamaica. The Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney was a prominent international critic of the pan-African movement, as nation-states in the Caribbean and Africa marginalized radical left opposition parties. Rodney, who had returned to Guyana as a leader of the socialist Working People’s Party, was assassinated by agents of the dictatorship led by Forbes Burnham. His death was condemned by Manley, Fidel Castro, and Maurice Bishop, New Jewel Movement and Prime Minister in Grenada. Bishop’s assassination in 1983 and the subsequent US invasion galvanized opposition to US imperialism.

Building on the work of TransAfrica and the efforts of the Black Congressional Caucus to oppose US government and corporate support of apartheid, Jesse Jackson attempted in his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns to highlight the issue of US policy toward Africa. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 and his US tour in June of that year catalyzed the international solidarity movement with demands for continuing sanctions on the apartheid government. With South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 resulting in an ANC-led government, African American activists had a new ally on the African continent, though both faced a daunting neo-liberal terrain, with democratic projects undermined by spiking global inequality, western financial institutions’ structural adjustment and debt regimes, and a post-cold war remilitarization and growth in carceral and surveillance states.
In the early 1990s, African American activists supported Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former Catholic priest and leader of the mass movement, La Valas, demanding democracy and social justice for the island’s impoverished majority. Aristide had been elected by 70 percent of the population in Haiti’s first free elections. When Aristide was overthrown in a 1991 coup, the African American choreographer, anthropologist, and activist Katherine Dunham, aged 82, made headlines when she initiated a 47-day hunger strike protesting the US deportation of Haitian refugees and demanding Aristide’s return to power.

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Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Meriwether, James H. Proudly We Can Be Africans, Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Plummer, Brenda Gayle. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Von Eschen, Penny M. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.