Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960

RISING WIND

A wind is rising—a wind of determination by the have-nots of the world to share the benefits of freedom and prosperity which the haves of the earth have tried to keep exclusively for themselves. That wind blows all over the world. Whether that wind develops into a hurricane is a decision which we must make now and in the days when we form the peace.

Walter White, 1945

Rising Wind

Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960

BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

© 1996 Brenda Gayle Plummer

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising wind: Black Americans and U.S. foreign affairs, 1935–1960 / by Brenda Gayle Plummer.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2272-8 (cloth : alk. paper).

ISBN 0-8078-4575-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—Politics and government.

2. United States—Foreign relations—1933–1945—Citizen participation.

3. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1953—Citizen participation.

4. United States—Foreign relations—1953–1961—Citizen participation. I. Title.

E185.6.P68 1996 95-–36068

327.73—dc20 CIP

Brenda Gayle Plummer, professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is author of Haiti and the Great Powers and Haiti, the Powers and Haiti, the Psychological Moment.

00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

FOR ROBBY

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Race, Ethnicity, and U.S. Foreign Policy

2 Dictatorship and Democracy

3 World War II

4 Peace without Justice

5 Into the Cold War

6 The Long Thaw

7 A New Era

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

TABLES

1.1. Black Newspapers, 1930s 27

1.2. Black News-Gathering Agencies, 1940 28

3.1. Negro Digest Polls: Black Opinion on the Peace Settlement 88

3.2. Major Organizations Supporting the Negro Labor Committee Petition, 1944 103

4.1. Supporters of Colonial Freedom and a World Bill of Rights 133

4.2. Federated Organizations of Colored People of the World 150

5.1. Do Race Problems Affect World Opinion of the United States? 168

5.2. Black American Organizations that Endorsed the NAACP'S Petition to the United Nations, 1947 180

5.3. Foreign Supporters of the NAACP'S Petition to the United Nations, 1947 181

5.4. Public Opinion on Aid to Greece and Turkey, 1947 186

C.1. Partial List of ANLC Sponsors 307

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map showing location of international stringers and correspondents for ANP and major black weeklies, 1935–45 26

Salaria Kee 63

Black troops ride rickshaws to see Tarzan's New York Adventure 94

Malcolm Jackson 122

An African reads a petition to the United Nations 127

W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Walter White 137

Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt 143

Vijaya L. Pandit and her daughters with Judge Jane Bolin 148

Harry Truman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Vijaya L. Pandit, and Ralph Bunche 177

George Schuyler 215

Vijaya L. Pandit and Mary McLeod Bethune 220

George McGhee 236

Mrs. Sekou Touré tours an American supermarket 276

Kwame Nkrumah and members of the National Council of Negro Women 281

Nasser and Castro in Harlem 286

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., with John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie Kennedy 292

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was funded by the Social Science Research Council Advanced Research Fellowship in Foreign Policy Studies. These acknowledgments include my colleagues who were fellows during those years and the senior scholars who, as consultants, assisted us with our projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported a semester of research at the Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture. I am particularly grateful for the assistance and encouragement given me there by director Howard Dodson and archives division head Diana Lachatenere. The staff of the Division of Photographs and Prints was also very helpful. The graduate schools of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin provided me with research grants and leave time. I am also indebted to the University of Wisconsin Vilas Trust for a research associateship and summer salary.

I received invaluable aid from the curators at numerous libraries and repositories. In addition to Schomburg staff, they include Esme Bhan of the Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard University; and the personnel of Butler Library, Columbia University; the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; Tamiment Library, New York University; the Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles; the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Yale University Divinity School; and the Bethune Museum and Archives.

In the near-decade that this study has incubated, I incurred numerous debts. Many people have helped me grapple with one stage or another of the project from inception to final execution. Some will not recognize this work in its current, final incarnation. They include Thomas Borstelmann, Elombe Brath, John Henrik Clark, Donald Culverson, Robert Dannin, Ossie Davis, Mary Dudziak, Robert L. Harris Jr., Herbert Hill, Gerald Home, Allen Hunter, Ernest Kaiser, Paul G. Lauren, Hylan Lewis, Bert Lockwood, Tom McCormick, William Minter, Nell Painter, Melissa Rachleff, Cedric Robinson, Emily Rosenberg, Michael Sherry, Gary Sick, and Mabel Smythe.

ABBREVIATIONS

RISING WIND

INTRODUCTION

This project is a historical investigation of the Afro-American response to foreign affairs during the 1935–60 era. It attempts to resolve two controversies: the apparent contradiction between the absence, until recently, of an articulated foreign policy strategy in the black community and, paradoxically, the abiding interest of black Americans in global issues and the identity and characteristics of an Afro-American attentive public.

Black Americans never expressed a single, monolithic opinion on international matters and deemed civil rights and employment issues more important. A sustained interest in world events has always been characteristic of the few, and Afro-Americans are no exception. Yet social scientists and the general public have profoundly underestimated the scope and discounted the richness of this aspect of the black experience and its potential for future engagement.

For decades, researchers confined Afro-American subjects to lines of inquiry that conformed to an American-exceptionalist world view. An essentialist perspective on race, combined with the belief that the United States has little in common with other mixed societies, limited the kind of questions that historians and other social scientists were likely to ask about race relations. Consequently, few works emerged that were cross-cultural or relational or that examined racial discourse in concert with other important factors that shape U.S. society. This has changed, but work on black Americans in international perspective remains heavily concentrated on Africa and is often founded on scantily documented suppositions about Afro-American political behavior. These include the notion that black commitments have always been utopian and rooted in eccentric modes of thought arising from poverty and oppression. Scholars often see black organizational pressure on government as improvisational, and in the foreign policy realm, largely precluded because of racial discrimination. As a consequence of all the above, Afro-American interest in world affairs seems symbolic, transient, and largely fruitless¹

In recent years, a few commentators have drawn attention to a substantive change in the quality, direction, and persistence of the Afro-American effort to address international issues. Such organizations as TransAfrica and the Joint Center for Political Studies, in association with the initiatives of certain black politicians, appeared to be novel attempts to institutionalize a black American policy voice.² Research and writing on this foreign affairs interest remained largely casual and did not explore the rich past that underlay these seemingly new departures.

When I began this work nearly a decade ago, most scholars and, alas, publishers, were puzzled by my coupling of Afro-Americans and foreign affairs. To many, these two subjects seemed to have as little to do with one another as chalk and cheese. They had some acquaintance with pan-Africanism and Back-to-Africa movements, but it had never occurred to them to cast a wider net over the deep waters of Afro-American history. Expressions of nationalism were indeed crucial elements in the black American construction of the world, but not all provocative issues related directly to Africa or to race; and foreign affairs activists included persons outside the elites conventionally identified as having international concerns.

The ease with which social scientists analyzed the concerns of hyphenated whites had no counterpart in their study of Afro-Americans. The assumption that blacks had a figurative but not a literal past, and certainly not a traceable one, meant suspending the rules of observation. Blacks were, ironically, the consummate Americans, because it was supposed that the trauma of the Middle Passage stripped them of customary allegiances. Possible black defection, then, struck at the heart of the Republic. The slaveholder James Madison keenly felt this danger and alluded to it in the forty-third Federalist. Madison perceived the political order to be at risk from alien residents, adventurers, or those whom the constitution of the State has not admitted to the rights of suffrage. I take no notice, he wrote, thus contradicting himself, of an unhappy species of population abounding in some of the States, who, during the calm of regular government, are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human character and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves.³ Treachery by the slave, the intimate servant, further appalled because it reversed the normal order of things and exposed the vulnerability of the master.

Questions pondered by Madison and other eighteenth-century U.S. political theorists included the preservation of unity in a nation of immigrants or in circumstances in which foreign governments could exploit civil conflict. The federal system eventually accommodated the cultural, and even the political, interests of white ethnics. Only after a protracted struggle did it follow suit for minorities of color. The disparate experiences of white ethnic minorities and racial minorities contributed to confusion about their respective roles, histories, and commitments.

Survey literature of the 1950s and 1960s maintained that blacks were politically apathetic and indifferent to the world beyond U.S. borders. They reacted strongly to Africa-related questions, according to the polls, but showed as little empirical knowledge of Africa as of other regions. The same literature depicted a black community that remained inert on domestic matters as well. Subsequent events forced the refinement of these conclusions. The voting and participation studies done by sociologists in the 1950s, for example, suggested that Afro-Americans lacked organizational resources, but the emergence of the civil rights movement casted doubt on this assertion. In spite of this history, opinion research, and the popular media influenced by it, continued to posit the view that blacks collectively have not cared about public policy issues.⁴

Other data, drawn from government records, manuscript collections, personal recollections, and organizational files, strongly indicate contrary conclusions. Here an interest in foreign policy issues specifically emerges among working-class blacks as well as middle-class professionals.⁵ One of the major tasks confronting the researcher is the reconciliation of this discrepant information. Why do polls and popular media assume Afro-American indifference to international matters, whereas other sources indicate a global concern that has often crossed class lines and included issues with no direct impact on the domestic sphere? The answer to this question lies in the development of new ways of thinking about the Afro-American response to international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Current discussions often do not integrate this into a broader conceptual framework or situate it in a clear historical context.

This study examines the 1935–60 era, a period of crisis that fundamentally altered world power relations, with profound implications for domestic society. Such critical periods are often associated with incipient attacks on the status quo. The assault mounted by fascism, with its explicit racial mission, alarmed many observers long before the actual consequences of that doctrine began bearing fruit.⁶ Franz Boas and other scholars undermined sociobiological theory early in the twentieth century, and the wartime appropriation of racism by the Axis powers further discredited it in democratic countries. The subsequent identification of racism with obsolete science, cultural backwaters, and ephemeral attitudes (i.e., peculiarities susceptible to change with modernization) thus permitted Afro-Americans to claim a place in the mainstream.⁷

The years 1935–60 thus mark the transition from isolationism to internationalism as part of a newly perceived, acknowledged, and shouldered set of universal responsibilities. They encompassed the shift from internationalism to Cold War globalism and back to a reaffirmation of diversity. This epoch brought Afro-Americans from a rural South characterized by dispersed population, illiteracy, and the lack of institutional resources to concentrated urban areas with better communications. Industrialization, migration, depression and war, the transformation of the postwar Southern political economy, and the emergence of the civil rights movement, all condition this momentous quarter century. Black Americans confronted issues that, though not race-specific, affected them as a racially specific community.

This engagement with issues took place against the backdrop of a society in which race had always been a source of conflict. The perception of race as America's Achilles heel dates back at least to Thomas Jefferson's anguished description of the Missouri Compromise as a firebell in the night. While Jefferson referred specifically to the divisions caused by slavery, the incomplete resolution of the slavery dilemma bequeathed a troubling legacy to future generations. Statesmen might temporize on the question of racial justice, but the stark contrast between the nation's declarations and its practice ultimately could not be explained away. Civil rights activists seized on this vital contradiction to press their claims for racial reform.

Resistance to change frequently cloaked itself in the rhetoric of national security. This also had ancient roots in the early Republic when the specter of servile revolt unnerved the founding fathers. In more recent decades, U.S. officials invoked the principle of sovereignty to deflect fault-finding comment and sidestep international initiatives that they interpreted as interference in internal matters. As a sovereign power, the United States would not permit foreign governments, or an international body such as the United Nations, to prescribe or legislate solutions for its domestic problems. Ironically, in the context of the time, national sovereignty mirrored, and amplified, the states’ rights doctrine that diehard segregationists so dearly loved and so brutally enforced.

Critics made yet another unattractive comparison. After 1945 the United States contested the Soviets for world leadership. As a democracy, the United States could point with justice at the horrors of Stalinism. Students of the American South, however, could still find within Dixie borders the involuntary labor, miscarriages of justice, summary executions, and denial of human rights that poisoned life in eastern Europe. The Cold War liberals who dominated the formulation of public policy, both foreign and domestic, had thus to contend with two thorny race relations problems. They had to square the necessity of restoring and reaffirming the civil rights of black Americans with their need to limit the civil liberties of those who dissented from the racial status quo. This balancing act, alternating as it did generosity and repression, greatly influenced the way that civil rights insurgency subsequently evolved. Afro-Americans and their allies would have to abandon the internationalism of the World War II era and redefine the race relations problem in unique and purely domestic terms.

Studying Afro-American engagement with international affairs gives us a fresh perspective on Afro-American history and on the history of U.S. foreign relations.

This book differs from most diplomatic histories in that it does not place official policy makers at the center of the narrative. Some historians of the subject will read that displacement as, at worst, an indication that the work lacks legitimacy as a study of the history of foreign relations. At best, they will view it as a curious hybrid, the sort of scholarship with which they have not been comfortable.

Part of the difficulty lies in the field's tendency to ground itself in the world view of policy makers, to conflate its own authorial voices with those of official Washington, and to see as both normative and neutral the clearly ethnocentric commitments of elite national leadership. In addition, the state as a unit of analysis offers incomparable ease of reference and seduces the scholar along familiar, readily accessible paths that too often lead to self-fulfilling conclusions. Finally, like all academics, historians of foreign relations are concerned about the coherence of their subfield. The same relaxation of boundaries that may produce fresh insights can also be a source of anxiety.⁸

The consequent marginality that afflicts nongovernmental actors, especially those representing constituencies often deemed peripheral in the domestic milieu, is not fortuitous, but instead the imposed product of a particular, integral outlook. That perspective does not readily concede that interventions by such actors occur, are significant, and are salient to a broad understanding of the forces that shape our world.

Afro-American studies can similarly be faulted for its own parochialisms. John B. Kirby concluded in an influential article that Afro-American studies suffers from a static conception of modern history. Correlations between events in the black community and changes in overall U.S. institutions, ideology, public and foreign policy, culture, and social norms have warranted little attention. The view of America as a fragmented and segmented nation, Kirby writes, has worked against the creation of a broadly conceived historical frame of reference. Kirby suggests that the relationship between the Afro-American struggle for equality and the growth and limits of political institutions and the welfare state be probed. He makes U.S. commitment or hostility to civil rights central to ideological tensions in society and notes, The manner in which black people have been affected by and have themselves influenced certain foreign policy considerations, especially in respect to Africa, the Middle East, and Third World countries has barely been touched upon.⁹

This work attempts to address Kirby's challenge by placing foreign affairs interest and activism in the broad context of modern Afro-American history and by probing the linkages between a black American foreign policy perspective and the nature of black interaction with governmental and nongovernmental institutions and agencies of social and political change. During the epoch studied here, Afro-Americans functioned as a permanent liberal constituency in domestic affairs, following liberal leadership into the foreign policy arena except when prescribed policies conflicted with black perceptions of group interest.

These conflicts occurred with regularity. Afro-Americans opposed U.S. neutrality in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 and had little initial enthusiasm for World War II. Blacks also parted company with liberal white leadership over aid to the colonial empires after the war and the pace of decolonization. Federal officials rejected the linkage that Afro-Americans frequently made between racial discrimination at home and colonialism abroad.

Rising Wind begins the exploration of these themes in chapter 1 with an examination of how collective definitions of ethnic identity, race, and racism, have influenced perspectives on foreign affairs. The work then probes specific issues that aroused sectors of the Afro-American public. Chapter 2 traces the implications of fascism for black Americans. Starting with the Italo-Ethiopian War, it treats black responses to the Spanish Civil War and the rise to world power of the Japanese empire. It describes black Americans’ experiences in Nazi Germany. The war against Hitler forced a vital redirection of black activist energies and clearly illustrated to the world the limits of racial domination. The ways that World War II abetted the demise of colonialism and segregation at home and abroad, and the role of India in helping to catalyze Afro-American opinion, is the subject of chapter 3.

Chapter 4 reviews the postwar clamor for human rights, a militant internationalism, and the unrest of veterans and others who made wartime sacrifices. The context is the establishment of the United Nations. It examines the substantial efforts of Afro-American organizations to influence the form and character of the international organization and use it to gain leverage with the United States.

The euphoria of the immediate postwar years and an optimistic faith that rapid change would come yielded to the circumspection of the Cold War period. Chapter 5 examines this era and its impact on black interests, organizations, and individuals who had been most successful in articulating an Afro-American policy agenda. The Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954 marked the beginning, for black Americans at least, of a thaw in the Cold War chill. Chapter 6 places Brown in international perspective and reviews its implications for U.S. foreign policy. This chapter also discusses the emerging non-aligned movement at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, attended by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and what it represented to black Americans at home.

By 1960 civil rights activism in the United States had become a mass movement that was already reordering fundamental aspects of society. Even as it experienced its greatest successes, the movement found itself challenged by black nationalists who questioned its domestic orientation and wished to broaden its scope to address international questions of racial justice. Chapter 7 explores the internationalist activities of black nationalist organizations, including Muslim groups. It reviews the portentous Suez crisis. It traces the debate over southern Africa and the political and symbolic meanings of apartheid for an American society struggling to break its own racist shackles. The study concludes with an examination of the impact of emerging African states and the Cuban Revolutions influence on black political thought. The succeeding Conclusion summarizes the major patterns and trends in the Afro-American foreign affairs experience and suggests a different frame of reference for approaching Afro-American studies in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER 1 Race, Ethnicity, and U.S. Foreign Policy

The Irishman and German in the United States, are very different persons to what they were when in Ireland and Germany, the countries of their nativity. There their spirits were depressed and downcast; but the instant they set their foot upon unrestricted soil; free to act and untrammeled to move; their physical condition undergoes a change, which in time becomes physiological, which is transmitted to the offspring, who when born under such circumstances, is a decidedly different being.

—Martin Delany, 1855

To the nineteenth-century black leader Martin Delany, the transformation of Europeans into Americans was both immediate and tangible. American liberty, opportunity, and abundance produced new white men and women from the bitterness and oppressions of the immigrant past. No seachange awaited black Americans, however, born under oppression. Delany exaggerated the rapidity and effect of acculturation, but his contrast between the immigrant and Afro-American experiences highlighted the cruel distinction between race and ethnicity in the creation of an American identity.

Ethnic difference was no insuperable barrier for whites who aspired to full citizenship. From time to time, nativist-inspired reformers sought to suppress foreign elements in American culture, but the United States retained a pluralist vitality in the survival of its distinct groups. Both social preference and social constraints perpetuated ethnicity. Ethnic groups survived when members married one another or stayed in the same place or because poverty and discrimination blocked their movement into the mainstream. The decision to preserve an ethnic identity could stem from either compulsion or choice.

Ethnicity is as much a social construction as race; it is an artifact of a particular configuration of intergroup relations. In the United States, ethnicity has taken on a specifically racial character. The many Spanish-speaking nationalities thus become Hispanic, and diverse peoples ranging from Koreans to Samoans become Asians and Pacific Islanders. Here, race as the lowest common denominator suffices to meld the varied peoples into generic masses.¹ In contrast, the phenotypically European majority in North America has had the option of suppressing or embracing specific ethnicities. These choices are not entirely free of constraints, but the freedom to make them is probably unparalleled in human experience. Those who remain ethnically identified and function socially within ethnic communities have at their disposal a powerful political instrument.

Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan's influential study Beyond the Melting Pot explored the capacity to manipulate this advantage. Glazer and Moynihan suggested that a group's capacity to exploit ethnicity in extracting rewards from the establishment accurately reflects its level of acculturation. From these authors’ perspective, ethnic politics measures the ease with which a particular group can work the system, and thus indexes its familiarity with prevailing norms. An ethnic group that can use its knowledge to extend its collective goals thus demonstrates its effective acculturation, no matter how persistently members cling to particular folkways and idioms. This suggests that ethnic group lobbying in foreign policy matters remains inseparable from a group's domestic objectives. Both assure and enhance the group's status in America.² As long as hyphenated Americans maintain their connection with the United States, their foreign policy goals form part of a broader politics of inclusion and preferment.

As will be argued below, black challenges to U.S. foreign policy seldom originated in the conventional ethnic politics described above. Nor could black successes and failures be measured by the same yardstick. Jewish Americans, for example, seemed successful at influencing foreign policy making because their group objectives often paralleled policies actually formulated for different reasons of state. Washington frequently supported pro-Israeli positions. It failed to do so when and if this interest group's aims clashed with other U.S. objectives. The Suez crisis provides an early case in which a formal policy of anti-imperialism led President Eisenhower to reject the joint Israeli, British, and French intervention in Egypt. Similarly, the Carter administration later approved the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia over pro-Israeli objections. The desire to bolster a conservative regime in the Middle East, gain increased leverage over Israel, and market military hardware to an eager and affluent buyer prevailed over other considerations.

Afro-Americans rarely benefited from a harmony of interests with the U.S. government. Indeed, black perspectives on U.S. diplomacy often began with basic disagreements about the national interest, and consequently involved struggles over symbolic legitimacy as well as conflicts over specific directives.³ Here, debate often touched the sensitive core values of society itself. The problem of racism lies at the heart of black dissent. The continued salience of race and the intractability of racism in the United States limit the usefulness of ethnicity alone for understanding black American engagements with foreign policy. Even after the Supreme Court had overturned the principle of separate but equal in the Brown decision, resistance to full civil rights for blacks persisted. Reformism did not penetrate the innermost councils of government where policy makers remained relatively isolated from the growing demand for inclusion. The easy identification of the American nation with the white population and the blithe equation of loyalty with white blood cannot be overlooked, Marguerite Ross Barnett wrote. While the ideal is equal citizens born or naturalized into one ethnically and racially heterogeneous political community, the equation of the nation with the white population has persisted since the eighteenth-century declaration of America as a white man s country.⁴ For immigrants, race ultimately proved more important than ethnicity because although the latter was often either a simple convenience—or inconvenience, depending on the circumstances—the former was constitutive of the American identity itself. An enduring racial conception of Americanism has unavoidably influenced how both whites and blacks respectively define themselves in society as a whole.

For nineteenth-century Afro-Americans, the white mans country posed a dual dilemma. The first was slavery and the second freedom. Would a racially based slavery yield readily to a color-blind freedom? Antebellum conditions belied this hope. Even those states that prohibited slavery proved hostile to black settlement and enfranchisement. Yet black abolitionists and civil rights activists such as Frederick Douglass continued to insist on full citizenship for Afro-Americans. Others favored a black nationalism whose diverse formulations allowed for varying degrees of independence from, or coexistence with, white America. The often cited distinctions between assimilation and separatism did not always create predictable differences in the way that black people perceived the world beyond U.S. borders. Douglass, for example, favored complete racial integration. A respected Republican after the Civil War, he supported his party's domestic platform but as U.S. minister to Haiti in 1891 stubbornly opposed U.S. interference in that country. In contrast, James Theodore Holly, a separatist advocate of Afro-American removal to Haiti, encouraged Protestant missions and the implantation of Anglo-Saxon mores in the island republic.⁵ Much complexity and diversity have thus characterized Afro-American thought on world affairs.

Douglass and Holly, and subsequent generations of race leaders, held different views of the best interests of black people. Varied perspectives on this issue led to disparate conceptions of pan-Africanism. The early-nineteenth-century nationalist Paul CufTee wished to combine an African exodus movement with a healthy commerce between Africans and black communities of the diaspora. The premier black intellectual and activist of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, heavily based his version of pan-Africanism on lobbying for colonial reform. Marcus Garvey sought a mixed program of emigration and economic development that remained pointedly independent of white control. These differences are widely comprehended, but the scholarly literature often fails to link black nationalism to vital world-historical currents. Cuffee's version emerged in the context of the international slave trade and a global economy in which mercantilism had begun yielding ground to free trade. Du Bois's was forged during an era when the great empires were inexorably advancing their domination of Africa. The pan-Africanism of 1900 launched a moral suasionist appeal for an end to such abuses as those perpetuated in the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium. Subsequent activities of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the pan-African congresses must be understood in relation to the breakup of imperialism, the emergence of nationalist movements in Asia, and the agitation among central and eastern European minorities for territorial recognition, political autonomy, and language rights.⁶ In the absence of such a context, pan-Africanism can be reduced to an esoteric crusade only tangentially related to international matters beyond that of racial unity, an optic that masks its global salience and disguises the extent to which, in the United States, it helped defeat an American-exceptionalist view of race relations. Pan-Africanism expanded Afro-American consciousness by rescaling questions of racial justice to global dimensions. It thus created the space necessary to holistically assess U.S. behavior in the international arena.

Westernized, Christian black communities in the nineteenth century opposed the slave trade but colluded in European political encroachments on African territory in the name of advancing progress and civilization. This small intelligentsia collectively envisioned a Victorian Africa eventually ruled by blacks committed to statism, positivist science, and Christian ethics.⁷ By the turn of the century, they found inspiration in the ideas and achievements of Afro-American educator Booker T. Washington and carefully distilled the themes of racial pride, self-help, and group solidarity from the accommoda-tionist aspects of his thought. Colonial authorities, making no such shrewd analysis, were initially blind to the subversive potential of Washington's messages. They instinctively understood, however, that black nationalism would not aid their larger purpose of subordination and economic control. In this spirit, Baron Alphonse de Courcel, representing France in Germany at the time of the Berlin conference, saw instability in the Congo as an unwanted spur to pan-Africanist activity. For Courcel, it was to France's advantage to help King Leopold of Belgium come out of his dream world and establish something viable next to us in the Congo, if only to forestall the formation of a republic of American negroes or mulattoes, like Liberia or Haiti.⁸

Paul Gordon Lauren has written that changes in race relations take place only in the context of major wars and social upheavals. For whites, the fin de siècle was placid and still evokes fond nostalgia in Europe and North America. For Africa and the African diaspora, however, it was an era of profound and disruptive change. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called a conference in Berlin in 1885, where the United States agreed to the division of African territories among fourteen European states without the consultation of Africans.⁹

The great powers at Berlin gave themselves carte blanche for military conquest. France soon after defeated Dahomey (1893), and Britain Benin (1897), and the Ashanti kingdom (1895-1900). These wars featured the theft of indigenous treasures and the first widespread use of machine guns. Mandingo warrior-king Samori Touré lost to France in 1898. German punitive expeditions against the Maji-Maji uprising in Tanganyika from 1905 to 1907 cost 120,000 African lives. In a seeming dress rehearsal for the destruction of the European Jews a generation later, German troops in Southwest Africa nearly exterminated the Herero and Hottentot tribes. In King Leopold's private Congo Free State, Africans refusing forced labor in the rubber groves had their arms cut off.¹⁰

The era when African sovereignty came under the most violent assault was the one that most intensely depicted Africans as bloodthirsty savages. A few Europeans, such as Joseph Conrad, understood this psychological projection, and skillfully illustrated it in his classic novella The Heart of Darkness. Africans realized few victories during the epoch, but blacks everywhere could rejoice in the 1896 Ethiopian victory at Adowa. Here, Ethiopians with feudal weapons defeated an Italian army bent on their subjugation. Ethiopia's triumph, however, ironically underscored its backwardness: only its rugged and mountainous terrain—unmarred by roads—saved the ancient state from the Italians’ wheeled war machines. Colonial powers had taken Africa's future out of African hands. The Boer War of 1899–1902 clearly demonstrated this. On one level, the conflict concerned white men only. Yet the white South African settlers’ struggle against Britain had profound implications for a British Empire that, at its peak, already showed signs of deterioration.¹¹

The turn of the century was also a fateful era for Africans of the diaspora. Restorationist state governments had effectively disfranchised blacks in the American South. The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson made complete social segregation the law of the land. An extralegal regime of terror, including lynching, bolstered these legal strictures. U.S. commercial expansion into the Caribbean, Central America, and the South Pacific after the Spanish-American War extended the domain of racist ideology as apologists for imperialism used social Darwinism to rationalize domination of peoples of the islands and littoral.¹²

Britain and France could not satisfactorily meet the growing demand for democratic inclusion, social equality, and economic opportunity made by the bourgeoisie of color in their Caribbean colonies. Latin American elites’ infatuation with eugenics prescribed state policies that prohibited black immigration but promoted European settlement in the interests of biologically and culturally improving native stock. Industrial and commercial growth, planners hoped, would follow in the wake of these changes. Such interpretations of modernization in states such as Brazil and Argentina accompanied—and dictated—declining status for black and mixed blood persons.¹³

The Pan African Conference held in London in 1900 constituted an international response to these unfavorable developments. Colonized peoples, faced with the European military juggernaut, could not effectively resist what many people worldwide considered the inexorable tide of history. A substantial Westernized black element also subscribed to the belief that African societies could not remain independent in a world dominated by powerful nation states. They shared the West's faith that human society naturally moves toward betterment, a notion antithetical to cultures organized around ancestor worship and celebration of tradition. They did not maintain that Africans were inherently inferior. They instead embraced the idea that enlightened tutelage, resulting in eventual self-rule, would deliver African countries from the darkness of static, tribal societies into modern communities motivated by the desire for progress.¹⁴

Trinidadian-born attorney H. Sylvester Williams and Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church in the United States organized the 1900 Pan African Conference, which embodied black elite hopes of shaping the course of colonialism. With one known exception, the participants in this London meeting came from Britain and British colonies, South Africa, and the United States. Conference resolutions called for humane administration, an end to exploitative labor policies and racial discrimination, improved opportunities for African education, consultation, and participation in colonial government. To this end, the pan-Africanists petitioned Queen Victoria and the Colonial Office and received politely noncommittal replies. The Pan African Conference constituted itself as a permanent international organization, the Pan-African Association, but failed to visibly effect change in either the colonies, the metro-poles, or the three independent black states of Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia.¹⁵

That pan-Africanism in 1900 did not achieve its objectives does not mean that it lacked significance. Pan-Africanists faced overwhelming odds as they organized a conference in the very midst of a bloody, global assault on black people. Coordinators had to assemble participants from territories controlled by powers inimical to their views. Conference goals were further confounded by attendees’ partial acceptance of imperialist ideas and their ideological collusion in colonialism. The pan-Africanists of 1900 failed to mitigate the abuses of colonial conquest and domination. Their achievement instead rested on their ability to clarify the issues arising from the nexus of imperialism and race relations and suggest ways of handling them. Pan-Africanists accomplished this at a time when mainstream intellectual and political discourse provided no language to support such understandings and no humane solutions to the problems colonialism imposed.

The Pan-African Association continued as an essentially conservative organization of the global black intelligentsia until World War I renewed the opportunity for people of color to place their agenda before an international body. The war had fractured the basis of empire in Europe and called its legitimacy into question elsewhere. Defeated imperialists of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey could no longer command the diverse nationalities that now demanded territorial integrity, language rights, and political autonomy. Those claiming to represent Africans made similar appeals. Arguments favoring rights for national minorities in eastern Europe provided tactical models for Afro-Americans.

Black Americans began discussing the postwar settlement before hostilities ended. Already I and a number of Negroes in the United States had been talking of the advisability and necessity of having the American Negro and the Negroes of the world represented in some way before the Peace Congress, W. E. B. Du Bois recalled. Ida B. Wells Barnett, the veteran antilynching activist and feminist, recorded similar sentiments among members of the militant, all-black National Equal Rights League. The league's 1918 annual meeting, held in Wells's bailiwick of Chicago, determined to have representatives at any subsequent peace conference.¹⁶

The UNIA also named representatives to the peace conference. Wells Barnett would be one of three. The UNIA, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1916, was approaching the apex of its powers. Garvey met Wells Barnett while on tour in Chicago in 1916. Her determined militancy, initiative, and proven track record on the lynching problem impressed him. The UNIA also appointed as delegates socialist journalist and activist A. Philip Randolph, editor of the Messenger, and Eliézer Cadet, a Haitian immigrant and mechanic.¹⁷

Soon after the German surrender on November n, 1918, the allied governments announced plans for the forthcoming peace conference. All over the world, individuals and groups interested in observing or influencing the proceedings swung into action. Among Afro-Americans, organizations not identified specifically with black nationalism or separatism also became involved. The National Race Congress elected civil rights advocate Rev. William H. Jernagin its representative to the peace conference. The International League of Darker Peoples emerged. The league was born on January 2, 1919, at the Hudson River estate of black businesswoman C. J. Walker. Principals included Walker, Marcus Garvey, socialist A. Philip Randolph, and Harlem community leader Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Its primary purpose was to help the plethora of black groups make coherent demands at Versailles.¹⁸

This flurry of organizational activity is important for several reasons. It suggests that the war provided Afro-American civil rights and religious groups added incentives to press forward with demands for effective racial reform. Those being nominated as delegates included many of the most talented and energetic spokespersons in black America. Afro-Americans planned to raise the issue of racial discrimination before an international body. Interest in the peace conference stemmed not only from the direct participation of black American and colonial troops in combat but also from the altered perspective on race relations that this experience had created. Following World War I, the NAACP was but one of several competing civil rights organizations. It did not have the venerability it now possesses. Critics argued variously that the NAACP lacked militancy and depended too extensively on white liberals. That other organizations had separate plans for the peace talks and for achieving black unity illustrates the association's inability to command the field at this date.

The United States government, led by the segregationist president Woodrow Wilson, did not want any black agitation at Versailles, where proceedings began in January 1919. The United States had dirty linen it wished to conceal—mounting racial violence in the cities, a politically powerful Ku Klux Klan, the persistence of lynching, and injustices perpetrated against black soldiers in Europe. U.S. officials maintained that the black presence would be disruptive and unwelcome to France. Washington created disinformation about the upcoming Pan-African Congress, and the State Department then refused passports to the delegates, only a few of whom succeeded in crossing the Atlantic by ruse or through connections with powerful whites.¹⁹ One of these pulled strings for W. E. B. Du Bois, whom the NAACP selected to represent it at the peace conference. The association asked him to simultaneously convene blacks from all over the world in a Pan-African Congress and draft uniform recommendations to make to the great powers. Du Bois in December 1918 secured passage on the official press ship as a reporter for the NAACP house organ, The Crisis. His speedy departure gave the NAACP an advantage over other civil rights groups, who were still planning their approaches to the conference in late 1918. Once in France, he soon met the black French politician Blaise Diagne, a member of the French chamber of deputies elected from Senegal. Diagne persuaded premier Georges Clemenceau to permit the Pan-African Congress to meet in Paris, February 19–21, 1919. Fifty-seven persons attended the congress, widely if thinly representing Africa and the diaspora. They came from France's African colonies, including Algeria; the British African colonies; Portuguese Africa; South Africa; the Belgian Congo; Egypt; Ethiopia; Liberia; the French Antilles; Haiti; and the Dominican Republic. Few attended from the British Caribbean because of Britain's refusal to grant such subjects passports.²⁰

Resolutions of the Pan-African Congress of 1919 stressed the preservation of indigenous languages and territories, the protection of aboriginal peoples from economic exploitation, and the need to direct colonial affairs with the welfare of colonized subjects as the paramount concern. Using the standard parlance of the day, participants carefully distinguished between civilized Africans and persons of African descent who should suffer no color bar and those in need of tutelage.²¹

Apart from these general principles, the Pan-African Congress undertook another issue that was specific to postwar planning—the disposition of the German colonies in Africa. Participants accepted the view that neither Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda-Urundi, nor Tanganyika could become sovereign in a world of modern states. They advocated instead colonial administration under international supervision. Appointed states, operating ostensibly in the best interests of the subject peoples, would rule the colonies until they matured politically. Du Bois and others also instituted a second Pan-African Association, which like the first faded away for lack of funds and human resources.²²

Given the circumstances of wartime dislocation and deliberate obstructionism, the Pan-African Congress was something of a tour de force. It nevertheless displeased those who wanted more forthright declarations of Africans’ rights to self-determination. The meeting also failed to endorse the equality of nations principle. This was not an abstract issue, for China and Japan had an interest in the postwar settlement and specifically in the terms of their admission to an international community. Japan's diligent pursuit of an equality clause in the charter of the emerging League of Nations, though muted in the U.S. press, was well known to those who followed the peace talks closely.²³

The Pan-African Congress did not satisfy determined nationalists for several reasons. Meeting in France, still under martial law, under the aegis of Blaise Diagne and Clemenceau, limited the scope of possible criticism of colonialism. Diagne chaired all the sessions and made his French loyalties clear. Insofar as the congress's purpose was to effect the liberalization of colonial African regimes, the moderates in charge deemed a dispassionate tone best. The delegates, moreover, were not of one mind on African fitness for self-rule. Most believed that cultural levels varied among the territories. They requested civil rights for educated, Westernized persons like themselves, not for the inhabitants of the bush. Such elitism in the U.S. context reflected the growing aspirations of part of the black bourgeoisie, Du Bois's Talented Tenth. Black professionals with a growing political appetite were hungry for opportunities and just emerging from a stifling accommodationist milieu.²⁴ The equality of nations principle also proved problematic. Pan-Africanists at the 1919 conference could not have persuaded the great powers to apply it to Africa. Many would not have endorsed such an application themselves. Pressing the matter in the African context would furthermore have impaired the effort that Japan was mounting to get the equality principle accepted without explicit reference to race.

Finally, an undercurrent of resentment from both militant civil rights activists and black nationalist separatists in the United States undercut the pan-African movement's effectiveness. The most vocal opposition came from Gar-veyites. During a mass meeting in New York City on November 10, 1918, the UNIA formulated a set of demands to convey to the peace conference. The association's resolutions far exceeded the self-imposed limits of the Pan-African Congress. The principle of self-determination must apply to all colonies peopled by persons of African descent, it declared. The petition prescribed a universal end to all racial discrimination and segregation, controls on missionary activity, repeal of the Native Lands Act in South Africa and restoration of expropriated land, black proportional representation in any scheme of world government, and transfer of the German colonies to Africans led by educated Western and Eastern Negroes.²⁵

The UNIA deplored the failure of Du Bois and the Pan-African Congress to explicitly call for an end to colonialism and racial discrimination. It regarded Du Bois as an imperialist stooge and condemned him at a New York meeting on March 25, 1919. Long before this, however, UNIA members expressed disapproval of what they regarded as the high-handed, secretive, and manipulative way that Du Bois was conducting affairs in Paris. The Negro World pointedly contrasted the open selection and well-publicized departure of Eliézer Cadet, the one UNIA delegate who had succeeded in reaching France, with Du Bois's clandestine modus operandi. Garveyites did not know that Du Bois, like they, required a low profile to evade U.S. government efforts at obstructing the congress. They believed instead that he fully agreed—and colluded—with the imperialist states.²⁶

Black civil rights groups, distrustful of NAACP contacts with powerful whites and impatient with calls for restraint and forbearance, added their voices to the chorus. The knowledge that Du Bois, black businessman R. R. Wright, racial moderate Rev. William H. Jernagin, and Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton, traveling at the U.S. government's behest, had received passports while activists noted for their racial militancy had not further rankled temperaments. Only good niggers who positively would not discuss lynching, peonage, disfranchisement and discrimination could obtain travel documents, Messenger coeditor Chandler Owen complained at a UNIA meeting.²⁷

The National Equal Rights League numbered among the groups whose delegates could not travel. One delegate was the organization s founder, William Monroe Trotter. Trotter, publisher of the Boston Guardian, had fiercely opposed Booker T. Washington's conservative leadership and rejected NAACP interracialism. Lacking an ordinary passport, he took a devious route across the Atlantic. Trotter signed on as a cook on a freighter and reached Paris after the most critical talks had ended. Indignant that no racial equality clause appeared in the Versailles documents, Trotter memorialized every national delegation present. He tried without success to see Woodrow Wilson, with whom he had had a tense interview in 1914.²⁸

Trotter and others outside the NAACP focused on the peace conference rather than on the Pan-African Congress. This indicates that most black organizations preferred to directly approach the powers that controlled the world's fate rather than network with a handful of Africans and other diaspora blacks. Du Bois, describing how difficult it was to interest the NAACP in pan-Africanism, saw Afro-American indifference to and ignorance of Africa as a legacy from the slavery era. Beyond this, he added, they felt themselves Americans, not Africans.²⁹

Du Bois failed to recognize, however, that the New Negro, as she and he emerged from the crucible of World War I, had a vital interest in racial equality. Civil rights radicals and nationalist-separatists did not agree on strategy, but they shared a common dissatisfaction with moderate approaches to racial reform that seemed always to leave the status quo intact. As a result, many were willing to try novel methods in the space that unique world events had opened up for them.

One of these consisted of cooperation with the Japanese on questions of racial equality. Thoughtful observers could plainly see that Japanese advocacy of an equality principle had far-reaching implications. Japan had already distinguished itself by evading the colonial servitude imposed on most of the world's people of color. In industrial and military affairs it ranked with the major powers. The significance of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 was not lost on either proponents or opponents of racial equality. In January 1919 C. J. Walker initiated a meeting between the International League of Darker Peoples with Japanese publisher S. Kuroiwa, then touring the United States. The league wanted Japanese assistance in placing the issue of racial equality before the powers assembled in Versailles. Cadet obtained an appointment with Count Nobuaki Makino, head of the Japanese delegation, on March 6, 1919. According to Cadet's account of the interview, published in the April 19 issue of Negro World, Makino heard him out with great interest and declared that our movement was to be taken seriously.³⁰

In the end, Japan failed to have the subsequent League of Nations adopt an equality clause. The United States and Britain opposed the measure, but when it came to a vote, it was passed by a majority. Woodrow Wilson, presiding, then declared that only unanimity could make the principle binding and refused to recognize it. In so doing, he blatantly departed from past parliamentary practice. Pan-Africanists also failed to dent the hard surface of colonialism in Africa and racial discrimination elsewhere. As Cadet observed, small nations and peoples found little respect at Versailles.³¹

The demise of the racial equality clause and the feebleness of pan-Africanism did not lay these questions to rest. Instead, rejection by the great powers gave wider credibility to Garveyite ideas among black people. Du Bois denounced Garveyism as dangerous, ill-considered, impracticable, but his own careful work and patient, polite requests to the colonizing powers had not substantially altered the map or the treatment of Africans. The UNIA'S assertive cry Africa for the Africans rang much more clearly in black ears. These nationalists did not think that Du Bois's cautious initiatives would bear fruit. As a people, we can expect very little from the efforts of present day statesmen of other races, Garvey editorialized. Their plans are laid only in the interest of their own people and not in the interest of Negroes.³²

The UNIA articulated ambitious and wide-reaching plans in the 1920s for what it called African redemption, which involved minimal networking and interracial cooperation. Its program, description of which lies beyond the scope of this study, included a fledging oceanic line, projected land concession in Liberia, titled order of meritocrats, and more. It was the largest black organization in the world.³³ Its formulation of black nationalism came to dominate the era in which it flourished and still largely eclipses other interpretations. Garvey remained contemptuous of Du Bois's brand of pan-Africanism. In 1921 he mocked the plans of the second Pan-African Congress to extend invitations to the colonial offices. It reminds me of the conference of rats endeavoring to legislate against the cats and the secretary of the rats convention invites the cat to preside over the convention, he remarked.³⁴

Large numbers of black people worldwide found Garvey's logic more compelling than that of the pan-Africanists, who eventually had to come to terms, even if obliquely and reluctantly, with UNIA successes. The first UNIA international convention brought two thousand persons from the United States, Caribbean, and Africa to New York City in 1920. This figure compares significantly to the fifty-seven individuals who attended the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Even as Du Bois denounced Garvey and refused to invite him to the pan-African congresses, the UNIA'S nationalist ideas crept into resolutions passed at the congresses of 1921, 1923, and 1927. The 1921 congress, with sessions in London, Paris, and Brussels, formulated a Declaration to the World. This document called for local self-government for backward groups, with gradual evolution toward full autonomy, the return of expropriated lands, freedom of religion, and the right to maintain traditional customs. Similar features had appeared in the UNIA'S 1918 communication to the peace conference. The second Pan-African Congress's resolutions retained such attributes as the distinction between civilized and uncivilized individuals, but the