Black Americans and Anticolonialism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>February 2000
>
>Book Review
>
>-----------------------------------------------
>Race Against Empire:
>Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957
>Penny M. Von Eschen
>Cornell University Press, 1997
>189 pp.+ notes and index
>-----------------------------------------------
>
>When Anti-Imperialism and Civil Rights Were in Vogue
>
>By Clarence Lang <clarlang at aol.com>
>
>	Scholars in recent years have begun reinterpreting
>the foundations and legacies of McCarthyism in the United
>States.(1) More work, however, remains to be done on the
>impact anticommunist fear and hysteria had on the developing
>black freedom struggle of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In
>Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
>1937-1957, historian Penny M. Von Eschen contributes toward
>understanding the intersections among pan-Africanism,
>Afro-American politics, and the U.S. Cold War front during
>this period.
>
>	At the center of her narrative is the rise and fall
>of a broad left-liberal coalition of black scholars,
>artists, journalists, politicians and labor leaders. Many of
>them were aligned, with varying degrees of closeness, to the
>Popular Front strategy of the American Communist Party.(2)
>This coalition, she argues, cohered not only around an
>anti-imperialist project, but also around the domestic fight
>against U.S. racial apartheid. Articulating a "politics of
>the African diaspora," it sought to redefine the individual
>and group rights of Asians, continental Africans, and
>African descendants in the Caribbean and the Americas -- all
>within an international context created by World War II and
>its immediate aftermath (p. 2).
>
>	According to the author, the guiding nucleus of this
>wartime black political front in the United States was the
>International Committee on African Affairs, later renamed
>the Council on African Affairs (CAA). At its core were
>Communists and "fellow travelers" like W. Alphaeus Hunton,
>Max Yergan, W.E.B. and Shirley Graham DuBois, and singer
>Paul Robeson. At its height, the council drew within its
>ranks individuals like U.S. congressman Adam Clayton Powell,
>Jr., New Dealer Mary McLeod Bethune, and sociologist E.
>Franklin Frazier. As Von Eschen suggests, the council was in
>no sense a Communist front, and certainly, individuals'
>affiliations to the party did not determine CAA activities,
>or split its membership along sectarian lines. "Until 1948,"
>she writes ". . .most conflicts within the CAA concerned the
>question of how to work effectively on anticolonial issues
>-- with those close to the CP often lining up on different
>sides." (p. 20) Largely a fundraising entity, the CAA
>provided the link between international anti-colonial
>networks, and African liberation groups. Further, it lobbied
>the U.S. State Department and United Nations for support in
>African decolonization, and generated reports about the
>continent's economic landscape.
>
>	In documenting the CAA's activities and campaigns,
>Von Eschen argues that the shape of the postwar globe -- far
>from being set in concrete -- was in violent flux. Thus,
>pan-African activists and intellectuals had an open window
>of opportunity in which to successfully contest for the
>political, civil and economic rights of those struggling
>under the yoke of colonialism, and those oppressed as
>national minorities in the West. However, with the rapid
>crystallization of U.S. political, economic and military
>hegemony during the Harry Truman administration, radical
>black anti-colonialists found themselves increasingly
>repressed by the state, discarded by former allies, and in
>Von Eschen's view, driven to the sidelines of
>African-American political culture. Cold War liberal
>leadership, positioning itself as the sole paradigm in black
>politics, influenced the limited aspirations and strategies
>of the early Civil Rights Movement. This turn of events
>mirrored the marginalization, across the board, of
>left-leaning activists who gave momentum to the Popular
>Front.
>
>	Although the CAA's growth and development forms a
>centerpiece of the book, Von Eschen devotes considerable
>attention to the many long- and short-term conditions that
>influenced the form and content of a diasporan identity in
>the 1940s. This included, most fundamentally, the legacy of
>nineteenth-century pan-Africanism established by Martin
>Delany, Edward Blyden and Alexander Crummell. Against this
>backdrop, scholar W.E.B. DuBois played a powerful role in
>convening a series of Pan-African Congresses in 1900, 1919,
>1921 and 1927. However, it was the Marcus Garvey movement
>that expanded pan-Africanism beyond a small elite and
>brought it within reach of a mass, working-class audience,
>though as Von Eschen convincingly argues, Garveyism itself
>embraced many of the ideals of Western imperialism. In
>contrast, the left internationalism of the 1920s and `30s
>(represented by individuals like C.L.R. James, then a
>Trotskyist, and George Padmore, a former Communist) helped
>infuse pan-Africanism with a militant anti-colonialism and
>anti-imperialism that later proved significant.
>
>	Like numerous scholars, Von Eschen views fascist
>Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as a flashpoint in the
>history of pan-Africanism and African nationalism, giving
>rise to the formation of the International African Service
>Bureau, which later became the Pan-African Federation.
>Formed by a core of individuals that included Padmore,
>James, I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, and Jomo Kenyatta (future
>leader of Kenya), the federation represented another pillar
>of pan-Africanism in the early twentieth century: the
>marriage of diasporan politics and labor militancy. This
>cross-fertilization not only influenced the character of the
>pivotal 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England (of
>which the Pan-African Federation was a chief architect), but
>also helped stimulate among politically engaged African
>Americans a strong emphasis on employment. Another key
>ingredient in the making of this diasporan community,
>according to the author, was the manner in which continental
>Africans studied abroad in the United States. Attending
>historically black schools like Lincoln University, and
>boarding in local black communities, people like Kwame
>Nkrumah were able to get a tangible sense of the
>commonalties among peoples of color.
>
>	For the author, it seems the most vital cohesive
>solidifying diasporan consciousness and solidarity was the
>"international black press." Von Eschen argues that the
>Afro-American press, then at its apogee, played a critical
>role in informing its black readership about strikes across
>West Africa and the Caribbean during the late 1930s. More
>than any other institution, she reveals, black newspapers
>heightened a sense of familial unity with people on the
>other side of the Atlantic -- most of whom U.S. audiences
>would never meet, yet with whom they still could imagine a
>connection. This was due in large part to the existence of
>Claude Barnett's Associated Negro Press, a syndicated news
>service that "made international reporting widely available
>to small papers" (p.8); it also had to do with the regular
>contributions journalists like Padmore made to the Chicago
>Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and similar outlets.
>
>	Beyond her discussion of institutions and social
>phenomena, Von Eschen offers a clear sense of the centrality
>of several influential figures -- DuBois, James, Padmore,
>and so forth -- in advancing the pan-Africanist project.
>Throughout the text, their paths intersect frequently, and
>at dizzying angles. Further, she demonstrates how her
>various protagonists traversed the boundaries of labor,
>journalism, and the pan-Africanist movement. Nnamdi Azikiwe,
>who became the president of Nigeria, attended Howard
>University (where he met the ever-ubiquitous Padmore), and
>contributed articles to the Philadelphia Tribune and
>Baltimore Afro-American. Upon his return to West Africa, he
>encouraged Nkrumah and others to similarly pursue their
>studies at U.S. black institutions of higher education.
>Likewise, Henry Lee Moon, while a member of the Congress of
>Industrial Organization's Political Action Committee, was a
>newspaper journalist who, in Von Eschen's view, did much to
>familiarize black Americans with the struggles of African
>labor.
>
>	Hence, when the convulsions of the Second World War
>upset existing power relations in the North, West and
>colonized South, intellectuals and activists were in firm
>position to rally popular opinion around visions of a more
>equitable world. Von Eschen is explicit in her contention
>that the "global dynamics" of World War II animated
>pan-Africanist discourse (p. 7). Antifascism, which
>ostensibly undergirded the Anglo-American-Soviet "Grand
>Alliance," lent legitimacy to demands for democratic
>freedoms, and buttressed anti-racist arguments. Still, many
>U.S. pan-Africanists found this wartime antifascism lacking.
>While opposing Nazism, it left imperialism untrammeled (for
>instance, the U.S. military presence in, and economic
>penetration of, Liberia and the Caribbean), and equivocated
>on the need to end colonialism and overturn the structures
>of North American racism. From the perspective of such
>pan-Africanists, fascism was but an aspect of the same
>imperialism of which England, France and the United States
>all were guilty.
>
>	The CAA played a key role in formulating such
>analyses during the 1940s, much of it elaborated in written
>reports by Alphaeus Hunton. This body of work, Von Eschen
>intimates, proceeded from a framework anchored in political
>economy, and understood racism as a phenomenon with
>historical origins in slavery and capitalism. Surprisingly,
>Von Eschen asserts, such analyses gained widespread currency
>in popular journals like the Crisis (published by the
>National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
>or NAACP) and the Journal of Negro History, and even in
>conservative black newspapers like the New York Amsterdam
>News. On another, significant note, writes Von Eschen,
>"1940s anti-colonialism represented a radical departure from
>the earlier gendered language of, for example, Martin R.
>Delany's consistent masculinist positing of Africa as the
>fatherland and pervasive invocations of the motherland." (p.
>79) In its place rose a more "universalist" notion of
>rights, presumably inherited from the left internationalism
>of the 1930s. This paradigmatic shift not only upset
>"gendered political categories," but also corresponded to
>the central leadership roles of women like Bethune and
>Charlotta Bass.
>
>	Promising also were the development of the Atlantic
>Charter and United Nations, both of which created
>international vehicles for redefining the meanings of
>freedom and rights. In the fluid context of early postwar
>multilateralism, activists employed a variety of
>international strategies aimed consistently at raising
>"issues of discrimination and colonial representation," and
>arguing for an economic reconstruction in Africa along the
>lines of that proposed for war-ravaged Europe. (p. 84)
>However, this "race against empire" was derailed by a chain
>of events, including heightened tension between the Soviet
>Union, and Britain and the United States; the articulation
>of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, both of which
>asserted U.S. guardianship of the "free world" against a
>perceived communist threat; conservative backlash against
>the wave of labor strikes in the late 1940s; and in the
>U.S., a growing preoccupation with internal "security," and
>mounting repression of dissenting voices. Public criticisms
>of U.S. policy abroad, once a domain of black anti-colonial
>activists, became strictly off limits.
>
>	In this hostile climate, political elites were able
>to easily conflate civil rights issues with communism.
>Liberal activists like Powell and Bethune, and mainstream
>civil rights groups, pragmatically supplanted criticism of
>U.S. foreign policy with an exclusive focus on domestic
>discrimination. Seeking refuge in the burgeoning
>anticommunist consensus, political actors like the NAACP's
>Walter White contended that racial discrimination undermined
>the United States' justified battled against the Soviet
>Union. Similarly conceding the high ground to anticommunism,
>many CIO unions and most black newspapers jettisoned
>activists with real or imagined ties to the Communist Party,
>and journalists like Padmore whose militant anti-
>imperialism previously was in vogue. Parallel to this,
>coverage of African affairs declined precipitously. In an
>atmosphere of hysteria conditioned by the communist
>revolution in China, the Korean War, and the Alger Hiss and
>Rosenwald cases, the CAA soon found itself burdened with
>lawsuits filed by the Attorney General's Subversive
>Activities Control Board. Members like Hunton, DuBois and
>Robeson likewise found themselves imprisoned, harassed or
>barred from travel abroad. By 1955, its coffers empty, the
>CAA folded.
>
>	Von Eschen skillfully documents how this chain of
>events reverberated through U.S. black political culture.
>Significantly, she writes, "one of the consequences of the
>later collapse of the politics of the African diaspora was
>the reinscription of gender in discourses on Africa and
>anti-colonialism and, arguably, within Pan-African politics"
>-- paving the way for a return to the old masculinist
>discourses and renewed gender hierarchies. (p. 79) Black
>civil rights and anti-colonial agitation became, in popular
>circles, separate spheres. Racism, once tied to the workings
>of political economy, was reconceptualized as a
>psychological, moral problem that gave birth to slavery,
>instead of the other way around. Issues of racial
>oppression, once internationalized, were confined to the
>limited horizons of U.S. "race relations."
>
>	Black identity in the United States similarly was
>reconfigured, as even the black popular press encouraged
>audiences to think of themselves as "Americans" separate and
>distinct from the rest of the diaspora. Von Eschen proffers
>that this Afro-American "exceptionalism" went hand in hand
>with a reinvigorated belief in African primitiveness, a
>condition to be overcome through Western tutelage and
>development schemes. Thus, the author contends that anti-
>colonialism, while it persisted, changed dramatically in its
>core assumptions. She implies that just as civil rights was
>separated from anti-colonialism, anti-colonialism was itself
>severed from anti-imperialism. The two, though related, were
>not the same.
>
>	The making of African Studies, though largely
>overlooked here, was no less important to the climate of
>reaction Von Eschen highlights. An emergent superpower, the
>United States sought to advance its knowledge about the
>African continent. This was part of a larger schema for both
>securing Africa's further integration into global capitalist
>accumulation, and winning its peoples' allegiance against
>the Soviet Union. In North America and Western Europe, the
>study of Africa was effectively transformed as an
>enterprise. This transformation, according to Michael West
>and William Martin, rested on a "teaching and research
>endeavor focused on sub-Saharan Africa; organized by
>extra-disciplinary research programs; dominated by faculty
>and staff at Historically White Universities (HWUs); and
>funded by ties to private foundations and public
>agencies."(3) Such changes consolidated, on the one hand, a
>division of the continent between a "black" Africa in the
>south and a more "Caucasian" Africa in the north; on the
>other, a division between Africa as a focus of study, and
>the rest of the diaspora.
>
>	The consequences of these shifts were numerous, and
>by no means limited to North America. The work of
>Afro-American scholars like DuBois and Hunton was severed
>from the field altogether. This undoubtedly accompanied
>their growing marginalization within U.S. Cold War politics.
>Also negated was the role of black colleges and
>universities, publications, and institutions (like the
>Association for the Study of Negro Life and History) as
>longtime reservoirs of African scholarship. This allowed a
>new breed of white "experts" the space to claim paternity of
>the study of Africa. Thus, the creation of Northwestern
>University's African Studies program in 1948, and the
>formation of the African Studies Association in 1957, came
>to be viewed as "firsts" in the development of the field.
>
>	Second, the broad "civilizational" questions raised
>by pan-Africanist scholars in the United States and the
>Caribbean were supplanted by calls for "modernizing" and
>"developing" a backward Africa with no presumed past glory.
>Third, the making of African Studies further disengaged
>study of the continent from any notions of anti-colonial and
>anti-imperialist struggle. Fourth, the separation of
>pan-Africanist themes and scholars from African Studies
>meant that continental students traveling to North America
>did so under the aegis of the State Department, white
>foundations, and white universities. The interactions with
>African Americans, possible for Azikiwe and Nkrumah, no
>longer had an institutional basis. Subverting this aspect of
>pan-African community-building perhaps helped reinforce the
>growing African/Afro-American estrangement the book
>discusses. At the same time, many of the old colonial
>discourses about African infancy and Western stewardship
>made their way intact into African Studies as then
>conceived. This buttressed the widespread exoticization of
>the continent that Von Eschen details.
>
>	However, the author views the 1950s as a period not
>merely of tragedy, but also of continuity. She reveals that
>even as the CAA fell into disrepute, new avenues opened for
>challenging the "liberal consensus" via the assertion of
>diasporic identity. These alternative spaces included the
>1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, which challenged
>the legitimacy of a bipolar, Soviet-U.S. world; the Nation
>of Islam, which advanced its own "anti-American critique of
>the Cold War" (p. 174); and the "goodwill ambassador" tours
>of Afro-American jazz musicians, which subtly promoted
>pan-African solidarities despite State Department
>sponsorship. For Von Eschen, it also seems clear that the
>independence of Ghana in 1957 (and Nkrumah's All African
>People's Conference in 1958) ushered in a new era of African
>nationalism and diasporic solidarity, principally by giving
>pan-Africanism the backing of state power.
>
>	By the mid-1960s, the internationalization of
>Afro-American civil rights, and an explicit critique of U.S.
>foreign relations, once again were in full bloom -- thanks
>in part to the developing anti-imperialism of Malik El Hajj
>Shabazz (Malcolm X), the anti-Vietnam War stance of the
>Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the
>revolutionary internationalism of organizations like the
>Black Panther Party. As Von Eschen illustrates, by 1967 even
>Martin Luther King, Jr., publicly declared his opposition to
>the war in Vietnam. In doing so, like activists in SNCC, he
>violated the taboo against civil rights leaders criticizing
>U.S. diplomacy.
>
>	In its scope, Von Eschen's book complements works
>like Gerald Horne's Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the
>Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, and
>Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane's The Ties That Bind:
>African-American Consciousness of Africa. However, one might
>have expected from her book more attention to the specific
>political and economic struggles against racial apartheid in
>the United States. Similarly, her discussion of
>pan-Africanism's shifting, gendered subtext seems far too
>understated. Some scholars might rightly criticize Von
>Eschen for glossing over serious, deep-rooted antagonisms
>among left activists during this historical period, and
>failing to ground the book more in a discussion of the
>Popular Front period. Others may disagree about whether the
>potential truly existed for a genuine transformation of
>global power relations, even the immediate post-World War II
>moment. Yet, Von Eschen convincing demonstrates that history
>is rarely the story of the inevitable: The course of
>historical events may often appear linear and preordained to
>those reviewing them in the here and now, but arguing from
>this perspective results in reading the present backward
>into the past.
>
>	On the whole, Von Eschen paints a riveting portrait
>of a time when radical anti-colonialism and domestic black
>civil rights marched arm in arm, before weathering the
>challenges of the Truman and Eisenhower years. In the
>process, she helps illuminate the origins of the
>long-running "primacy debate" among historians of the black
>slave experience. The debate continues as to which preceded
>which: Racism or slavery? Color prejudice or capitalism?
>
>	Race Against Empire is important finally for the
>immediacy of its subject matter. As the twenty-first century
>begins, we now may be witnessing another moment of
>disjuncture, one that has created renewed possibilities for
>a radical "politics of the diaspora." For instance, a number
>of African Americans, in criticizing U.S. economic sanctions
>against Cuba, have "rediscovered" a diasporan connection to
>its people, a vast majority of whom are of African descent.
>Several months ago, Randall Robinson, head of the
>Washington, D.C. lobbying group TransAfrica, led a
>delegation to Cuba as part of a public appeal to lift the
>blockade. Just as striking as its campaign was the fact his
>group had a broad political and ideological composition
>characteristic of 1940s-era anti-colonialism. Among those
>accompanying Robinson were actor Danny Glover, a vocal human
>rights activist; Johnnetta B. Cole, former president of
>historically black Spelman College; and Bill Fletcher, Jr.,
>education director for the AFL-CIO, and national organizer
>for the Black Radical Congress.
>
>	The goals of this mission dovetails with on-going
>calls to dissolve the African debt, which a number of
>observers (including the late Julius Nyerere) contend has
>been paid several times over. Along these lines, vocal
>opposition to U.S. trade policy in Africa has put a new
>generation of black activists in conflict not only with the
>Clinton Administration, but also with the black
>professionals and managerial elites operating within his
>"New Democrat" alliance. Moreover, now that the Cold War is
>over and "Area Studies" are becoming superfluous to the
>State Department and vulnerable to university budget cuts,
>many scholars are exploring how to bring African Studies to
>new constituencies. Or rather, they are examining how to
>return the study of Africa to institutions, actors, and
>constituencies in black community life -- going "back to the
>future," as historian Paul Tiyambe Zeleza terms it.(4) A
>reading of Von Eschen's book reveals it is difficult to
>appreciate today's pregnant historical moment without
>comprehending its origins in the contested political terrain
>of the 1940s and `50s.
>
>--
>
>Clarence Lang is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the
>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a member of
>the St. Louis Organizing Committee of the Black Radical
>Congress. The views and opinions expressed in this article
>are his own.
>
>--
>
>Notes
>
>1. See, for instance, Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes:
>McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
>
>2. The Populist Front, codified by the Seventh Congress of
>the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935, sought to
>defend bourgeois democracy as a bulwark against the spread
>of fascism in Europe. Hence, the Communist Party of the
>United States sought to "Americanize" its image, integrate
>itself more fully within U.S. politics, and build mass-based
>antifascist alliances encompassing mainstream and liberal
>forces. See Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism:
>The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
>
>3. Michael O. West and William G. Martin, "A Future with a
>Past: Resurrecting the Study of Africa in the
>Post-Africanist Era," Africa Today, Vol. 44, No. 3 (1997):
>309.
>
>4. Zeleza, "The Perpetual Solitudes and Crises of African
>Studies in the United States," Africa Today, Vol. 44, No. 3
>(1997): 205. See also, Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies
>and Crises (CODESRIA, 1997); William Martin and Michael
>West, "The Decline of the Africanists' Africa and the Rise
>of New Africas," Issue, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1995): 24-26;
>William G. Martin, "Constructive Engagement II, or Catching
>the Fourth Wave: Who and Where are the `Constituents' for
>Africa?" The Black Scholar, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 1999):
>21-30; Gerald Horne, "Looking Forward/Looking Backward: The
>Black Constituency for Africa Past & Present," The Black
>Scholar, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 1999): 30-34; Lisa Brock,
>"Questioning the Diaspora: Hegemony, Black Intellectuals and
>Doing International History from Below," Issue, Vol. 24, No.
>2 (1996): 9-11; Melina Pappademos, "Romancing the Stone:
>Academe's Illusive Template for African Diaspora Studies,"
>Issue, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1996): 38-39; and Stanley J.
>Heginbotham, "Rethinking International Scholarship: The
>Challenge of Transition from the Cold War Era," Items
>(Social Science Research Council), Vol. 48, Nos. 2-3 (June-
>September 1994): 33-40.
>
>Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Clarence Lang. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
>
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