Beyond Double Consciousness: Black Peace Corps Volunteers in Africa, 1961-1971

Abstract

In June 1961, the first director of the Peace Corps flew home promote his new agency before a special gathering of an older one. I have in my hand a volunteer questionnaire for Peace Corps service, R. Sargent Shriver told the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago, which he had founded and supervised for several fractious years. Nowhere does it ask for the candidate's race. This conscious omission illustrated the Peace Corps's most conspicuous goal: to see people as peopleto come terms with human beings as persons apart from qualifying adjectives, as Shriver formulated it. Here he credited the burgeoning civil rights movement of the era, which echoed and inspired the Peace Corps's own color-blind philosophy. Injustice is done when men place high priority on race or class rather than personality, Shriver intoned. When will the ugly incidents of Montgomery and Birmingham cease be? Only when every man becomes a person every other man. Since the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, Shriver admitted, Americans' behavior had often contradicted that document's credo of human equality. The Peace Corps would reinvigorate it, stressing quality of skill over color of skin and prodding the nation complete its historic task.1 Ten years later, a young recruiter's letter African American collegians breathed a decidedly different spirit. I am a Black Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, began Carolyn Gullatt, who wants rap with you about the relevance of such an