From Colored Cosmopolitanism to Human Rights: A Historical Overview of the Transnational Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract

Abstract The last twenty years have witnessed an outpouring of scholarship on the transnational dimensions of the African American freedom struggle. Drawing on that scholarship, this essay offers a synthetic overview of the global civil rights movement from two specific and distinct lenses: human rights and colored solidarity. Beginning in the 1920s, notions of a dark or colored world connected African Americans to anti-imperial and antiracist movements abroad. In the 1950s and 1960s, solidarities based on notions of color were gradually replaced by a human rights framework and a new focus on the third world. The colored world lost its centrality as the leaders of postcolonial nations turned away from global antiracism toward state-centered visions of international relations. After 1968, however, colored cosmopolitanism experienced a resurgence within the United States as a result of shifting patterns of migration. On the global scale, by contrast, notions of human rights emerged triumphant in the discourse of international organizations and in the popular imagination of many countries. The achievement of those rights remains, however, woefully incomplete. While the promise of the colored world failed to survive decolonization, the promise of human rights endures more as a goal than a reality.