From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979

Abstract

The image of a globe divided into ‘blocs’, ‘camps’, ‘systems’, or even ‘worlds’ is familiar to histories of the Cold War. Less common are studies which focus on transnational relations spanning the gulf between the Soviet Union and United States of America, and rarer still are accounts exploring patterns of exchange between the US and socialist Asia. This article focuses on an overlooked chapter in the history of Cold War contact between the US and the People’s Republic of China—trips to the PRC made by African-American dissidents, peace activists, and black nationalists and internationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to recent attention to the Cold War ‘battle for hearts and minds’ in Asia, it is now well-established that the PRC was not closed off to influences from the US and its allies during this critical period in global geopolitics. 1 On the contrary, information and disinformation campaigns, cultural exchanges, and covert person-to-person recruitment carried out by both sides not only reshaped popular perceptions of the conflict, but also sustained the movement of people and ideas. Radio Peking and Voice of America vied for control of public opinion, while lesser-known organizations like the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries—which in style and function was akin to Soviet predecessors VOKS and Intourist— facilitated programmes of travel and exchange. 2 These latter patterns of cross-bloc contact were not reciprocated by the US, but through them a slow trickle of US citizens reached the PRC and, as a result, were introduced to life on the other side of the ‘bamboo curtain’. These individuals included African-American reporter William Worthy, intellectual and activist