Gazing Toward Ghana: African American Agency in the Eisenhower Administration’s Relations with Africa

Abstract

African Americans viewed Ghana as a symbol of black success, capability, and modernity during the 1950s and pressured the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to attribute more importance to the decolonizing nation and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Black American leaders thus played a role in shifting American policy in Africa toward a more ‘middle ground' approach balancing European and African desires and also helped cause Vice President Richard Nixon's 1957 trip to Ghana and Nkrumah's 1958 visit to the United States. Such actions reveal domestic influence on international relations, black American agency and a positive outcome of racially based worldviews during the Cold War.