Making Racial Change, Managing Radical Change: The Civil Rights Movement, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Race Relations on the World Stage

Abstract

In the fall of 1964, after a bruising summer of freedom fighting in Mississippi, eleven members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) toured Africa, simultaneously searching for direction and broadening their alliances. In Guinea, their first stop, they asked officials what assistance they could lend. President Sékou Touré suggested to his guests that the civil rights movement and Africans’ fight for independence and development were inextricably linked. After hearing similar analyses across the continent, the SNCC members proposed that their organization intensify and regularize their international contacts, especially with Africa. About a decade later, an account of a meeting between Marxist guerrilla leader Amilcar Cabral and activists from the U.S.-based African Liberation Support Committee circulated among black nationalists in America. When asked what African Americans could do to assist the anticolonial fight, Cabral, future first head of state of independent Guinea-Bissau, replied that while his liberation movement welcomed their help, the black radicals’ principal responsibility was organizing a revolutionary movement in the United States.1 Popular movements on both sides of the Atlantic transformed African Americans’ consciousness of and relationships with Africa, while simultaneously making increasingly difficult the federal government’s efforts to manage rapidly changing race relations at home and abroad during the Cold War. The ideological shift is at the core of James Meriwether’s Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961. Thomas Borstlemann’s The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena is concerned primarily with the second theme. Separately, they are excellent examples of situating United States history in a transnational context; together, they provide an acute study of the centrality of race to twentieth-century America’s foreign affairs and join a burgeoning field that examines the international dimensions of American race relations.2