SYMPOSIUM: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS From Hope to Disillusion: African Americans, the United Nations, and the Struggle for Human Rights, 1944?1947

Abstract

“So much suffering, such fleeting hope” is how Melvyn P. Leffler summarized the Second World War. For African Americans that hope was best captured in a Pittsburgh Courier editorial. “What an opportunity the crisis has been,” the editorial declared, “for one to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation … into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people.” The “crisis” had already led to the Atlantic Charter, the Nazi defeat, India's inevitable independence, and plans to create a United Nations. African American leaders now worked diligently to ensure that the “crisis” would also lead to black equality. Yet, as the U.S. government bowed down before the doctrine of states' rights and consistently pointed to its powerlessness to destroy Jim Crow, African Americans, through their organizations, took their struggle for equality into the international arena.1 These organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the leftist Council on African Affairs (CAA), and the Communist-dominated National Negro Congress (NNC), sought to address more than “domestic” issues, such as lynching, peonage, Jim Crow, and discrimination. Recognizing that African Americans were suffering not only as Negroes in the United States but as coloreds in a white-dominated world, the organizations also sought a comprehensive solution to centuries of worldwide oppression. If human rights were denied abroad, they believed, civil rights could not exist at home. As long as Africans were subjected to white colonialism, African Americans stood little chance of overcoming white supremacy. This realization led the NNC to boldly declare the dawning of a “new day” in which the future of blacks and the future of the “peoples of the world” were “inextricably linked.”2 In short, the struggles for human and civil rights were interwoven, and African Americans were determined to bring about human rights and decolonization in the postwar world.