The Reluctant African: The Foreign Policy Journalism of Louis Lomax, 1960–1968

Abstract

ABSTRACTLouis Lomax was a popular public figure in the 1960s who is often relegated to tertiary status in historical accounts of both civil rights and its foreign policy outgrowths. He was the writer and reporter for Malcolm X’s introduction to the nation, The Hate That Hate Produced, co-producing the documentary with Mike Wallace. Lomax was the first black man with a syndicated television talk show, an author of several books, a journalist, and a publicity-seeking provocateur who did what he could during the decade to both report the news and to keep himself in it. His work, though often passed over in historical treatments, was read and discussed openly. His books were bestsellers. His opinions changed minds, and many of his opinions concerned foreign policy. His work was built most consistently on opposition to colonialism. Like black nationalists, Lomax saw the United States as part of the broader imperialist problem and did occasionally make a comparative American race analysis when dealing in foreign lands, but like George Washington Williams in the Belgian Congo, he more often sought to interpret foreign political actors on their own merits and within their specific contexts. The problem for Lomax was that as a freelance journalist without any real foreign policy expertise, that understanding was necessarily going to be filtered through his own racial experience, whether intentional or not, and his coverage was going to lack the nuance of those who studied the various regions more intently and for longer periods of time.