Thinking Locally, Acting Globally

Abstract

intimately connected with the fates of Africans and other has a long history. From Martin Delany's hopes for a return to Africa to the links between Americans and South Africans in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Americans of African descent drew inspiration from real and imagined connections to the continent of their origin, however distant in generations or miles.2 And white Americans, including those in the ranks of government, spouted a seemingly endless stream of racist analogies that placed non-whites low on a racial hierarchy that was as breathtaking in its purported precision as in its global reach.3 Du Bois and Harding both believed that America's racial concerns must be understood in international context. Yet they drew very different lessons from their global visions. The president credited arch-racist Lothrop Stoddard with broadening his perspective. Stoddard had recently authored the screed whose title reveals the book's alarmist tone as well as its racist argument: The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Du Bois, on the other hand, excoriated the ways in which the color line, whether in form of Jim Crow segregation or colonial oppression, made racial discrimination into an international problem.4 Fewer than four decades after Harding's speech, however, these global visions had converged significantly, if not completely. Changing domestic political and social circumstances, combined with transformations in international relations, challenged the State Department and White House to reconsider the racial norms espoused by their predecessors. African-Americans' determined struggle for justice provoked violent resistance from white