Where, though, to find such leaders? What recent tradition of engagement with Africa there was among black Americans belonged mainly to the left and such organizations as the Council on African Affairs (CAA), which espoused a mixture of socialist economic ideals and a diasporic cultural consciousness known as pan-Africanism.6 The CAA boasted two of the most eminent African Americans of the day, singer and actor Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois, distinguished scholar and founding father of the powerful African American civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As the organizer of a series of pan-African congresses in Europe (the first of which, held in Paris in 1919, coincided with the Versailles Peace Conference), Du Bois was very well connected with African and African diaspora intellectuals. Nonetheless, by 1950 the rise of Cold War anticommunism had pushed the CAA beyond the political pale (just as it helped move the NAACP toward the Truman administration) and made political pariahs of Du Bois and, especially, Robeson, who in that year was denied a passport by the State Department. Clearly, U.S. government officers would have to look elsewhere for their black allies.7
Fortunately for them, the same developments that had suddenly made winning the battle for African hearts and minds so crucial—decolonization and the rise of the civil rights movement—were also producing a new generation of more moderate black American leaders who shared the CAA’s interest in Africa but not its radicalism. Typical of this breed was a Columbia University–educated social scientist and CCNY professor of government, John A. Davis, a self-confessed member of Du Bois’s “talented tenth” (the great writer’s explicitly elitist plan for creating an African American intelligentsia) who had later rebelled against his mentor’s influence.8 In 1954, following a meeting at the Connecticut home of former Executive Secretary of the NAACP Walter White, attended by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Victor Reuther, Davis was placed in charge of a two-year research project investigating foreign attitudes toward civil
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rights and race problems in the United States. With funds provided by Orin Lehman, a great-nephew of New York governor Herbert Lehman, and attorney Bethuel M. Webster, the American Information Committee on Race and Caste also lobbied the federal government to increase black representation in the American foreign service and began laying the foundations of a permanent organization for promoting cultural exchange between the United States and the new nations.9 Davis’s project thus embodied a new approach to African affairs that was very different from that of the Council on African Affairs, one that served the interests of black Americans as much as the welfare of Africans and downplayed socialist anticolonialism in favor of liberal anticommunism.10
As yet, though, this tendency lacked any ideological purchase beyond elite black circles in the United States. This was where Richard Wright came in. Having moved to Paris in 1947, mainly in order to escape white racism in the United States, the novelist had befriended a group of French African intellectuals dedicated to the principles of “Negritude”—a movement started by Senegalese poet-politician Léopold Senghor during the 1930s in “celebration of African cultural heritage in the Francophone world.”11 Wright was too much of a western modernizer to feel entirely comfortable with Negritude’s mystical invocations of a precolonial African past, but he did share the French-speaking intellectuals’ desire to cast off white cultural domination and explore new forms of black literary expression.12 When in 1947 the group began publishing a literary journal,
Just how spontaneous was this sequence of events is hard to gauge.
The mid-1950s were a crucial period in the developing relationship between the Cold War and the struggle for black freedom, witnessing not only the first serious challenges to segregation in the U.S. South, such as
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the launch of the Montgomery bus boycott in late 1955, but also, earlier that year, the Bandung conference, an epoch-making gathering in Indonesia of representatives from nonaligned nations in the Third World.