What was less to be expected was that members of AMSAC’s own circle in the United States would share some of SAC’s misgivings. In part, their reasons were pragmatic. “The fact that we have started under ‘the auspices’ of a well-known stable group of Africans is an advantage not to be taken lightly [nor] easily recovered if lost,” the outspoken Adelaide Cromwell Hill told fellow members of AMSAC’s Executive Council before urging them to compromise with Diop’s demands.67 Others objected in principle. “I am somewhat sensitive about educated Negro Americans overexposing themselves in Africa at this stage,” Davis was told by Martin Kilson, a member of Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs (and later head of Harvard’s black studies program), in April 1962. African students at Harvard did not like AMSAC’s “assertive features,” Kilson reported, viewing the organization as an “‘Uncle Tom agent’” of “‘American imperialism.’” These young Africans preferred to identify with black Americans who addressed the economic and social problems of Africa, rather than “pointing at a few doctors, lawyers, artists, etc., as if they were representative of the Negro community at large—which they obviously are not.” AMSAC must get off its “phony high horse,” Kilson urged, and
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concentrate on what he “thought was supposed to be its original aim and purpose,” that is, educating the mass of ordinary American blacks about their African roots, something that had become “lost in an attempt to project America (and I’m not really sure it is NEGRO AMERICA) into Africa.”68 These remarks, which strongly echoed Alioune Diop’s earlier assertion that the “mission of AMSAC . . . [was] the work of integrating into the national American culture . . . the special qualities which constitute the African cultural heritage,” clearly upset the normally equable Davis, who devoted much of a lengthy response to an impassioned defense of his own record as a civil rights activist, one he compared favorably with Kilson’s and that of his mentor, W. E. B. Du Bois.69
Fuelling African apprehension about the Lagos office were recurrent rumors “of a liaison between AMSAC and government,” as one confidential internal report delicately put it.70 Such suspicions were, of course, entirely justified. In the first years of its existence, AMSAC received almost all of its funds directly from the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs, an arrangement reminiscent of the relationship between the National Student Association and the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs. Between June 1958 and May 1959, for example, out of a recorded total income of $32,985, the amount of $30,500, or 92 percent, was listed as “Grants from CORAC,” the remainder being made up of membership dues and individual donations.71 In March 1959, however, Orin Lehman signaled a move away from this state of near complete dependence by telling an annual meeting of CORAC directors that “some foundations and also some additional individuals” had expressed an interest in sponsoring AMSAC. (The same meeting approved AMSAC’s program “on the understanding that activities that might possibly be considered of a political nature should be avoided.”)72 Matthew McCloskey resigned from CORAC in April (later going into overt government service as John Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland, then resigning this position in the wake of a financial scandal involving his construction empire), and in February 1960 AMSAC received its own certificate of incorporation (predictably, perhaps, in Delaware), the legal paperwork having been filed by Frederick “Rusty” Van Vechten of Bethuel Webster’s law firm.73 Federal tax exemption followed in May and, after a separate bank account was opened at the Park Avenue office of the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company in June, the organization was ready to start receiving subsidies
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from pass-through foundations.74 Henceforth, financial assistance from CORAC would be limited to routine operating costs, such as officers’ salaries.75 Grants for specific projects, which was by far the largest part of AMSAC’s annual budget, would come from elsewhere, so that in 1964–
65, for example, CORAC supplied $12,500 and foundations $87,500.76
That said, CORAC maintained a say in AMSAC’s affairs, with its annual meeting of directors providing an opportunity for Lehman and Webster to steer the organization toward particular activities.77 Meanwhile, money flowed into AMSAC’s coffers from such CIA conduits as the Colt and Cleveland Dodge foundations.78