No matter how tightly the CIA controlled AMSAC, it did not have a stranglehold on contact between black U.S. citizens and Africans. Although the old form of leftist engagement with African affairs epitomized by W. E. B. Du Bois was by now more or less squelched, a new kind of cultural nationalism was stirring among young African Americans, one that celebrated black identity not to achieve integration into western culture, but rather as a rejection of it. Identified after the mid-1960s by the slogan “Black Power,” this new mood was most powerfully expressed during the early years of the decade by the radical nationalist Malcolm X, who preached a doctrine of racial separatism and dared to criticize the nonviolent tactics of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Twice in 1964, Malcolm visited Africa, the second time on an eighteen-week tour, meeting government representatives, speaking on the radio, and addressing the Organization of African Unity in Cairo.84 Concerned American officials wondered how to counter his charismatic presence and the threat to U.S.
African policy it posed.
Enter the towering figure of African American leader James Farmer. A founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a prominent civil rights organization, Farmer had risked his life taking part in the 1961 Freedom Rides on segregated interstate buses in the Deep South, but he was no racial radical in the mold of Malcolm X. He shared Martin Luther King’s belief in integration and nonviolence; indeed, he was a pioneer in the application of Gandhian protest techniques to the African American struggle for freedom. Moreover, Farmer had a proven interest in African affairs, having participated in November 1962, along with King and other representatives of the “Big Six” African American organizations, in the launch of the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), an initiative to build links between the civil rights movement and the new African states, as well as to strengthen black representation in official U.S. foreign policy.85
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Farmer had already taken part in a tour of Africa, in late 1958, as a representative of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, in a five-member delegation of the Public Service International (the same organization that collaborated with the CIA in 1963 to unseat Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana).86 This experience had stirred unexpectedly powerful feelings of cultural solidarity in both Farmer and his African hosts. “When I landed in Africa, I felt quite literally like falling on my knees and kissing the earth,” he remembered later. When the time came for him to leave, “Nigerian trade-unionists gathered at the airport to see me off, and they threw their arms around me and kissed me.”87 The PSI report on the trip noted the same phenomenon, but in more dis-passionate terms, describing Farmer as a “colored trade unionist—a fact which naturally proved of considerable advantage to the delegation in its approach to the Africans.”88
Farmer, then, was the obvious choice to counter Malcolm X. How, though, to get him to Africa without undermining his credibility as an independent spokesman for black America? In December 1964, only a cou-ple of weeks after Malcolm had returned from his second African trip, AMSAC approached the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (not difficult, given that the two organizations shared the same offices), offering to finance “an extended trip to Africa.” ANCLA immediately asked Farmer to represent the organization, giving him twenty-four hours to reply; he “accepted eagerly,” despite some protest from CORE, which was going through an organizational crisis at the time.89
The next few weeks were a rush of frantic planning in AMSAC’s New York headquarters. Hank Raullerson, returned from Lagos and back in his old position as John Davis’s assistant director, sorted out Farmer’s travel arrangements, put him in touch with African acquaintances, and smoothed his path with American officialdom.90 Carl T. Rowan, director of USIA (and the first African American to sit on the National Security Council), looked forward to Farmer’s “voicing the true aspirations of most Negro Americans as compared with what has been said in Africa by such
‘spokesmen’ as Malcolm X” and offered to brief him before his departure.91
Meanwhile, John Davis alerted Raullerson’s replacement in Lagos, James Baker, to Farmer’s imminent arrival, explaining the purpose of the trip in words almost identical to those used by Rowan.92 Baker was instructed to accompany Farmer throughout the tour in his capacity as a member of the
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ANLCA’s planning committee, rather than as an officer of AMSAC.93
This reticence about the latter organization’s role in conceiving, funding, and planning the trip was presumably related to its reputation in Africa as a U.S. government front.