C:\Documents and Settings\Carol\My Documents\Conferences

$C:\Documents and Settings\Carol\My Documents\Conferences$ The NAACP and the Political Liberation Movements in Africa and Asia By Carol Anderson University of Missouri Abstract By the end of the Second World War it was clear, the colonial world was falling apart. Surprisingly, few were more willing to hasten and celebrate its demise than the largest and most powerful civil rights organization in the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although its role in the domestic assault against Jim Crow is well known and generally applauded, historians have dismissed the NAACP’s Cold War anti-colonialism as little more than “Faustian,” “reactionary,” and “ritualistic.” Scholars contend that the Association “traded ‘breaks in the American color line for acquiescence in American and West European control of the world’s colored peoples.’”1 The implications of this long-accepted story are chilling. It suggests that an organization, ostensibly committed to the advancement of people of color, was, in fact, willing to conspire with imperialists to keep those very people enslaved. It is a spellbinding story; it is just not accurate. The Association willingly waded into the battle against global white supremacy recognizing that the same forces that degraded black people in Namibia did so, as well, in Mississippi. Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, argued forcefully that “the problems of race and colonialism are world wide in their scope and, next to the question of U.S. - U.S.S.R. relations, the most important problem in the world today. We of the NAACP,” White asserted, would “be derelict in our duty if we do not recognize that fact and shape our program accordingly.”2 And shape it did. The Association was able to do what W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson could not by maneuvering in the very limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare to fight for the political and economic freedom of Asians and Africans, even when that fight appeared to threaten US national security. The NAACP’s surprising maneuverability was the result of a confluence of factors ranging from the United States’ own ambivalence about colonialism to the growing strength of the Afro- Asian bloc in the United Nations. Equally important, however, was the NAACP’s staunch anti- communism, which gave the organization the political latitude to fight for a “third way” to democracy and nationhood for the hundreds of millions in the colonial world. 1 Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944- 1963 (Albany, 1986), 56; W.E.B. Du Bois to George Padmore, April 7, 1949, Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, Reel 64; James Roark, “American Black Leaders: The Response to Colonialism and the Cold War, 1945-1953,” African Historical Studies, Vol. 4 (1971): 253-70; Du Bois quoted in Robert L. Harris Jr., “Ralph Bunche and Afro-American Participation in Decolonization,” in Michael L. Krenn, ed., The African American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II, (New York, 1999), 177; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, 1997), 107-18; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs (Chapel Hill, 1996), 174-75, 178, 184, 188; James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans (Chapel Hill, 2002), 2, 3-4, 83, 89; Kenneth Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York, 2003); idem, “From Colonial Liberation to Cold War Liberalism: Walter White, the NAACP, and Foreign Affairs, 1941-1955,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 6 (November 1998): 1074-75. 2 Walter White to Arthur B. Spingarn, n.d., ca. Spring 1950, Box 6, File “Spingarn, Arthur B.,” Walter Francis White and Poppy Cannon White, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. The Association’s leaders argued that the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent the degradation that comes from unalloyed capitalism was to embed human rights, with its economic, political, and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. The Association then skillfully used its influence in the United Nations and with progressive, non-communist organizations to aid the liberation struggles in Kenya, Tunisia, Libya, Indonesia, Namibia, Somalia, and Eritrea. Indeed, the NAACP formed a complex web of transnational alliances that wielded the special levers of middle class power – media campaigns, lobbying, fund raising, interest group organizing, and political pressure – to align with indigenous groups in Africa (and Asia) to provide the mechanisms to help break the grip of the colonial powers. In short, this latest research project reconnects a key link in the diasporan chain – the American black middle class – that scholars have systematically removed from the historical analysis of colonial liberation so they could focus more fully on the spectacularly martyred black Left. Yet, while the travails of Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois are fascinating and important, the subsequent erasure of the NAACP and its progressive, non-communist allies has eliminated the political center from the equation for global freedom movements and left a critical void in our understanding of the forces that bring about political system transformations..

Load more