BLACK POWER, RED LIMITS: KWAME NKRUMAH AND AMERICAN COLD WAR RESPONSES TO BLACK EMPOWERMENT STRUGGLES I ~ by ADRIENNE VAN DER VALK A THESIS Presented to the Department of Political Science and the Graduate School ofthe University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science December 2008 11 "Black Power, Red Limits: Kwame Nkrumah and American Cold War Responses to Black Empowerment Struggles," a thesis prepared by Adrienne van der Valk in partial fulfillment ofthe requirements for the Master of Science degree in the Department of Committee in Charge: Dr. Joseph Lowndes, Chair Dr. Dennis Galvan Dr. Leslie Steeves Accepted by: Dean ofthe Graduate School III © 2008 Adrienne van der Valk IV An Abstract ofthe Thesis of Adrienne van der Valk for the degree of Master ofScience in the Department ofPolitical Science to be taken December 2008 Title: BLACK POWER, RED LIMITS: KWAME NKRUMAH AND AMERICAN COLD WAR RESPON ES TO BLACK EMPOWERMENT STRUGGLES Approved: Scholars ofAmerican history have chronicled ways in which federal level response to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was influenced by the ideological and strategic conflict between Western and Soviet Bloc countries. This thesis explores the hypothesis that the same Cold War dynamics shown to shape domestic policy toward black liberation were also influential in shaping foreign policy decisions regarding U.S. relations with recently decolonized African countries. To be more specific, the United States was under pressure to demonstrate an agenda of freedom and equality on the world stage, but its tolerance of independent black action was stringently limited when such action included sympathetic association with "radical" factions. The case ofthe Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations' relationship with the popular and highly visible leader Kwame Nkrumah ofGhana during the time ofthe Congo crisis is the primary case used in the exploration ofthis hypothesis. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Adrienne van der Valk PLACE OF BIRTH: Ames, Iowa DATE OF BIRTH: January 19, 1975 GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon Grinnell College DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Science, Political Science, 2008, University of Oregon Master of Science, Journalism, 2008, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Sociology, 1997, Grinnell College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: International Journalism Political Culture African Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Editorial Assistant, Oregon Social Learning Center, Eugene, OR August 2008-present Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR September 2005-December 2008 Counselor-Mediator, Open Adoption and Family Services, Eugene, OR August 2002-August 2005 VI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Professor Joseph Lowndes for his enthusiasm and patience throughout the completion ofthis project. I would also like to thank Professors Leslie Steeves, Dennis Galvan and Jane Cramer for their consultation and support. Vll For Arnold and Suzanne van der Valk, who provided me with the foundation I needed to succeed in this task. Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. LITERATlTRE REVIEW.......... 11 III. THE COLD WAR AND THE COLOR LINE 23 Critiques of Kwame Nkrumah's Leadership 23 Cold War Civil Rights 25 The Symbolic Power of Kwame Nkrumah 30 ,The U.S. Observes 33 The Liability of Symbolism........................................................................... 35 Crossing Over :............................................ 38 Robeson and Baker.................................................................................... 39 Williams and DuBois................................................................................ 41 Conclusion..................................................................................................... 48 IV. NKRUMAH AND THE CONGO CRISIS 54 Crisis in the Congo......................................................................................... 55 The United Nations and United States React................................................. 60 Nkrumah Reacts................. 64 Is This a Case of "Crossing Over"? 68 Blackness 71 Potential to Participate in an "Everybody Wins" Relationship................. 72 Less than Total Alignment with an Anti-Communist Position 74 Willingness to Demonstrate Commitment to Ideals of Black Activism Over U.S. Government Desires -.. 76 IX Chapter Page V. CONCLUSION 79 BIBLIOGRAPHY 87 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This project explores the hypothesis that the dynamics of the Cold War, shown by modern historians and political scientists to have shaped domestic policy toward black liberation in America, were also influential in shaping foreign policy decisions regarding U.S. relations with the recently decolonized African country of Ghana. I will argue that despite the geographic, political and economic distance between these two countries, the stories ofblack American liberation and Sub-Saharan decolonization were similarly influenced by two powerful dynamics that grew out of Cold War liberalism: one, the federal government was under enormous pressure to demonstrate an agenda of freedom and equality on the world stage by appearing to support these respective movements; and two, independent black action was perceived as threatening to American interests, especially when such action included sympathetic association with "radical" factions and willingness to act publicly in opposition to Western agendas. I will frame this argument around the following premise: The limits of Cold War liberalism were applied to both foreign and domestic policy decisions related to emerging racial empowerment, defining the ideological boundaries beyond which the United States would actively oppress any actor perceived as a threat to the country's already vulnerable international reputation. That the plight ofblack people in both parts of the world are connected is not a new idea, but the dimension of this reality has yet to be fully explored or understood, especially by scholars of International Relations whom, historians of the discipline observe, tend to 2 suffer from a case ofcollective amnesia regarding the relevance ofrace during the Cold War. The legacy ofwhite supremacy in the United States is linked both culturally and historically to European enslavement and colonization ofindigenous populations throughout the Sub-Saharan African continent. Although the process of "racial formation" has not followed an identical path in each area where native black Africans have been forcibly subjugated, scholars like Michael Omi and Howard Winant (who dubbed the term), Penny Von Eschen, and Brenda Gayle Plummer chronicle efforts to draw parallels and comparisons between such areas for the purpose ofbetter understanding current racial dynamics and prescribing normative solutions to problems originating from a white supremacist history recorded primarily by scholars who have ignored it. Omi and Winant argue for applying what they call a nation-based analysis to this history. "In the nation-based paradigm," they state, "racial dynamics are understood as products ofcolonialism and, therefore, as outcomes ofrelationships which are global and epochal in character." For Omi and Winant, "Pan-Africanism, cultural nationalism, and Marxist debates" are included in the nation-based analysis. What these approaches share is their reliance on elements derived from the dynamics of colonialism to demonstrate the continuity of racial oppression from its heyday. Chief among these is the use of racial categories to distinguish members of the oppressor and the oppressed "nations" - the colonizers and the colonized (1985, p. 39-40). Denying the "global and epochal" character ofracial dynamics has resulted in the development of a discipline that has gone startlingly color-blind in the last thirty years, a state ofaffairs that leaves Omi and Winant, Von Eschen, Plummer and other scholars (myselfincluded) to reinterpret a history that has purged itself ofone ofits most relevant 3 variables. "To be a professional IR [International Relations] scholar in the United States today," asserts Robert Vitalis, "means adopting a particular disciplinary identity constructed in the 1950s and '60s that rests on a certain willful forgetting....Contemporary writing about IR turns out to share along with all other domains ofAmerican culture the powerful tendency toward 'silence and evasion' about the four-hundred-year presence ofAfricans and African Americans in the United States," (2005, p. 160). IfIR scholarship is failing to effectively address race currently, a glance at the history ofdevelopment theory reveals an affinity for racial-evolutionary thinking that hardly set the stage for an accurate account ofthe ways in which colonial institutions have continually shaped racial dynamics. As early as 1910, The Journal ofRace Development, a precursor to Foreign Affairs, institutionalized the concept ofracial hierarchy in academia, using scientific language to legitimate the image ofAmerica "lifting" backward people upward and shepherding them along a trajectory of development. This scholarly trend lay the foundation for what Jessica Blatt calls a "research tradition with a long and probably unbroken history up to today [that], to put it crudely, offers diagnosis and prescription for 'sick' groups and societies," (Blatt, 2004, p. 707). Black activists like George Padmore, Franz Fanon, and Stokley Carmichael have been able to record far more accurate accounts ofthis