Part One: African Americans and International Social Justice
This discussion will appear in two parts. Part II will be included in Vol. 1: No. 2, January 2020.
The African American pursuit of social justice has been an established source of group action and influence not only domestically but internationally. The mobilization of African American interests in pursuit of domestic political, social and economic rights did not occur in a vacuum. It both impacted and was impacted by external events and phenomena in the global system. The purpose of this discussion is to trace the impact and significance of the African American experience and agency on the evolution and development of social justice in the global\international system from the era of enslavement to the present. The discussion that follows in part-one of the two-part discussion.
THE MEANING OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE GLOBAL\INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
Changes in and transformation of international systems of political, socio-economic systems occurring over several centuries impacted interpretations of the concept of social justice. During the twentieth century, the social justice concept became an institutionalized global norm in the preamble of the International Labor Organization (ILO). When the post-WWI Western powers restructured the global order after the destruction of the western dominated global imperial\colonial system through the formation of the ILO and the League of Nations, the concept of social justice was agreed to be fundamental to global peace and prosperity. “The Preamble to the 1919 Constitution of the International Labor Organization (“ILO”) makes two major claims: (1) that universal peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice, and (2) that the failure of any nation to adopt humane labor standards may be an obstacle in the way of social justice improvements in other nations.”[1]
Philosophical perspectives on social justice range from those of John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, and Fredrick Hayek. Religious traditions, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, varieties Christian Protestantism and Catholicism, to name some, have also influenced the meaning and definition of the concept. Different concepts of justice in ancient, renaissance, and modern Western philosophy centered around the discussion of relationships between the state and individuals in a society predicated upon a social contract or relations based upon equal or unequal status.
Through the course of the twentieth century, the concept was widely expanded, to include considerations of gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, culture, sexual preference, and disability. Social justice became an inextricable part of the global mission of the United Nations when it replaced the League of Nations after World War II. The United Nations’ use of the term has undergone several iterations. In 1969, the terminology was used in lieu of “protection of human rights,” in the Declaration on Social Progress and Development. In 2006, the United Nations’ document, Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations, defined social justice in broad terms with an emphasis on the distribution of economic resources and “fruits of economic growth.” [2] While this discussion emphasizes the efforts of African Americans to advance and achieve racial and social justice, domestically and internationally, it is done so with an acute awareness of the symbiotic of the linked fate of humanity, regardless of expressed, assigned or named identities.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE—COLONIAL BEGINNINGS
The narrative of American political history begins with the contradiction between the assumed entitlements of freedom, liberties and social justice for European settlers and the assumed racial disqualification and ineligibility of the same for enslaved Africans. From the beginnings of the African presence, in what became the United States in 1619, African Americans have been an ever-present and sometimes crucial force in the projection, formulation, and direction of American power and influence in the world. African Americans made significant and vital contributions to the nation and the evolving global order—through the eras of the American War of Independence, the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican-American War, the universal Abolitionist Movement during the nineteenth century, western-hemispheric conflicts, the Spanish-American war followed by American imperial expansion, two World Wars, the construction of the post-WWII international liberal social and institutional order, the demise of the European empires, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Cold War era in the twentieth century, to the post-9\11 global transformation of the twenty-first century.
African Americans, individually, and collectively, have been supporters, managers, critics of and dissenters against American foreign policy. They have served and continue to serve in the foreign policy arena as bureaucratic implementers, lobbyists, governmental policymakers, official and unofficial diplomats, and foreign correspondents. The opportunity to serve in these roles is inextricably tied to the quest for domestic political inclusion and agency for four centuries. “… in their quest for universal freedom, African Americans, who were born in foreign affairs through African slavery and the slave trade, have turned to America’s foreign policy to support ideals of human rights and humanitarianism. Any appreciation of the universal freedom thrust of African American politics must include an understanding of African Americans’ role in foreign policy.”[3] (Measuring to nature of and the extent to which African Americans have been included in the foreign affairs of the United States is important to the calculation of summation of how far the nation has achieved domestic social justice and inclusion.
Political Science theory suggests that a groups’ impact on a nation-state’s foreign affairs and its inclusion in the policymaking and implementation processes of foreign affairs and international relations is an indicator of the level and extent of the groups’ propinquity to the mainstream and power. [4] From the 20th century thru the current two decades of the 21st century, African Americans have gone from being on the periphery and an exceptional presence in the realms of the foreign policy establishment to the pinnacle during the presidency of Barack Obama. Theoretically, political scientists have identified several factors that historically excluding African Americans from the foreign policy process. The range from 1) the exclusive and elitist nature of the foreign policy decision-making in most societies, 2) the assumption that African American interest in US foreign policy was limited to issues and regions of low priority to the broader foreign policy establishment, i.e. the Caribbean, Afro-majority dominant Latin America, and Africa, and 3) the absence of a powerful and established group African American elites with equal socioeconomic status, social connections, and allied interests with those in the broader group of US foreign policy elites, limited African Americans to the use of external pressure through the mobilization of public opinion to influence foreign policy decisionmakers.[5]
African Americans fought on the side of liberty and freedom during the War of Independence. Choosing to serve on both sides, their military service was expected to bring the desired result, freedom. Many remained in the former colonies and many retreated to Canada with the British. Either way, promises of freedom were met with re-enslavement in some instances and marginalization as quasi-free people in other instances. For those remaining in the former colonies and those remaining loyal to Britain and scattered throughout other parts of the British empire, social justice remained unfulfilled on all levels—civil rights, civil equality, and economic participation. The nearly one-hundred-year-old pre-existing institution of slavery in the Americas, inherited by the eighteenth-century Founders of America continued as a vital socio-economic element. The institutional framework for the expansion and development of the political economy of chattel and enslaved labor proceeded full-force in the wake of independence and was perfected using the constitutional and legal systemic development of the United States of America—from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution order of 1789.
SLAVERY, ABOLITION, CIVIL WAR, TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
African American enslavement, subjugation, and dehumanization were also aided and abetted by the structure of the international system, religious, cultural and societal norms among the European powers and those emergent-powers in the western hemisphere. International social norms supported by an international society did not emphasize or recognize social justice as a norm. Social justice thinking slowly emerged during the nineteenth century and sowed the seeds for the major transformation in later eras. The concept was an essential component of ‘enlightenment’ thinking and emergent liberalism but did not extend to the concept of racial social justice given the concomitant emergence of European racial ideologies that undergirded the forces of global commerce in slavery, commercial enslavement and the colonial expansion of European empires.
African Americans resisted the conditions subjugation and the structures of power that denied them justice from the very start. Resistance took on many and variant forms; from violent rebellion, passive accommodation to legal and political efforts. (There were over two-hundred-fifty slave rebellions during the period of enslavement before the formal abolition of the institution in the nineteenth century.) The legal end of the American slave trade was in 1807-08, although illegal trafficking in enslaved Africans continued through the end of the nineteenth century. An emergent, soon to mature, anti-slavery Abolitionist movement emerged to challenge the slave trade and focused on the eradication of slavery altogether.
The Abolitionist movement, as it pertains to African Americans, should be considered the first international social justice movement in which African American leaders were at the forefront. Antislavery activism was international and created international cooperative networks linking African Americans to their European sympathizers, especially in Great Britain. African American activists, Fredrick Douglas, Ebenezer Bassett, Ida B. Wells, William Ellen Craft, Rev Sella Martin, Josiah Henson, Alexander Crummell, Sarah Remond, Charles Lenox Remond, Ida B. Wells, Moses Roper, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, for example, traveled throughout Great Britain campaigning against slavery. Douglas established ties with Abolitionist activists in parts of Latin America, as well. In addition to the strategy of moral suasion, there was also some effort to encourage boycotts of goods produced by slave labor, but with little success.
In contemporary, international relations analytical terms, the international Abolitionist movement would be identified as a transnational movement and abolitionist organizations would be labeled, nongovernmental organizations. African American abolitionists reached every important destination in Britain and helped to mobilize a major shift in global social and economic norms—an end to slave labor and the recognition of human rights for African descendent populations in the Atlantic world. Although their efforts did not completely dismantle anti-Black racism, it was the first major effort in the international social justice movement in which African Americans were a crucial source of leadership. The focus of efforts on Great Britain and winning the allegiance of the British public and support of Parliament also indicates the political sophistication of African Americans because those sympathies weakened the political alliance between Britain and the American Southern political economy.
African American domestic migration through the Underground railroad presented what is now a very contemporary political issue; defining and protecting the rights of migrants escaping violence and oppression. Escape to the north rendered African Americans refugees and in the modern political parlance “illegal migrants” in a land in which their presence proceeded that of most white American immigrants. Much like the DACA students of today, many of the “slave-fugitives” became political activists. This nineteenth-century American migration “problem” received international scrutiny as many of those fleeing slavery in the US, fled to Canada. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and later the Dred Scott decision, heightened the pace at which thousands of “refugees” sought to leave the country. Canada, Texas under Mexican control, and Florida before the Second Seminole War were the major recipients of African American refugees. It is often overlooked that African American Abolitionists who left the country to speak in Europe were not issued US passports because they were not, legally, US citizens.[6] The denial of passports for African American Abolitionists was a method of restricting and limiting their power to effect political change in attitudes internationally and build international social and political contacts which were necessary to re-shape global norms to reject slavery as a practice and institution. Ultimately, the opposite occurred.
An alternative approach to the issue of American slavery and the presence of former slaves’ development in the 1830s led to the founding of the American Recolonization Society. The Society was established based upon two critical ideas; 1) Former enslaved Africans would be better-off returned to the continent of Africa, and 2) their repatriation would serve a religious purpose. Repatriated African Americans, who were Christians, would serve as evangelists on the Continent. As early 1810--nearly a century before Marcus Garvey--Paul Cuffe, a successful African American New Englander, and early Abolitionist, advocated the return to Africa to Sierra Leone, a British colony. Later in 1821, the American Colonization Society continued Cuffe’s initiative by purchasing land on the west African coast and began the settlement and named it Liberia in 1847. The project slowly began to emigrate numbers of African Americans in a newly created African “Zion”. African Americans were also returned to other regions in the Caribbean and South America—Haiti, Dominican Republic, Haiti.[7]
Remarkably astute, African American leaders who were denied domestic political efficacy and power, turned to the international system to garner and development transnational and global political power through the creation of ideological networks of association, using the international press and lecture circuit, religious institutions, and other alliances. The creation of a global movement and shifted global norms and values about the humanity of Africans. Therefore, creating a foundation for the consideration of human rights for enslaved Africans. The nineteenth-century global antislavery movement also aligned with the emergent reform and progressive movements that challenged the repression of and conditions of labor throughout the industrializing western world. The early labor movement began to coincide with the Abolitionist and later civil rights movements for racial equality. However, these movements met with the formidable and the specters of ‘Economic and Social Classism,’ and ‘White Supremacy’ which manifested the racial political-economies and cultures throughout the world.
The civil war, the end of the Civil War, and Reconstruction in the United States, when understood from an international perspective, was a significant phenomenon not only for its role as harbinger of change in the nature of global political-economic development, in terms of industrialization and modernization, the efficacy of democratic and republican governmental arrangement, but also advanced the notion of racial democracy, to the level of global imagination. (Though the concept would quickly become suppressed with the end of Reconstruction, the seed was planted and remain dormant until the end of the twentieth century.) The end of the civil war and Reconstruction also opened the door for the formal recognition of Haiti, which in turn opened the door for the first formal inclusion of African Americans in the United States diplomatic core. Ebenezer Don Carlo Bassett became the first African American and American diplomat appointed to a ministerial-level diplomatic post to Haiti. He was followed by Fredrick Douglas who was later appointed to the same post.[8] (The recognition of Haiti, the first Black Republic in the entire world, by the first Republic in the World is of no minor consequence. It was the first formal recognition of African descendant Republic and governing sovereignty that, unlike Liberia, was not created by a White-dominated government power. Haiti was also unlike traditional Monarchical Ethiopia, which remained free of European colonial rule. It achieved independence in the “new world” and embraced the Western European\Anglo-American political ideals of the “Enlightenment” and the right to fight a War of Independence.)
Sadly, the end of Reconstruction, 1877, was followed by the subsequent re-enslavement\debt peonage Jim Crow system, repressive Black Codes, the organization of domestic white racial terrorist groups that unleashed a wave of racial political-economic, social, and institutional violence that would last well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The forms and context of African American racial subjugation would mutate and reproduce in many and varying forms. The wave of lynching that began in an organized and sustained fashion throughout many regions of the nation, launched African American activists back into action at the international level. In many ways, Ida Well-Barnett became one of the first intentional anti and counter-terrorist campaigners at the international level. Certainly, African Americans were not the only group of people to experience massive terror and threats of genocide, but it is important to recognize and point out that their historical experiences were and have been mobilized at the global level to effectuate, once again in the same way as the earlier Abolitionists, and international shift in normative thinking and rejection of systematic and overt state-sanctioned violence. It was met with limited success, but the work of Barnett should be recognized as among the first anti-terrorist[9] campaigns that predated those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The supreme paradox of the foundational idea upon which America was founded—All Men are Created Equal, except for enslaved persons and excluding the Native nations—continued in legal form from 1877 to 1954. The paradox, combined with the mechanism of racial violence and terrorism, undergirded the post-Civil War expansion of the United States to the shores of the Pacific. Westward expansion was justified by the persistent and symbiotic ideologies of ‘white supremacy’ and manifest destiny. African American subjugation remained critical not only in the domestic social-political context but also the creation of a territorial empire.
A little known and forgotten incident in the annals of American history illustrates the intersection between African American racial subjugation, the imperial aspirations, and hubris in the post-civil war era. The incident occurred on a disputed island in the Caribbean in which African American males from Baltimore were contracted to dig the guano on the island of Navassa. In 1857, Congress passed a law, the Guano Islands Act, that granted American citizens the right to claim any territory not claimed by any other nation or inhabited, to occupy and taken by ‘peaceable possession’ under American jurisdiction and be considered as ‘appertaining’ to the United States. Although claimed by Haiti, Navassa Island was claimed by the US Guano Corporation because the US did not recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation-state, politically or diplomatically, at the time. In essence, the Guano Act permitted the territorial expansion of the United States beyond its continental boundaries to islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, thus setting the stage for the creation of an American empire, with territories and protectorates it would later possess, control and occupy at the end of the nineteenth century to the present.[10]
After the civil war, the Navarro Phosphate Company of Baltimore obtained rights to the island and began digging phosphate on the US unincorporated territory, Navassa Island. In 1889, it recruited and contracted one hundred forty (140) African American men from the city. Conditions on the island were less than humane and the men rioted, leaving five white male supervisors dead. Eighteen of the men were arrested, indicted for murder and put on trial on the mainland. As part of their defense was the argument that the United States did not have legal jurisdiction over the island, the island was foreign soil. The case went to the US Supreme Court and ruled that the Guano Act was constitutional and therefore the island was an American territory. President Benjamin Harrison went further and deployed US Naval ship, the Kersage, to the Island, therefore endorsing the opinion that the islands were part of the United States. According to the historian, Daniel Immerwahr, this seemingly minor case, laid the foundation for the creation of an overseas American empire—an empire that would include non-white populations throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific.[11] These new populations would be impacted by the parameters of racial politics and policy in which African Americans were the boundary markers and standard bearers. The “negro” problem became a deterrent to the full incorporation of many of the new territories into the Union as many in power deemed the inclusion of more non-white populations as an unnecessary exacerbation of an existing racial problem and an existential threat to the white numerical majority. Finally, this little known and apparently insignificant case would present a unique dilemma and irony for the next century as the push for civil rights and social justice at home would be inextricably tied to the defeat of old European empires, while at the same time, the American territorial empire would recede into the shadows and has yet been fully dismantled.
TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFRICAN AMERICAN AGENCY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Thus far the conversation has interpreted the African American quest for freedom and equality during from the era of slavery, the civil war, reconstruction and the beginnings of the long season of Jim Crow in terms of its impact on international norms and values. This section suggests that nineteenth-century efforts of abolitionism, anti-slavery, that changed perceptions of the humanity of African Americans and facilitated the procurement of civil and human rights for African Americans also contributed to an emerging international normative and value system that became critical foundational elements in the reconstruction of the global political order in the aftermath of World War I and World War II. African American political ideas, methods for social and political change in the United States, by the end of the twentieth century, would be important to similar movements of oppressed populations across the global system, impacting and informing anti-colonial movements throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but also significantly impacting political movements that would bring about an end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe. And, the interaction between domestic civil rights\freedom movements and international liberation and rights movements would be symbiotic and reciprocal.
World War I and its aftermath led to the destruction of the European balance of power system and the emergence of a new international order. Throughout the world, national minorities demanded rights such as language autonomy, independence, and self-determination. US President, Woodrow Wilson, laid the foundation and framework for the creation of sovereign and self-determining minority populations, primarily in Europe in his 14-point program which is also the conceptual progenitor of what would become the League of Nations. Wilson was a committed racial segregationist supporter of Jim Crow who had effectively re-segregated federal civil servants by race. Given his attitudes about race and African Americans, in particular, his concept of self-determination did not envision and extend to non-European\non-white populations. However, the tenacious and persistent quest for African American freedom was not deterred and was expanded to include the decolonization of the continent of Africa and the liberation of all peoples of African descendant and nonwhites globally.
As the global military powers met in Versailles, France to craft an agreement to restructure and divide territorial control of territories lost by Germany and to extend sovereign rights and territories to liberated European nationalities, African American leaders also developed proposals for and a presence at the meeting to represent the interests of African descendant and continental populations. W.E.B. DuBois, Madam C.J. Walker, William Monroe Trotter, Ida Wells Barnett, A. Phillip Randolph, delegates representing the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association defied Woodrow Wilson’s efforts. Wilson did not want nor supported the presence of African Americans at the talks and resorted to the tactic used by US governmental officials during the internationalization of the Abolitionist movement, to deny passports to African Americans wishing to travel to France. The Great Powers of World War I effectively coalesced and aligned themselves to the preservation of the value of a dominant White racial global order. As white racial nationalism consolidated at the international level, the avenues for the mobilization of African American pro-human rights and civil rights allies in Europe, especially, diminished. Jim Crow remained the reality and law of the land at home. However, the door opened for African American support for anti-colonial movements throughout Asia and Africa.
The impact of the idea of racial justice and equality at the international level, fostered in part by the international activism of African Americans, became evident in the post-World War I era. The issue of race equality weakened the Japanese support of the League of Nations because the Western powers rejected an article in the Charter affirming the principle of racial equality. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was the second issue involving race that began the precipitous collapse to the League of Nations experiment. The invasion ignited African American support for the Ethiopian cause and the beginnings of a broad coalition against Italian fascism and European fascism in the long-run. The convergence of African American resistance to racial repression, support for decolonization, and Ethiopian resistance to fascist imperialism were precursors to the US governments formal involvement in WWII to resist the expansion of fascism throughout most of Europe. In other words, African American outcries against the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia combined with the decades-long struggle against domestic racism and Jim Crow, were forms of anti-fascist resistance before fascism formally became a recognized threat to the global stability for many Americans.
The significant presence and contribution of African American troops in the two world wars and their subsequent permanent postings in Europe began another era of domestic political and cultural transformation, regarding issues of race and national identity. American domestic racial politics reinforced similar European racial politics, that ironically WWII opposed—the creation of a eugenically pure and racially dominant social order among whites—the ideological pillar German Nazism. The presence of African American troops in Europe during this period of stateside civil rights mobilization impacted the social dynamics in Europe where African American troops were stationed. The seeds of consciousness-raising among Europeans on issues of racial civil rights and the African American political perspective were planted and today we continue to see the harvest. African Americans in Europe were catalysts for a degree of domestic social change that primed some constituencies in post-war Europe to align with racial and minority rights movements to build international regimes and institutions that would foster the values of racial and social justice within the context of liberal democracies with market economies.
On the other hand, Paul Robeson and other African Americans on the radical political left welcomed the idealism of the Soviet Union’s rhetorical commitment to ideals of human rights and equality and opposition to the inequalities and proven emptiness of the promises of equality in western democratic-capitalist economies and systems of government. The emergence of African American sympathies for the Soviet Union was a bellwether for the role that race would play in the efforts of the United States to lead the construction of the post-WWII global order and the Cold War. African American intellectuals were lured by the Soviet alternative to the western market and governmental models beginning in the nineteen-teens with victory the Bolsheviks in 1917.
At the end of World War II, unlike the creation of the League of Nations, the creation of the United Nations responded to the inevitability of decolonization. African American leader, Dr. Ralph Bunche, was instrumental in creating the United Nations’ Trusteeship program designed to handle the transition of European colonies from possessions to independent sovereignties. As before, with Japan, the largest Asian power in the midst, the United Nations’ conferees did not affirm a Chinese government proposal to include a racial and national equality clause in 1944 UN preamble and efforts for the organization’s founders to formally commit to the protection of national minority rights and interests. (Minority rights were instead enveloped in a broader concept of human rights, which for supporters of the former, was not specific enough to address specific populations.)[12] Ironically, the lack of political consensus among the UN founding governments indicated that the issue of internal minority group inequality—racial and\or ethnic or religious—was not solely endemic to the United States. Because of this, the impact that the African American quest for rights and inclusion in the leading nation-state in the world, would eventually impact the status of those groups as well—eventually.
African American leaders, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Dubois (NAACP), Walter White (NAACP) were present in St. Francisco in 1945 as observers. The NAACP was instrumental in organizing efforts to demand that the UN Charter protect the rights and interests of minority populations and embraced the organization as an instrument for the promotion of minority rights with the power and agency to moderate the abuse of minority populations. In 1948, as the chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force in creating the 1948 African American leaders, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Dubois (NAACP), Walter White (NAACP) were present in St. Francisco in 1945 as observers of liberties which will always be her legacy: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[13] (Eventually, by the end of the twentieth century, the United Nations would endorse the concept of specific minority rights.)
African Americans also attempted to use the United Nations as an intergovernmental mechanism to challenge US racial oppression at the international level through petitions and appeals. These efforts continued until recently in the twenty-first century when the parents of the teenage victim of police brutality that sparked the Ferguson protests and Black Lives Matter movement, appealed to the United Nations Commission of Human Rights to investigate over-policing and brutality of African American communities in 2014.[14]
Social and cultural change occurred on multiple levels during and after World War Two as the result of US dominance and victory. The end of World War Two ushered in the era of Pax-Americana. Short shrift should not be given to the fundamental societal changes at home because of a significant contribution of African Americans in the armed forces as well as the mobilization of African American cultural and artistic forms, such as Jazz. During and after the war, the US State Department deployed African Americans, especially artists in a formal mission of “Jazz diplomacy” to negate the real ironies in US leadership in reconstructing the global political and economic order in which the values of social equality and democracy were promoted abroad while at the same time grappling with racial injustice and inequality at home.
As Mary L. Dudziak notes, “U.S government officials realized that their ability to sell democracy to the Third World was seriously hampered by continuing racial injustice at home…. Despite the implementation of policies of domestic containment, for the Truman Administration, to tackle the issue of race discrimination and segregation forcedly became a Cold War imperative. In 1946, very significantly, Secretary of State Dean Acheson brought attention to the fact that the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States, it would have an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. In response, the Eisenhower administration sponsored America’s leading jazz musicians’ tour abroad as part of its cultural foreign policy agenda. These initiatives helped the United States government in its global propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, who widely reported and successfully exploited the racial tension and violence that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movements in the United States – after Brown v. Board of Education and the Little Rock Nine, especially – an example of blatant hypocrisy coming from the nation claiming to lead the free world. Moreover, the so-called jazz ambassadors had another function: they contradicted the assertions coming from communist propaganda that Americans were “cultural barbarians” and that materialistic capitalism could only produce commodities rather than highbrow culture.”[15]
In early the early 1950s, the decade of the new civil rights coalition and mobilization, the U.S. State Department was increasingly concerned that domestic racial relations could have a negative impact “on the dozens of countries on the verge of independence from Western colonial powers;” new nations, most of them with a non-Caucasian population, viewing racism in the United States as a strong reason to ally with the Soviet Union rather than the West.[16] From this perspective, a crucial international event was organized, the Asian-African Conference (also known as the Bandung Conference), a meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent, which took place on April 18–24, 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. Tito, Nasser, Sukarno, Zhou Enlai, and Nehru were the leaders who laid out the conference’s major goals to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by either the United States or the Soviet Union, or any other imperialistic nations. The conference was an important step toward the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. The United States, through its Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, shunned the conference and were not officially represented.[17] Four high profile African Americans, however, attended the conference as observers; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Edith Sampson, Ethel Payne, Carl T. Rowen, and Richard Wright.
COLD WAR TO THE POST-COLD WAR 21ST CENTURY
America’s race relations were an open wound easily exploited by the Soviet Union and other powers during the Cold War years—1945 to 1991. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet, and later Chinese, ideological rhetoric of racial and societal equality proved attractive to many African American intellectuals because of the convincing propaganda that their systems would be more effective at solving class and therefore racial caste inequality. In hindsight, it is clear that Cold War super-power competition for allies in the colonial world undergoing decolonization, and the overall murkiness created by the bi-polarization of the international system obscured the true failure of both governments (China and the Soviet Union) to achieve their professed ideals of ethnonational and racial equality, even within their own ‘revolutionary’ systems.
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower were the first Cold War presidents confronted the link between US race relations and US credibility abroad and identified the ideological lure of the political left among within the ranks of the African American civil rights, labor, cultural and intelligentsia leadership. The heuristic approach of confronting subjugation and repression at home embraced the linkage between foreign and domestic policy among those in the civil rights leadership. It is during the period of the Cold War that African American influence on the creation of the global order developed through multiple levels of participation and agency reflecting the diversity of approaches and ideas among African Americans about the how best to reform, revolutionize, accommodate or challenge the system of racial subjugation both domestically and internationally.
As mentioned earlier in the discussion, African American involvement in American foreign policy ranged from roles of implementors, managers, critiques, lobbyists, opinion leaders, and citizen diplomats. The intersectionality of international systems of racial repression and the domestic American system of racial inequality necessitated the multi-faceted and pronged approach to the promotion of not only African American freedom and rights but global freedoms and rights. Just as the abolitionists understood the agency of created transnational ties that would lead to an external consensus against slavery, the same remained true throughout the twentieth century.
A small cadre of African Americans in the State Department and ‘society’ of African American diplomatic and internationalist professionals developed during this period. Edith Sampson, an African American woman attorney, was appointed by President Truman and became the first African American to represent the United Nations at the UN.[18] She was followed by numerous others up to the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first century appointments of Andrew Young, Donald McHenry, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Susan Rice. Dr. Ralph Bunche, although not officially a representative of the US government, acted in an official capacity to assist in the development and construction of the United Nations system. He was the architect of the UN Trusteeship program that anticipated the unraveling of European colonial empires and the creation and emergence of newly independent nation-states, primarily throughout Africa and Asia. Bunche later to complete the diplomatic process that created the first post-war treaty to partition the British controlled region of Palestine, for which he received a Nobel Peace Prize.
Cold war politics and domestic US civil rights politics developed interdependently and proved to be symbiotic beyond expectations. Unlike any previous era, African American leaders were able to effectively make use of international condemnation and criticism of US support for democracy and decolonization abroad while maintaining its system of racial segregation and racial oppression which came from both its European Allies and its competitor, the Soviet Union. The US exportation of the ideals of freedom and liberty fought for during the war, did not hold up to the realities of US domestic politics during the Cold War. US government support for Jim Crow and other policies underpinning segregation were a glaring defect in its efforts to lead in the United Nations and the other international institutions and regimes it effectively constructed after WWII.
Ironically, Dubois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’ first presented in his 1903 publication The Souls of Black Folks was manifested in US foreign policy throughout the Cold War. “On the one hand, some American leaders pushed for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s out of a desire to promote a positive image of America abroad, particularly in the contest for support in developing and decolonized countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—principal proxy arenas for the Cold War… U.S. officials often sought “to try to manage and control the efforts of racial reformers at home and abroad. . . . They hoped effectively to contain racial polarization and build the largest possible multiracial, anti-Communist coalition under American leadership.” [19]
This ‘duality of consciousness’ in foreign policy catapulted African Americans into the forefront of the international movement for liberation, civil rights, political equality, racial justice, and self-determination. The American civil rights movement became the model for racial and ethnic struggles against oppression. African American social institutions and civil rights organizations developed an international role and presence. African American representatives in Congress became vocal about foreign policy issues that intertwined with domestic social and racial justice issues. Race became a factor in the analysis and critique of US foreign policy, especially regarding US policy towards the decolonization of Africa. Global racism and racial supremacy were not newly discovered, it was simply that the Cold War international environment, the rise of Soviet and to some degree Chinese specters of global domination, and the rise of Japan created an environment much more favorable to arguments in favor of domestic racial reforms, inclusion and political change.
Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs became the earliest congressional insiders to impact foreign policy formulation and perspectives towards Africa. It was Powell’s influence that opened the door for African American appointments to the United Nations in the 1950s and by the Johnson administration, Patricia Roberts Harris was appointed the first African American Woman Ambassador (Luxembourg). Charles Diggs became the first African American sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1959.
US intervention in the Vietnamese conflict was a critical turn in the intersection between domestic civil rights revolution and foreign policy. The progressive public policy successes of the African American freedom movement and the Johnson administration, along with the crucial role of Adam Powell in Congress, passed War on Poverty legislation that initiated an institutional and economic dimension of the ‘second reconstruction’ of American socio-economic and political order that began with the 1954 Brown decision which ended the legal support for Jim Crow segregation. Sustained and successful progress, however, was brought to a steady halt as the economic priorities of the national budget shifted away from the implementation of domestic social justice policies to the prosecution of the expanding war effort in Vietnam.
African American majority urban communities were crushed by the draft of young black males and the beginnings of the deindustrialization process. The tide of African American rural to urban migration was met with shrinking financial and development assistance to cities. Also, the era marked the beginnings of the consolidation African American electoral power but on the other hand that power was viciously curtailed by the desiccation of economic resources available to new leadership through because of the war, the systematic disinvestment of capital, employment opportunities and the automation of jobs occurring simultaneously.
Dr. King was the first national leader in the consciousness of the American political mainstream to speak publicly against US involvement in Vietnam and to call for immediate withdrawal in his historic groundbreaking speech on April 4, 1967, delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City. The speech, delivered one year to the date of his assassination in 1968, presented a critical analysis of the damage the war to racial and social progress domestically and America’s moral authority internationally. It was the culmination of his two-year struggle with the political pragmatism of his SCLC colleagues who warned him against speaking out against the war for fear he would alienate the Johnson administration and other allies.[20] As a political outsider, Dr. King became the international face of the American social and civil rights justice and freedom struggle and the second African American given the honor of the internationally esteemed Nobel Peace Prize. It was only after courage evoked criticism not only from President Johnson, political insiders and some members of the African American social elite as well as civil rights activist outsiders, that the anti-war movement began to overtake the civil rights movement in the public arena.
Although Dr. King became the first nationally accepted African American leader to speak out against the war, it was Malcolm X, the political outsiders who years before, carried the mantle of vocal criticism against the war. Malcolm X viewed the war as being part of the global struggle against white supremacy and imperialism in the same vein as similar struggle throughout the world. “We are against what the US is doing wrong in other parts of the world as well as here…What she’s doing in South Vietnam is criminal… It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negroes simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or a purely American problem. Rather we are today seeing a global rebellion of oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”[21] Student activists enrolled in historically Black institutions of higher education joined the national trend in protests the war across the country and at mainstream predominantly white universities and colleges, in addition to increasing numbers of African American celebrities, academics, militants, athletes, and other high public profile figures. By the 1970s, African Americans in Congress, “the insiders,” began to outwardly question and challenge the war. Of note is the fact that the lone African American serving in the Senate, Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA), opposed the Nixon administration’s expansion of the war to Cambodia. The African Americans in Congress, from the 91st to the 93rd Congress (1969-1975), all eventually opposed the expansion of the war and the drawdown of US troops to end the war.
The end of the Vietnam era left African American communities, ravaged and in shambles. Unlike the dynamics of WWII igniting the most successful era in civil rights expansion, the end of Vietnam had a different effect on the national mood, the economy, and politics. While the ranks of an African American middle class seemingly advanced, the creation of the African American lower-class became seemingly intractable. Jobs in urban areas for those with non-technically advanced skills and education disappeared, economic contraction and deindustrialization stalled African American socio-economic advancement as aforementioned. America’s global leadership suffered from the unpopularity of the war which grew internationally. The travesty of US involvement in Vietnam and its impact on domestic and international race relations was a segue to the cause of justice and defeat of US support for South African apartheid. This was primarily due to the shift in post-Vietnam US military strategy from direct intervention in the “Third World” to indirect intervention through arms sales and other material support for pro-US\anti-Soviet actors. The consequence was the rapid escalation and militarization of the ongoing conflicts in southern Africa and the military interventionism of South African Apartheid military forces to suppress the liberation struggles in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique encouraged and supported by the US.
US support for the South African apartheid regime dated back to the 1948 victory of the Nationalist party that formally institutionalized and constructed its equivalent of Jim Crow and internal racial colonization. African Americans and Black South African freedom fighters consolidated and mobilized a ‘Black internationalist’ momentum and transnational connections that did not acquire political agency on an international scale until after Vietnam. The repression of anti-apartheid resistance in the 1950s and 1960s and the imprisonment of key Black leaders—Mandela and Luthuli—paralleled the events of the era of struggle in the US. The fight against global racism turned to southern Africa.
The Cold War continued to limit the context in which US opposition to the Apartheid regime functioned. US support for the Apartheid regime added another layer of tarnish on the image of the US and its ideals of liberal democracy much in the same way that US involvement and conduct of the war in Vietnam did. African American activists joined and, in many instances, led the international fight against South Africa but most importantly, “African Americans … worked to influence U.S. foreign policy ‘from the inside’ and in the process established connections with black South Africans in ways that continued to emphasize their shared experiences of race discrimination”[22] Legacy African American organizations such as the NAACP, NCNW (National Council of Negro Women) and institutional African American churches began early efforts to influence policy. Rev. Leon Sullivan used his position on the board of General Motors to develop and apply the Sullivan Principles to apply economic pressure and organize international corporate support of a code of conduct that would eventually be adopted by the United Nations in 1999 to increase transnational and international corporate participation in human rights and social justice advancements at the international level.[23]
TransAfrica, formally the Black Forum on Foreign Affairs founded 1975, became the premier African American foreign policy research and lobbying organization. The organization under the leadership of Randall Robinson, launched legislative initiatives, media campaigns, organized activists and consolidated ties with the international anti-Apartheid community. Most notably, the organization founded the Free South Africa movement that successfully moved anti-apartheid to the mainstream of US politics and legislative foreign policy agenda. Through its mobilization of grassroots activism, protests, demonstrations, and other strategies, the organization exposed the clandestine ties between the Reagan administration and some members of Congress to the South African Nationalist Party organization and regime. It in conjunction with the Congressional Black Caucus formulated the Comprehensive Apartheid Act of 1986 (originally introduced in 1972 during the throes of US withdrawal from Vietnam). The Act was vetoed by Reagan but overridden by Congress within less than seven days.[24]
The combined victories of the domestic civil rights movement and the formal opposition of the US government to Apartheid laid the foundation for an emergent international order embracing the ideals and values of racial justice and national diversity. African Americans were at the forefront of the construction of the post-WWII liberal international order, as well as the post-Vietnam, post-colonial, international human rights order.
POST-COLD WAR TO THE PRESENT: THE REVERSAL OF AN ERA OBAMA TO TRUMP?
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War in the early the 1990s opened the door for the complete collapse of the Apartheid regime. South Africa was “free at last”. It was a victory for African American foreign policy interests, as well. The end of the Cold War and Apartheid also opened the door for several historic ascendancies of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice to the high ranks of the ‘inner circle’ if the foreign policy bureaucracy, serving as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Barack Obama’s election to the presidency for two terms in the first half of the new century (21st), was the ultimate achievement in terms of foreign policy power. As the first person American of African descent, elected to the Office of the Presidency, bestowed him the roles of Commander in Chief, Chief Diplomat, and principle ‘architect’ of American foreign policy. It was also during this period of transition that the diplomatic corps and the leadership ranks of the military developed a significant number of seasoned and experienced African American men and women professionals. African Americans in the foreign policy bureaucracy and government reached higher levels than previous historical eras.
While professional advancement and achievements of these three individuals symbolized some level of racial advancement for African Americans as a group, the impact of their roles and association with controversial foreign policies of the administrations they served marked an ironic shift in the direction of African American influence. For centuries, African American leaders, insiders, and dissenters sought to be the conscience of the nation, at home and internationally, focusing on the ideals and visions of democracy, inclusion, social and economic justice, civil rights and liberties, and racial\ethnic equality. African American voices were consistently supportive of progressive values.
The election of Barack Obama to the Office of the Presidency of the United States had unparalleled historical significance that verified the potency and agency of the liberal democratic ideal for the global system. In an insightful article published in the, asked, “Is the election of Barack Obama the end of Black Politics?” [24] The major question for the next part of this two-part essay will be what impact did the election of President Obama have on the prospective role and impact of African American internationalism and agency on the 21st century? What is the empirical evidence of African American agency in the achievement or semblance of social justice at the international level? What are the cogent conclusions and prospects for the twenty-first century? With these questions in mind, Part two of this discussion will continue in a future edition of 1619: Journal of African American Studies.
Walton Brown Foster, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the African Studies and Latin American Studies programs, Coordinator of the African American Studies Program, and Editor in Chief of 1619: JAAS at CCSU.
NOTES
[1] Brian A. Langille. Re-reading the Preamble to the 1919 ILO Constitution in Light of Recent Data on FDI and Worker Rights, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Volume 42, Number 1.
[2] https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/ifsd/SocialJustice.pdf ST/ESA/305" (PDF). New York: United Nations. 2006. Archived (PDF) from the original on 29 August 2017. Langille, op cit.
[3] Hanes Walton. African American Politics and the Quest for Universal Freedom, New York, NY: Routledge, 2017, pg. 373.
[4] See, for example, David G. Haglund, Ethnic Diasporas and US Foreign Policy, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000, and DeConde, Alexander. Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992
[5] Charles Henry, Rise and Fall of Black Influence on Foreign Policy, found in Michael L. Clemmons, African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives, Boston, Mass: Northeastern Univ. Press, 2000, pg. 3-4, eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 7/2/2019 11:38 AM.
[6] “Between 1859 and 1861 Sarah Parker Remond delivered 45 lectures in seventeen cities and towns in England, three in Scotland, and four in Ireland, all to considerable acclaim and extensive press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. When visa problems threatened her ability to travel to the continent, the dispute was played out in the press. A southern bureaucrat at the American legation refused her the document because she was not a United States citizen. Following considerable publicity, Secretary of State Lewis Cass intervened and granted her the visa and “in case of need… all lawful aid and protection.” See Black Activists Archive, retrieved at https://libraries.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital
[7] See George M. Fredrickson. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. 1971; Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1781–1863, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975; Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816–1865, New York: Columbia University Press. (1961)
[8] Bassett was first African American male to graduate from New Britain Normal School, now Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut.
[9] African Americans are among the first populations in modern history to experience organized and government sanctioned acts of terrorism.
[10] See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, eBook. Part One: Chapter Three, found at https://books.google.com/books?
[11] ibid.
[12] Promoting and Protecting Minority Rights A Guide for Advocates, United Nations Publication, 2012, found at https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/HR-PUB-12-07_en.pdf.
[14] Josh Levs Michael Brown's parents address U.N.: 'We need the world to know' retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/11/us/ferguson-brown-parents-u-n-/index.html.
[15] Pierangelo Castagneto "Ambassador Dizzy: Jazz Diplomacy in the Cold War Era" Volume X, Special Issue on Jazz found at http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10jazz/castagneto. Mary L Dudziak. Cold War Civil Rights’: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000, p. 62-63. See also Dudziak, Mary L. 1988, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative.” Stanford Law Review, 41,1: 61-120, cited in Castegneto, op cit.
[16] Ibid. See also Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 107-108.
[17] See Jason Parker “Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era.” Diplomatic History 30, 5: 867-892 and Penny Von Eschen. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 167-180.
[18] Sampson would later be appointed to the UN and become the first African American to represent the US in the organization. Found at https://www.aaihs.org/the-illusion-of-afro-asian-solidarity-situating-the-1955-bandung-conference/ and https://www.blackpast.org/special-features/african-american-u-s-ambassadors-1869/.
[19] Postwar Foreign Policy and African American Civil Rights. Found at https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Keeping-the-Faith/Postwar-Foreign-Policy-Civil-Rights/, retrieved July 14, 2019.
[20] http://www.amistadresource.org/civil_rights_era/black_opposition_to_vietnam.html.
[21] Ken Morgan, “20th Anniversary of Vietnam War’s End.” Chicago Defender, May 23, 1995, p. 12. Found at http://aavw.org/protest/malcolmx_malcolmx_abstract02.html. See also, http://aavw.org/protest/homepage_malcolmx_malcolmx.html.
[22] Nicholas Grant, Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945-1960. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. 2017, pg. 13.
[23] See the Global Sullivan Principles, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library found at http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/links/sullivanprinciples.html.
[24] It was the first time in the twentieth century that a Presidential veto of foreign policy legislation was overridden.
[25] Matt Bai, Post-Race-Is the election of Barack Obama the end of Black Politics? New York Times, August 6, 2008, retrieved online at https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10politics-t.html.
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