This study ends in 1974 with the issues of colonialism and African-American civil rights oddly unsettled, with race once again resurgent as a marker of both individual and national fates in the United States and abroad. Sovereignty and freedom were more problematic than expected. While statism retained its allure, the succeeding era was one in which transnational decisions that bypassed foreign offices reduced the power of central governments. A slackening of state control, increasingly evident after the collapse of Soviet communism, deeply marked international society and culture, and many kinds of migration (tourists, labor, refugees, technology, capital, information, images, and religious values). Contemporaries have been highly conscious of these transitions and actively attempt to mediate them in their own interests.

When black and white educators, officials, corporate leaders, and foundation representatives met in the mid-1950s to decide what to do about the growing clamor over integration and decolonization, they had already anticipated to some degree the scope of the impending changes that would overtake the world. They chose to make allies of the new insurgents. A Western victory in the cold war required the recruitment of emerging states and their most important citizens: new classes and politicized youth who would share elite values. While the goal of independence for the global South would be upheld, broader critiques of the international behavior of Western powers were disallowed or deemed subversive of world order. The U.S. policy establishment sought, at best, the invisibility of race and, at least, its neutrality. Civil rights, perceived as a domestic issue for Americans, was dissociated from antiimperialism. The Left, in contrast, strove to join African-American freedom struggles to worldwide radical movements and restore the affinities that they had often had in the past. Black nationalists, who could range widely on the Right to Left spectrum, did not accept cold war liberalism and did not have to rediscover a past association with Africa. Rapid decolonization in the early 1960s, the Congo crisis, and the Algerian war coincided with the domestic mass mobilizations of the civil rights movement and provided opportunities for activists to link issues of racial justice to overseas events while new states faced rival superpowers’ determination to extend their conflicts across the globe.

Proponents of more educational opportunity for minority youth saw schooling as the avenue to social peace. But the liberal response to youth unrest was not the only one. The FBI’s approach was governed by its police orientation and a broadly punitive attitude that continues to suffuse U.S. society. The Bureau helped to create and disseminate a popular view of outlaw culture in which young thugs engaged in violence for individual rather than collective ends. There was little room to consider political motivations and collective action outside the framework of criminal conspiracy. Revolutionists in this formulation were far from stolid Stalinist bureaucrats. Instead they acted, like other malefactors, more from narcissistic impulses than from moral conviction.

The thin line that had always separated revolutionaries from outlaws aided the FBI’s work. A tension existed between the potential for politicizing delinquents and their centrifugal tendencies toward solipsism and vice. Radicals like Max Stanford believed that youth gangs had revolutionary promise and published this opinion in the Liberator in January 1965. The article hit the press around the same time that Malcolm X’s autobiography appeared. The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Stanford’s essay both focused on the salvation of the so-called lumpenproletariat, the term Karl Marx had applied to jobless workers at the lowest economic levels, criminals, and the rootless. Malcolm X claimed that the Nation of Islam had redeemed him from lumpen status. The Black Panther Party, formed in Oakland, California, began to proselytize street organizations. Black Panther Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, a member of the five-thousand-strong Los Angeles Slausons, brought a branch of it into the party in 1967. Like Malcolm earlier, Carter converted to Islam while jailed and met Eldridge Cleaver when both were at Soledad Prison.

If many Capahosic participants had ties to an older, traditional GOP and retained a quid pro quo approach to politics, more internationally minded Republicans began to rival Democrats in looking outward at a global environment in transition. They looked for counsel to such figures as Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, for whom Urban League director Lester Granger wrote a policy paper during the Eisenhower years. Kissinger had directed a seminar focused on the status of the United States in the world. Granger’s contribution, “The Racial Factor in International Relations,” advocated decolonization and racial reform. Granger used conventional cold war arguments to suggest approaches for improving the United States’ image. He called for a coherent State Department program for foreign visitors of color and recommended removing materials in United States Information Agency (USIA) libraries that denigrated African Americans. Granger placed considerable emphasis on propaganda work, including “good will missions,” foreign aid, and the integration of the Foreign Service.

In line with the Urban League’s focus on placing minority candidates in jobs, his recommendations leaned heavily on the appointment of “American Negroes of high qualification” for overseas posts. He expressed skepticism, however, about sending popular black entertainers on foreign tours. Granger “seriously questioned,” for instance, whether having jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong play before a “shouting, swaying, rocking and rolling Gold Coast audience,” advanced the best interests of the United States. Instead of Satchmo’s sweaty vulgarity, the punctilious Granger believed, “skillful, well-trained and highly intelligent” blacks would be far more appropriate representatives. The Urban League director’s disdain for such authentic expressions of African-American culture as jazz was not rare at the time.

In late summer 1959 two aging generals and trusted staff members met for a series of candid conversations at a medieval fortress. The generals were also presidents, and the venue, the Château de Rambouillet, was the official summer home of French heads of state. Charles De Gaulle enjoyed receiving his foreign counterparts at the chateau, whose interior, resplendent with gilt and tapestries, and exterior, lush with formal gardens, reflected the grandeur of France. “Our guests,” he noted, “were made to feel the nobility behind the geniality, the permanence behind the vicissitudes, of the nation which was their host.”

De Gaulle’s guest this time was the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who on arriving in Paris received a hero’s welcome as the liberator of wartime Europe. While the shared experience of World War II united the two men, their talks were not limited to the past. The major powers had accepted the inevitability of decolonization by the end of the decade, but not without hand wringing. Eisenhower and De Gaulle bemoaned colonial peoples’ lack of preparation for independence. As an aide recalled the discussion, Ike declared that “often we were asked for tractors when the level of the economy required the ability to handle a plow and an ox. Many of these peoples were attempting to make the leap from savagery to the degree of civilization of a country like France in perhaps ten years, without realizing that it took thousands of years to develop the civilization which we know.” De Gaulle concurred. In spite of disagreement between the two as to how Western Europe might best be defended, they agreed that it was now vital that the West act in concert in handling the developing countries. De Gaulle ultimately consented to a French withdrawal from Algeria and Eisenhower was the first American to be so informed. Ike himself had little prior knowledge of Africa, and awkward mistakes compromised his administration’s efforts to conduct normal relations with the new states.

In the late autumn of 1946, José Adriano Trujillo, a World War II veteran and an adopted son of the Dominican Republic’s strong-arm leader, set out on a road trip from New York with a Jamaican friend. With Miami as their destination, the two reached Bunnell, Florida, around midnight and stopped for food at the Green Tile Café. Denied service on color grounds, Trujillo protested loudly in English and Spanish and, according to later reports, went to his car to retrieve a pistol. The proprietor called the police and the arriving sheriff’s deputy, after delivering a warning, shot and killed Trujillo.

This incident did not travel far in the media, and the State Department’s representative in Miami did not see fit to return from vacation to investigate it. José Adriano had clashed with the postwar South’s understanding of status and entitlement, one very different from his own. Yet the tragedy did not alter Generalissimo Trujillo’s clientelistic relationship with the United States or lessen his grip on the Dominican population. Years later, race continued to be a matter that Dominicans and Americans would sidestep in regard to one another, and as always, “law and order” prevailed over social justice in the rank order of U.S. priorities as far as Latin Americans were concerned.

Pope John XXIII, the fourth of thirteen children born to a family of tenant farmers in rural Italy, on May 15, 1961, issued an encyclical titled Mater et Magistra. Here the pontiff defined the Roman Catholic Church’s position on “Christianity and social progress.” The pastoral benevolence in the document’s tone might seem paternalistic to the contemporary secularist, but the encyclical constituted a critical departure from the church’s decades-long inertia on social and political issues. The Vatican was now responding to the tenor of the times. “There is a … keener interest in world affairs shown by people of average education,” the pope observed. “We are witnessing the break-away from colonialism and the attainment of political independence by the peoples of Asia and Africa.” Changing times required a reaffirmation of Christian values. “The solidarity which binds all men together as members of a common family makes it impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference upon the hunger, misery and poverty of other nations whose citizens are unable to enjoy even elementary human rights,” Mater et Magistra noted. “Glaring economic and social imbalances” undermine global security.

Pope John XXIII criticized self-interested forms of foreign assistance designed to create dependency and enhance wealthy states’ pursuit of “their own plans for world domination.” Exploitative aid practices “would in fact be introducing a new form of colonialism – cleverly disguised, no doubt, but actually reflecting that older, outdated type from which many nations have recently emerged.” They would “have harmful impact on international relations, and constitute a menace to world peace.” For the Vatican, the “whole raison d’être” of the state was “the realization of the common good in the temporal order.” It identified this goal with a free market and embraced capitalism but rejected materialism of the socialist kind.

Shortly before Christmas in 1963, a group of SNCC volunteers arrived at a downtown Atlanta hotel to meet a foreign visitor. The guest was Oginga Odinga, the Kenyan minister for home affairs and a leading figure in the country’s struggle for national independence. The hotel, the Peachtree Manor, was one of only a few desegregated hostelries in the city. Odinga was much admired for his forthrightness among SNCC workers. He had criticized the United States for its failures on the racial front and had defended Kenya’s decision to seek amicable relations with the Eastern bloc as well as with Western states. Georgia’s only black state legislator arranged Odinga’s State Department–initiated visit.

The SNCC workers entertained Odinga and Joseph Murumbi, minister of state, with freedom songs. After the meeting, accompanied by Odinga, they adjourned to a restaurant near the hotel, where they were refused service. A spontaneous sit-in ensued. Once Odinga left, the Atlanta police swooped in and arrested the group, dragging some physically to jail, where they vowed to remain over the Christmas holiday. SNCC then sent telegrams to President Johnson and Soapy Williams, telling them that Atlanta should be removed from the list of venues for visiting African envoys.

Just as the Congo crisis cast a pall over earlier optimism about independent Africa, the Nigerian civil war heightened the pessimism in official circles. Only five years after the exhilaration of 1960, the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate took a dim view of the African states. Lagging growth “in most areas will be very slow; indeed, setbacks are probable in a number of countries,” the report noted. “There is a desperate shortage of virtually all kinds of technical and managerial skills; indeed, the basic institutions and staff for economic development are often inadequate or absent. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that most African countries will obtain external assistance or investment on anything approaching the scale required for sustained economic development.” Loy Henderson, retired but still prominent, regarded many African nations as “mini-states,” “so insignificant” that they hardly merited a consulate. It was cheaper, however, to name ambassadors to them and spare the cost to the departmental budget that appointing a regional ambassador, traveling frequently and required to entertain lavishly, would entail.

Fourteen months later, a State Department task force charged with reviewing Africa policy remained dismissive. It declared that Washington’s “primary concern with Africa has been, and will continue to be for some time, to prevent events in the continent from complicating a search, largely conducted elsewhere, for solutions to the problems of war and peace, or from interfering with our central strategic and political preoccupations in other regions.” The ethnic tensions then overtaking Nigeria would be of no great concern unless they had the potential to affect matters in areas of greater interest to policy makers.

In the mid-twentieth century most African Americans belonged to a church, often Baptist. Congregations ranged from storefronts to megachurches with eleven thousand members. Ministers might exert enormous sway over churchgoers, commanding resources in the millions of dollars, living handsomely, and influencing the black vote through their sought-after endorsements. Unsurprisingly, many clerics jealously guarded their perquisites. Baptist politics were tumultuous and could be violent. A photographer for Jet magazine sued after a burly preacher attacked him during the National Baptist Convention (NBC) meeting in Chicago in 1952. The photographer’s crime was having recorded men of the cloth “quarreling” on stage. Nearly ten years later, the dais remained a site of contestation as competing factions tried to crowd each other off the platform during the Baptist convention in Kansas City. Two men fell off the stage, with one sustaining a skull fracture and lapsing into a coma. As Taylor Branch relates it, “A staircase to the platform collapsed under the weight of the antagonists jammed on it, scattering and bruising dozens of people.” The Kansas City police arrived on the scene to break up skirmishes that had erupted among the expensively tailored pastors.

What would lead the purveyors of Jesus’s message of peace to public brawls? The Chicago Defender slyly intimated that votes for Ike were for sale in the Windy City in 1956. Clergy identified as having supported Eisenhower’s reelection were angered that their names were used but they had not been paid. Sums as large as $30,000 were allegedly on offer.

One day in autumn 1967, Dr. Donald Gatch, a white physician practicing in rural Beaufort County, South Carolina, smuggled a nine-year-old black girl into an operating theater. It was against the rules of his facility to perform surgery on indigent patients, so the operation, an appendectomy, was done surreptitiously. Once the child was on the table, the surgical team discovered that she had rickets. When they opened her abdomen, they found her riddled with worms. “These colored children don’t have much to eat,” a colleague observed, and when they did receive some nourishment, worms got to it first. Gatch tried but failed to secure funds from the local health department to remedy the widespread sickness and malnutrition. He had no better luck with foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation, whose hookworm program during the 1940s had been highly successful, now only addressed nutrition overseas. The National Institutes of Health worked only through universities.

The Nebraska-born Gatch faced reprisal from area whites for embarrassing the state when the real issues, they thought, were the dirtiness and improvidence of blacks. Other local physicians publicly denied his claims, and white patients deserted his uncharacteristically integrated waiting room. Gatch was brought up on drug abuse charges and faced the loss of his license. Mississippi representative Jamie Whitten, chair of the House Agriculture Appropriations Committee, asked the FBI to investigate him. South Carolina’s governor, fearing the impact of the doctor’s revelations on investment and tourism, condemned him. Gatch eventually left the state.

In September 1970, Howard Fuller (Owusu Sadauki) arrived in Dar es Salaam as a representative of both the southern-based Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) and Malcolm X University, which he had founded in Greensboro, North Carolina. Malcolm X University emphasized science and engineering, fields often weak at conventional black colleges and universities and much in demand in developing countries. SOBU had worked on labor and housing issues in North Carolina, earning local respect. It developed a Pan-African Medical Program that collected and donated equipment and supplies to African liberation organizations. SOBU appointed a liaison officer to connect it with the revolutionary Southwest African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and with African student unions. The group established “fraternal relations” with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and some Iranian student associations. Fuller met with foreign revolutionists abroad and published an account of his travels in the African World, a SOBU newsletter that included news of student activism in United States and overseas reports provided by correspondents in Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean. In line with the African socialist agenda espoused by Nyerere, SOBU embraced a plan to have black students work as agricultural laborers in the U.S. South in preparation for serving rural African societies. This Pan African Community Work program, in the words of historian Fanon Che Wilkins, would help college students complete the “awesome responsibility of committing class suicide.”