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Home > Features > Incorporating African American History into the U.S. History Survey Course, Part II
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Incorporating African American History into the U.S. History Survey Course, Part II
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by Kevin Gaines
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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| | Race and Global Politics in the Post-World War II Period
Since World War II, African Americans in literature and the arts were inspired and energized by the accelerating movements for African American freedom and African liberation. As the African American struggle for equality became synonymous with the nation's agenda, black writers and artists enjoyed new opportunities in the form of wider audiences and greater freedom to portray the dignity and diversity of black life. At the same time, the Cold War imperatives that increasingly rendered the overt racism of Jim Crow obsolete also placed restrictions on black literary and artistic expression. Both black intellectuals and artists and U.S. authorities sought to benefit as American global power projected the optimism, vitality, and democratic significance of African American culture worldwide.
World War II represented the culmination of ongoing sociopolitical processes that fueled a spirit of optimism for black peoples. The war sparked a resurgence in the urban migration of African Americans fleeing the poverty and brutality of the South. Almost three million African Americans migrated north to urban defense jobs, helping to make Detroit, Chicago, and other cities vital wellsprings of black literary, artistic, and musical talent. Mass experiences of military service and labor migrations established pathways for the continuing sojourns of writers and artists to Europe. In the postwar period, African American writers would flock to Paris, following the celebrated example of Richard Wright.
Wright shared the harrowing collective black experiences of migration and flight from exploitation and brutality and viewed his writing as a conduit for the democratic aspirations for freedom of black peoples worldwide. Wright's unprecedented critical and commercial success with Native Son (1940) shifted the landscape of American literature and established Wright as a controversial figure. Self-taught, Wright refined his craft under the aegis of the Communist party, which had influenced literary culture and black struggles during the Depression era. Wright would later break with the party to maintain his artistic independence. But even as an anticommunist, his blunt criticisms of American domestic and foreign policy from self-imposed exile in France earned Wright the enmity of the U.S. government.
The controversies that surrounded Wright suggest the vexed relationship of African American literary and cultural expression and political change. That struggle pitted outspoken black intellectuals such as Wright, Paul Robeson, and others against a liberal establishment hostile to independent black dissent. For Wright, Robeson, W. E. B. DuBois, and others, the transition of former African, Asian, and Middle Eastern colonies to national independence epitomized their hopes for human freedom and global democracy. These intellectuals were sharply critical of American foreign policy makers' opposition to anticolonial and nonaligned movements. During the 1950s, toward the conclusion of his novel The Outsider, Wright predicted the failure of both American capitalism and Soviet communism to secure the allegiance of the majority of dispossessed peoples in the Third World. Because these modern, secular ideological systems were not committed to the material improvement of the majority of the world's people, they would be swept away in a vengeful backlash of religious fundamentalisms. It seems that Wright was quite prescient on this point. While scholars have criticized the Afro-Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon for his overly optimistic readings of the national liberation struggle in Algeria, his work testifies to the enduring power of nationalism in shaping the political aspirations of those dispossessed masses he termed "the wretched of the earth."
During the 1950s, white liberal critics measured black literature against an aesthetic ideal of universalism, whose exclusionary impact remained invisible, except to African American and women writers. Its counterpart in academic discourse was a standard of objectivity that also reflected white male privilege. In the cultural industries of Hollywood, and to some extent popular music, commercial priorities presupposed a predominantly white audience. In many instances this ensured that black cultural expressions or subject matter would be either censored, expropriated (as in the proliferation of white cover versions of hit songs originated by blacks), or sentimentalized for white mass consumption. Richard Wright was offered the opportunity of a Hollywood film version of Native Son, on the condition that he agree to rewrite the novel's black antihero as a working-class white youth. This deference to the sensitivities of a white mass audience was seen in Hollywood's reliance on racial stereotypes. And the Jim Crow South was adamant in its opposition to more equitable depictions of blacks in film, and with the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s, in popular music.
Ironically, it was the Cold War that lent a new and unprecedented legitimacy to African American culture, especially jazz. The global popularity of jazz, which many African American musicians had contrasted with American audiences' neglect, led the U.S. State Department to sponsor overseas tours by such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dave Brubeck. There was a strategic element to these tours, which took these and other musicians to the nonaligned world of emergent Third World nations seeking an independent political course from their former colonial masters and the East-West power struggle. By sending successful and accomplished black jazz musicians or integrated jazz groups to these areas, the U.S. government hoped to send the message that it was making progress in improving race relations in America. But the tours also reflected U.S. interest in controlling commodities deemed essential to American national security, namely oil and uranium.
In 1963, Duke Ellington toured through India and the Middle East. His appearance in Iraq was a mixed success. His concert in Baghdad was broadcast on Iraqi state television and received euphoric reviews in the press. The next day, however, the presidential palace was attacked in an attempted coup by Baathist party loyalists. As bad as that was, all hell threatened to break loose when a photograph of Ellington and his European mistress appeared in the Turkish press. This was an image certain to draw the irate opposition of segregationists in Congress. But that controversy was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy, and Ellington's tour was cancelled. For the State Department, the jazz tours were a double-edged phenomenon, seeking to woo overseas audiences but at the potential risk of antagonizing antiblack segregationists back at home.
One more example from the State Department tours, the full story of which is told in the forthcoming book Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz, Race, and Empire During the Cold War by Penny Von Eschen: Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong, performed in the former Belgian Congo during the civil war that erupted not long after the Congo's independence in 1960. One of the songs he performed in Elizabethville was the utopian ballad "What a Wonderful World." Armstrong would later boast that his appearance halted the civil war, but in fact it did not halt the assassination soon afterward of the Congo's democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba's murder occurred with the complicity of the U.S. and Belgium. Lumumba's death sparked worldwide protests, including a violent demonstration by outraged African Americans in the gallery of the United Nations Security Council.
As the modern civil rights movement came to dominate the nation's and the world's headlines, popular demand propelled black writing into the mainstream largely on its own terms. For many writers, artists, musicians, and dancers, the emergence of new African states from colonial rule fueled a new black nationalist cultural identity that superceded color-blind tenets of universalism. As racial confrontations escalated, African American critiques of U.S. liberalism expressed disillusionment with the federal government's apparent complicity in the face of white violence in the South. In 1963, writers Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, along with entertainers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, had joined a group of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists in a stormy meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The black activists and artists infuriated Kennedy as they excoriated the federal government's passivity in the face of violent opposition to desegregation.
The former Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X pointedly questioned the motives of the government and rejected the civil rights movement's strategy of nonviolence, dismissing its ultimate goal of integration as mere tokenism. Malcolm's assassination came as he was attempting a rapprochement with SNCC and the Southern black freedom movement and with progressive whites as well. Malcolm was also reaching audiences worldwide, addressing students in Africa and England. At the Oxford Debate Union, Malcolm linked U.S. involvement in the suppression of freedom fighters in the Congo with the federal government's refusal to press charges against the murderers of civil rights activists in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. To the consternation of U.S. authorities, Malcolm's criticisms were echoed by members of the Afro-Asian bloc at the UN.
To be sure, nonviolent protest campaigns and federal civil rights legislation had transformed the political landscape of the South. But many blacks in the urban North still encountered institutional racism in the form of underemployment, substandard schools, segregated slums, and police brutality. The limits of civil rights reforms sparked militant demands for "Black Power!" In addition, the racial and social inequalities of American society were exacerbated by the U.S. intervention in the Vietnam war, with African American soldiers initially bearing a disproportionate burden in casualties. When heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali refused to serve the armed forces in Vietnam, claiming that "no Vietnamese ever called me nigger," the government unwittingly created a new international symbol of black dissent and antiwar sentiment.
I find this all a very suggestive beginning to an attempt to understand the troubled world in which we live today. While there can be no justification for the terror attacks on America in 2001, nevertheless, we might consider this brief historical sketch of the postwar era as a preliminary answer to President Bush's question of why America is so intensely hated by Islamic extremists and terrorists. In any case, I hope that you find this approach provocative and useful.
Professor Kevin Gaines' research focuses on the African American experience. He has published several works on race relations, black leadership, politics, and family life. His book Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture During the Twentieth Century won the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association in 1997. Professor Gaines serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American History.
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