African Americans and Africa: A Critical Nexus

...Africare continues to function to this day...

...and Horace Mann Bond described some transatlantic ties between black Americans and Africans (for example, African students attending black American colleges since the late nineteenth century) that had an impact on West African nationalist movements...

...There was actually a precursor organization, the Council on African Affairs— organized in the late 1930s by a black YMCA activist who had run a YMCA for Africans in South Africa (Max Yergen)— whose executive members came from the mainstream black American intelligentsia: W.E.B...

...The ancestor cult religion with all of its manifold, poetic richness that created a sense of [African] self-sufficiency—did not that religion, when the European guns came in act as a sort of aid to those guns...

...As Walter Carrington described this development: On the eve of the 1976 presidential election, Diggs convened the National Black Leadership Conference on Southern Africa during the Congressional Black Caucus's annual leadership weekend in September...

...Wright, moreover, did not oppose modern African authoritarian patterns...

...Richard Wright keenly understood these kinds of twisted human contradictions in regard to so-called generic kinship bonds when he criticized Leopold Senghor's negritude mode of romanticizing black kinship bonds during the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956...

...Staniland's tendentious book argues that the American conservative perspective on African decolonization was hard-nosed and skeptical (it was, in practice, opposed to decolonization), while the liberal/ leftist perspective was soft-headed and romantic...

...There was also the emergence of a blackAmerican cadre of elected federal officials who honed their policy skills in relating to African developments...

...Many of these officials were posted in African states: Mercer Cook (first U.S...

...Currently, the "emotive" legacy is prominent in the form of the Afrocentric Movement led by Molefi Asante, a linguistic scholar at Temple University, which has had some impact through Africanizing the curriculum for schools serving 368 • DISSENT African Americans and Africa lower-class, inner-city children (particularly males...

...The very chartering of AMSAC by the cream of francophone African leadership endowed it with an enormous authority among the black American intelligentsia, and this authority was reinforced within a year of AMSAC's formation when its leaders were invited to the Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held in Rome in March 1959...

...Be this as it may, in regard to forging viable African linkages, the black ethnocentrist intellectuals have established neither effective lobbying organizations nor institutions for transferring developmental resources to African societies...

...They were also frequently involved in public demonstrations, such as the boisterous disruption of the United Nations General Assembly discussion of the Congo crisis and the murder of former Premier Patrice 362 • DISSENT African Americans and Africa Lumumba in the summer of 1961...

...They were joined by a three-hundred-member blackAmerican delegation—major federal officials...

...agencies involved in Africa during the 1950s, as was another leading AMSAC figure, Mercer Cook, who also spent some time as the American cultural attaché in the black-ruled state of Haiti...

...The ancient and deep religious fissure between Jews and Christians accompanied Jewish immigrants to America and, as Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab vividly demonstrate in Politics of Unreason: Rightwing Extremism in America 1790-1970, anti-Semitism was a far more vicious and fierce way of marginalizing immigrant groups within American life than was anti-Catholicism...

...Under the leadership of Randall Robinson, a former staff aide to Diggs who had organized student demonstrations on behalf of sanctions [against South Africa] while at Harvard Law School, TransAfrica opened its doors in 1978...

...AMSAC also stimulated African-related developments beyond its own sphere, such as encouraging civil rights organizations to direct their own lobbying activity around African issues, which they did in the early 1960s through the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, headquartered in Washington...

...There has also been an ambivalent element associated with the black American interface with African realities...

...2) dual citizenship status for black Americans in the twenty-four African states at the summit...

...But American ethnic groups involved in trans-nationalizing their ethnic clout have not always done so in a humanistic or morally sensitive way...

...and (3) a major lobbying endeavor by black-American intelligentsia to have the massive sub-Saharan African debt forgiven...

...This schizophrenic dialectic of ethnic group identity—between what we were and what we will become—is a fundamental component of the Americanization process...

...Black Americans entered the postwar era expecting some basic progress toward the desegregation of American society, and indeed some progress did occur, though nowhere near expectations...

...James Ivy analyzed the NAACP's pragmatic activist approach to equality for black Americans...

...American Intellectuals and African Nationalists, 1955-1970...

...According to one observer of Africare, "Lucas began [his] relief effort centered in the black community...

...Representatives of the assembled organizations [churches, businesses, professional associations, fraternities and sororities] pledged their financial support...

...Since the 1980s, with the expanding professional skills and leverage of the black middle class, this takeoff stage has been consolidated...

...In addition to the members of the 1956 American delegation, the delegation to the 1959 Congress included Robert Carter (legal counsel of the NAACP), St...

...Indeed, all Staniland offers to support his observation is anecdotal documentation drawn mainly from travel articles published in black American magazines like Ebony and the Negro Digest...

...Not all of it can or should come from the black community...

...And despite the enormous achievement for nearly forty years of forging viable and mutually beneficial linkages between blackAmerican and African elites, we today in the black-American intelligentsia must still follow Richard Wright's courageous lead in insisting not on a romantic negritude-type or the current Afrocentric-type interface with Africa but on a pragmatic nexus...

...PresenceAfricaine, June-September 1957...

...Thus it is clear that since the middle 1970s the formative black-American–African leadership ties that Bond, Davis, Cook, Drake, Ivy, and others forged through AMSAC in the 1960s had reached the "takeoff " stage, spawning a variety of initiatives crucial to African policy advances...

...But anthropological studies on human societies just do not support this assumption, for kinship bonds must be carefully nurtured and worked at in order to produce positive humanistic outcomes among human groups (whether they be tribal groups, racial groups, national-language groups, whatever...

...La Societe Africaine de Culture organized the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, to which a formal United States delegation was invited...

...The first drive for politically consequential trans-black organizations thus began in the late 1950s...

...African-Americans seemed to want to turn their backs on the continent and anything that associated them with it...

...Other members of the black American delegation were William Fontaine (professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania), James W. Ivy (writer and editor of the NAACP's journal the Crisis), and Mercer Cook (professor of romance languages and literature at Howard University, who had close ties to Senghor, Cesaire, and other francophone black intellectuals going back to the 1930s...

...However, the black ethnocentric element was only one sector among intellectuals concerned with African developments from the late 1950s onward...

...The experience of Randall Robinson's Trans Africa reflected this metamorphosis...

...Nowhere in Staniland's book can one find the names of Horace Mann Bond, John Aubrey Davis, Mercer Cook, Samuel Allen, William Fontaine, St...

...By 1976 Diggs found a way to institutionalize this goal...

...African policy experts...

...And this internal reAfricanization, as it were, had a wholly new twist—the exchange of a deep-rooted Christian faith for Islamic faith...

...But when viewed over a period of a century of the black American/ African nexus, the re-Africanization fetish has been more ideologically flamboyant than institutionally or politically viable...

...SUMMER • 1992 • 369...

...Ambassador to the United Nations—and his skillful deputy, Donald McHenry, to launch .3 intricate diplomatic maneuvers that kept South Africa at the negotiating table regarding the independence of Namibia...

...In 1972 he became chairman of the House Subcommittee on African Affairs...

...But this ambivalence has not been on the order of intensity recently described by a neoconservative analyst, Martin Staniland, who remarked: At least until the late fifties, Afro-American periodicals often reflected both a low level of interest in Africa and a rather disdainful attitude toward its inhabitants...

...The thousands of lives that IRA arms have snuffed out in Northern Ireland have not generated a serious movement among Irish Americans for a negotiated peace to the Irish crisis, though a handful of courageous Irish-American figures (notably Senators Daniel Moynihan and Edward Kennedy) have publicly condemned IRA terrorism...

...During its first year TransAfrica engineered a masterful lobbying drive that convinced Congress to sustain sanctions against South Africa...

...These individuals and organizations made up the pragmatic activist sector of black intellectuals and were, in fact, at the very center of Black American activity relating to anticolonial and pro-African nationalist developments from the 1950s onward...

...Wright informed Senghor: Brother . . . I have got to face it...

...These regimes continued without significant liberalization throughout the twentieth century, free of criticism from the black American intelligentsia, until the recent democratic election of Aristide (which, alas, antidemocratic forces have undone, with Aristide— at this writing—outside Haiti, while "negotiations" for his return proceed slowly...

...An unprecedented event—dwarfing previous conferences—it was attended by the governing classes of some twenty-four African states 366 • DISSENT African Americans and Africa (heads of state, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, experts from international agencies, and so on), over fifteen hundred African delegates...

...Thus, we find Greek Americans exacerbating social fissures in Cyprus...

...Rather, he insisted that these patterns be viewed as temporary, and especially that they be used to protect the societal freedom created by modernity from what Wright called "stultifying [African] traditions and customs...

...Black America and African Liberation," Focus, 72...

...The 1980s witnessed a slow but steady evolution of the black intelligentsia's perspective on the "quality-of-rule issue...

...A few leading anglophone African intellectuals were also a part of La Societe Africaine de Culture and of Presence Africaine in the 1950s, especially Davidson Nicol (biochemist and writer from Sierra Leone), S.O...

...As regards blacks' "cultural reinforcement" with their African heritage, we need only mention black Americans' perennial search for an ethnically satisfying group name—a search ranging from "Colored American" (during the nineteenth century), to "Afro-American" and "Negro American" (between the World Wars), to "Black American" SUMMER • 1992 • 361 African Americana and Africa (during the 1960s and 1970s), to the current term around which there's a broad consensus among blacks— "African American...

...Thus, unlike other white ethnic groups, Jewish Americans invested far more emotional and cultural energy in looking outside American society for a possible external haven or zion, just in case they were unable to achieve stable inclusion into an American identity and status...

...Wright's formulations were prophetic for, by the middle 1960s, rather soon after decolonization, African elites and states quickly took on authoritarian forms...

...Even during the conservative Reagan administration— which did not continue the Carter administration's outreach to the black foreign policy lobby—TransAfrica and its allies in Congress had stored up enough long-run political credit to enact, in 1986, legislation (the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act) that broadened and toughened earlier sanctions against South Africa, tying sanctions to concrete steps toward full-fledged democratization in that country...

...While this global lobbying capability has not generated a high level of foreign policy achievements relating to Africa (comparable, say, to benefits the Jewish lobby generates for Israel), some significant policy gains have nonetheless been achieved...

...Since the appearance of the black-American intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, what I would call the "quality-of-power issue" in black-ruled states has been ignored...

...The conference speeded up the time schedule of decolonization in francophone Africa through its influence on Senghor...

...Nor has Israel's heavy-handed governance of the West Bank sparked among Jewish Americans a serious thrust for a negotiated peace, though a growing number of Jewish-American intellectUals have publicly insisted on a Palestinian state solution to the Israel-Arab conflict...

...The roots of this difficulty among the Black intelligentsia are long-standing, first emerging in regard to the modern world's oldest independent black states—Ethiopia, Liberia, and Haiti...

...The naiveté of the Afrocentric notion of generic kinship bonds becomes apparent when it comes face-to-face with hard historical and structural realities, such as the voluntary role of African ritual and leadership groups in sustaining the .infrastructure of the slave trade (in exchange for European currencies, manufactured goods, guns, and so on) for a couple of hundred years...

...Given his special intellectual authority with other francophone nationalist leaders, he altered their moderate decolonization time schedule...

...The Link to Power Perhaps the most durable institutional spinoff from AMSAC relating to African development was its direct and indirect influence on the recruitment by the United States government of a sizable cadre of black American foreign policy officials and technicians who held posts in African states, and eventually elsewhere, too...

...Unlike other American organizations working in this area, Africare makes a special effort to mobilize black American institutions (churches especially) to provide money and assistance in kind...

...Ambassador Young and his deputy McHenry passed on to the Reagan administration a strong negotiating legacy regarding the Namibian crisis...

...In order to induce the U.S...

...Structuring Trans-Black Linkages The years 1956 through 1958 and beyond saw the start of a rather extensive institutional elaboration of linkages among black elites on the American and African sides of the Atlantic Ocean...

...And in the early 1970s there emerged another black-American initiated spinoff from AMSAC's presence—the founding of Africare by Payne Lucas, a black former Peace Corps official...

...So for black-American intellectuals (and CaribSUMMER • 1992 • 367 African Americans and Africa bean radical intellectuals like C.L.R...

...Each American delegate gave a paper at the 1956 conference...

...That is, they have too often ignored the negative impact their trans-national actions have on social and cultural divisions in their "ethnic homelands...

...From Re-Africanization to Lobbying The re-Africanization motif has no doubt been a prominent feature of black Americans' interface with Africa...

...Leading figures included major francophone black intellectuals: Leopold Senghor (poet and leading Senegalese politician), Alioune Diop (writer and Senegalese businessman), Aim6 Usaire (Martinique poet), Frantz Fanon (Martinique psychiatrist), Louis Achille (Antilles writer), Rene Despestre (Madagascar writer), among others...

...Africare focuses on aiding African countries suffering food shortages caused by droughts...

...This statement grossly and mischievously overstates the ambivalence that can be found at some periods in the black American interface with Africa...

...And this success, in its turn, aided the efforts of Andrew Young—the cabinet-level U.S...

...In fact, a more valid criticism of the long history of the black American interface with African realities is not that it involved a major tendency by black Americans to defame this heritage but rather that it involved a dysfunctional tendency to emotionally and ideologically exaggerate the African heritage, mystifying the African heritage into a fetish of re-Africanization...

...From all over the country, contributions to help African famine victims poured into Africare's headquarters in Washington...

...So, during a period of disenchantment, beginning in the late 1950s, there emerged two assertive political tendencies among black Americans...

...Three crucial policy proposals were generated by the 1991 Summit: (1) the setting up of black-American–African business ventures and an International Bank of Africa to fund such ventures...

...But the black nationalist or ethnocentric element was only one part of a much broader and more differentiated black American intellectual view of African decolonization...

...The most recent consequential foreign-policy event associated with this new foreign-policy infrastructure occurred in April 1991, at the "African–African-American Policy Summit" that convened in Abijan under the sponsorship of COte d'Ivoire President Felix HouphouetBoigny...

...According to Janet Vaillant's perceptive biography of Senghor—Black, French and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)—the 1956 conference had a major impact on political events in francophone Africa...

...TransAfrica led the way in this metamorphosis, for by 1985 it increasingly published criticisms of authoritarian practices in the worst African states such as Zaire and Central African Republic...

...In addition to Richard Wright (already resident in SUMMER • 1992 • 363 African Americans and Africa France since the late 1940s and a founding figure in Presence Africaine), the black American delegation was led by two brilliant scholars—John Aubrey Davis (political science professor at Lincoln University from the 1930s to the 1950s and afterward at CUNY), and Horace Mann Bond (sociologist and educator who was president of Lincoln University in the 1950s...

...After all, we still find materialistically inspired contradictions in the interaction of black Americans and Africans, such as the extensive role of Nigerians in smuggling South Asian heroin into blackAmerican inner-city communities—communities already saturated with many thousands of poor black households ravaged by drug abuse...

...Thus, regarding black Americans' "external haven" vision of Africa, we need only refer to the massive activity from the 1920s through the 1930s associated with the Garvey Movement (Universal Negro Improvement Association), which was popularly called the "Back-toAfrica Movement...

...One such was Representative Charles Diggs (D-Michigan), who organized the Congressional Black Caucus...

...Any group's ethnic identity within American society is carved out of a delicate, tension-laced mixture of its origin in one or another nationality, while adjusting to the American realities it had to adopt...

...They ignored it because of their primary concern with destroying white supremacist governments—a concern that, in fact, gave a special elevated status to Liberia, Haiti, and Ethiopia precisely because they were black- (not white-) ruled societies...

...As a recent historian of the black intelligentsia's ties with Africa has put it: "AMSAC brought important African leaders to the United States, held regular conferences on African issues, and published a leading journal—African Forum...

...Perhaps the worst case scenario regarding this dilemma occurred during the middle 1970s when the black intelligentsia (press, scholars, civil rights leaders, and so on) remained pathetically mute in the face of the barbarous rule of General Idi Amin in Uganda—a rule of such cruelty that Amnesty International estimated that there were over two hundred thousand political murders in the years 1972 through 1979...

...Above all, it was the pragmatic activist, not the black ethnocentric, who fashioned professional foreign policy lobbying in American politics on behalf of emerging African states and elites...

...businesspeople and financial professionals concerned with Africa...

...Staniland presents a very skewed history of the activity of black American intellectuals in the 1950s-1970s era with respect to African developments—an account that highlights certain militant ethnocentric figures, among them John Henrik Clarke, William Strickland, Shirley Graham, Dan Watts, and their organs—Liberator (edited by Watts) and Freedomways (of which Clarke was a board member...

...James Robinson, was encouraged to launch a student-based volunteer foreign-aid organization called Operation Crossroads Africa, which became a prototype for the Kennedy Administration's Peace Corps program, sending students to Africa and other developing countries as teachers and rural builders...

...Thus, through the formation of a Black American foreign policy cadre, the rise of black federal policy makers in Congress (legislators and technical staff), and the formation of a Southern Africa-focused lobbying agency—TransAfrica—by the late 1970s, a broad range of mechanisms functioned on behalf of African developments...

...Even the leading black representative dealing with African affairs—Congressman Charles Diggs—found it difficult to face up to the Amin regime's cruelty...

...The flaw is that the Afrocentric mindset among some black intellectuals assumes that there is a generic kinship bond among peoples of Negro ancestry in general and between black Americans and Africans in particular...

...experts from international agencies...

...Upon his return to francophone Africa, Senghor promoted a more aggressive perspective on decolonization...

...With the liberal Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s— administrations that for the first time placed federal authority behind the final reversal of legalized segregation—the recruitment of a cadre of black foreign policy officials became possible...

...This rudely contradicts the romantic Afrocentric notion of black kinship bonds, contradictions that black intellectuals who propagate the Afrocentric perspective must eventually confront...

...One tendency sought to activate the black civil rights movement (for example, Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Council), and the other tendency sought to galvanize a new version of the re-Africanization fetish, with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam emerging as seminal black political forces...

...The remainder of the policy proposals from the summit concerned the massive expansion of educational ties between black Americans and the still fledgling educational systems in African states, with the purpose of reducing Africa's large illiterate population...

...I cannot accept Africa because of mere blackness or on trust...

...Ambassador to Ghana), Walter Carrington (civil rights lawyer who was the first black American Peace Corps director in an African state), Clyde Ferguson (international lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School, who was the third U.S...

...The conference issued The Africa-American Manifesto on Southern Africa, which called for the formation of a black lobby...

...Indeed, from 1960 onward AMSAC's role as black America's bridge to African realities had a kind of "multiplier effect" on the black intelligentsia...

...Clair Drake (anthropologist and professor at Roosevelt University), Saunders Redding (novelist and professor at Hampton Institute), and Samuel Allen (poet and professor of law at Texas Southern University...

...So, the fact-of-black-rule perspective is found dominating a1Elis.6ussion of the origins and development of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century in an article by a black American sociologist in Presence Africaine (June-July 1958, Adelaide Hill, "Revolution in Haiti, 1791-1920...

...In general, ethnic groups from Europe's northern tier, notably the Protestant segment— such as the Dutch, Scots, Welsh, Scandinavians, Germans—experienced a low-to-moderate level of trauma in their quest for an American identity...

...The American delegates to the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists constituted AMSAC's inner circle of leaders, with John Davis assuming the executive operating post, and Horace Mann Bond the post of president...

...On the other hand, groups from Europe's southern tier and from the Catholic segment of the northern tier—such as Italians, Irish, and German Catholics—experienced a high level of tension...

...Richard Wright delivered a keynote paper, a brilliant analysis of the interplay of modernity and tradition in emerging African states, arguing that inasmuch as modernity—to which he said he was deeply committed—enhanced human and individual freedom, it was the obligation of emergent African elites to ensure modernity's victory over the antifreedom aspects of African traditionalisms while respecting traditionalisms' own cultural forms...

...Nor have they responded adequately to human rights violations and sectarian violence perpetuated by the ruling elites in these "homelands...

...John Davis had been a consultant to U.S...

...For as it spreads it might very well have a positive feedback on our country's own still shallow human rights consciousness—shallow especially in the past decade or more of conservative Republican governments that have cynically closed their eyes to the massive crisis of poverty in American life, particularly in the African-American sector of our society...

...This kind of developmental linkage was to be AMSAC's legacy alone...

...In short, Cruse and other black nationalists disliked the mainstream pragmatists because they weren't Garveyites and weren't anti-white enough...

...Throughout the 1960s AMSAC functioned 364 • DISSENT African Americans and Africa as the premier institutional mechanism that (1) spread African-related information among the black intelligentsia, (2) established close relations between the black American intelligentsia and the Africans who had come to power, and (3) edged toward a viable black American lobbying capability on African issues...

...Another important political outcome of the 1956 conference was the creation of an American branch of La Societe Africaine de Culture, which was headquartered in New York City—the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC...

...Such distancing of AfricanAmericans from Africa can be traced back . . . to the nineteenth century...

...And we can add the many contemporary violations of supposed black generic kinship bonds like the fratricidal civil war among feuding clans and lineages in Somali or among northern and southern ethnic groups in the Sudan...

...As members of American ethnic groups went about defining themselves within a pluralistic American society (since the 1840s, say), they were inevitably pulled backward through a past left behind (linguistic, religious, marital, ideological) and forward through adjusting to American ways...

...lobbyists...

...Did that religion help the people to resist fiercely and hardily and hurl the Europeans out...

...The black nationalist or ethnocentrist legacy has been exclusively of the "expressive" or "emotive" kind, trumpeted during the 1970s and 1980s in ethnocentrist-oriented magazines like the Black Scholar and the Black World (now defunct...

...So too have the authoritarian practices of independent African states benefited from black-American intellectuals' dilemma of lauding the fact of black rule while slighting the quality of black rule...

...But the Black Muslims did have a significant informal influence and following, especially among that sector of black intellectuals who preferred a radical anti-white stance toward the expanding African decolonization movements...

...Initially derived from AMSAC's presence, these persisted after AMSAC closed its doors at the end of the 1960s...

...and (2) in other forms—the dominant response in fact—it sought to borrow from African realities (past and present) sources of emotional, ideological, and cultural reinforcement of black American identity...

...Striking a tone of strategic realism, a leading member of the black-American delegation, Niara Suderkasa, president of Lincoln University, offered the following observation: "The development effort envisioned by the summit will require commitments of billions of dollars...

...But the Council on African Affairs, whose leaders moved to the far left in the postwar era, was mortally wounded by the antileftist hysteria of the time...

...After gaining citizenship status following the Civil War, black Americans encountered an even more vicious and restrictive marginalization within American life than Jewish Americans...

...How can Asians and Africans be free of their stultifying traditions and customs and become industrialized [modernized], and powerful, if you like, like the West...

...Black Americans are just the most recent ethnic group to successfully participate in this metamorphosis, following on the heels of groups like Irish Americans, Polish Americans, Armenian Americans, Jewish Americans, and others who have successfully leveraged their clout into a beneficial foreign policy impact on their "ethnic homeland" societies: Ireland, Poland, Armenia, Israel, and so on...

...This reluctance of Diggs and the pragmatic activist sector of the black-American intelligentsia to face up to the "quality-of-black-rule" issue was a moral limitation shared with the ethnocentric sector of black intellectuals...

...public and private sectors to increase investment in sub-Saharan Africa, the AfricanAmerican community must develop strategies to leverage its buying power and voting power...

...It is fascinating that nowhere in her article does Professor Hill ever treat the Haitian power structure evaluatively —that is, dissect the most fundamental attribute of the new black powerholders following the Haitian Revolution...

...Ambassador to Kenya), among many others...

...While the Black Muslim ideological message didn't follow the Garvey Movement in explicitly calling for an organized transfer of black Americans to Africa, it did follow the Garvey Movement's emphasis on re-Africanizing blacks' cultural patterns within American society...

...Much like white ethnic groups new to power in foreign affairs, the evolution among black Americans of trans-national clout has not been characterized by a special sensitivity to dysfunctional social and political patterns in the "ethnic-homeland" society...

...The activity of those I call pragmatic activists was much more institutionally articulated than that of the black American intellectuals whom Staniland curiously treats as prototypical...

...I have the feeling, uneasy, almost bordering upon dread, that there was a fateful historic complement between a militant white [slaving] Christian Europe and an ancestral cult religion in Africa...

...This caused blacks to reach for an ethnic identity that, as with Jews, looked outside of American society...

...DuBois, Adam Clayton Powell, Ralph Bunche (then a professor at Howard University), Paul Robeson, and Mordecai Johnson (the first black president of Howard University...

...Thus, the fact of black rule remained primary for black American intellectuals as they became colleagues of African elites through La Societe Africaine de Culture...

...Biobaku (Nigerian historian), and Kofi A. Busia (anthropologist and nationalist politician from Ghana...

...When the post–World War II generation of black ethnocentric or nationalist intellectuals began to articulate interest in emerging African states and elites during the early 1960s, they attacked the pragmatic activist black intellectuals associated with AMSAC who actually blazed the trail of viable linkage with emerging African elites...

...The initiative emanated from the francophone section of the emerging African states and elites (and French West Indian elites, too) who organized La Societe Africaine de Culture (Society of African Culture) and from the editors of its major organ, Presence Africaine...

...Furthermore, there was even more tension surrounding the status of two ethnic groups in particular—Jewish Americans and black Americans...

...And these gains have, in turn, had a kind of feedback effect, stimulating black leadership toward new African-related foreign policy initiatives...

...More recently TransAfrica has put the whole issue of authoritarian rule and human rights at the top of its policy agenda...

...From this position Diggs sparked black civil rights organizations and the black intelligentsia generally to push aggresSUMMER • 1992 • 365 African Americans and Africa sively for the elimination of white governance throughout Portuguese Africa and especially in the Republic of South Africa...

...Nor were they the main body of black American intellectuals involved in African events either, as erroneously suggested by Staniland...

...Ambassador to Senegal), Franklin Williams (NAACP legal counsel who was the second U.S...

...They complemented each other and this morally foul relationship remained for more than five hundred years...

...There is now a network of black American policy makers, foreign-policy bureaucrats, professional lobbyists, social science analysts, and private-sector professionals (business, law, finance, and so on) professionally concerned with African affairs...

...As Wright put it: "The problem is freedom...

...Otherwise, the differences between the ethnocentrists and pragmatists were quite basic...

...namely, that these powerholders established full-fledged authoritarian regimes over Haiti's agrarian black masses...

...For instance, it was through AMSAC's activities that a leading black clergyman, Rev...

...James and Eric Williams) the fact of black rule always preempted the quality of black rule...

...William Fontaine spoke on the ethics of segregation in American life...

...Clair Drake, Horace Clayton, Adelaide Hill, or Richard Wright, or the names of the American Society of African Culture and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa...

...It has become a major lobbying group in trying to get the United States foreign-policy power structure—governmental and private—behind the budding redemocratization processes in African states...

...It is hoped that this human rights consciousness will spread among the black intelligentsia...

...In terms of gaining a formal membership following among black Americans, the Black Muslims' re-Africanization appeal did not muster members much beyond a hundred thousand (as compared to the membership of mainstream black civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, about five million...

...He tapped ordinary black Americans in a way they had not been solicited for an Africa-related cause since the days of Garvey...

...When Congress in 1977 finally got around to discussing the regime's cruelty Diggs opposed the discussion because of his "concern that a congressional investigation of Uganda might divert public attention from human rights conditions in [white-ruled] South Africa...

...Any serious search through the writings of the black American intelligentsia regarding the African nexus will uncover a very different perspective, albeit alongside the kind of negativity Staniland finds typical...

...John Davis described the political status of blacks in American society...

...The attacks by the black ethnocentrist intellectuals (for example, Harold Cruse, John Henrik Clarke, Shirley Graham, and others) mainly focused on the ideological or political credentials of the pragmatic activist intellectuals, suggesting they were suspect because of what Harold Cruse characterized as "the assimilation tendencies in the outlook of [mainstream] Afro-American intellectuals, artists, writers . . . [who resist] a cultural rehabilitation and refurbishing of [their] entire racial outlook...

...This black American tilt toward Africa was essentially twofold: (1) in one of its forms, it sought a possible external haven or zion...

...and civil rights figures...

...Leon H. Sullivan, the civil rights leader and Philadelphia clergyman who was the architect of the "Sullivan Principles" (1977) that required American corporations operating in South Africa to structure working conditions and wages of Africans more favorably than required by South Africa's racist labor policies...

...Ambassador to Uganda), and William T. LeMelle (a Ford Foundation official who was the first U.S...

...Although sparked by the Garvey Movement, its appeal, for various reasons, had attenuated significantly by the end of World War II...

...The tension and trauma surrounding this schizophrenic dialectic vary from group to group...

...What emerges is more fascinating and complex—evidence of genuine intellectual and emotional endeavors to refurbish their Africanness...

...Mercer Cook discussed the views of postwar French travelers to America in regard to race relations...

...One of the militant black intellectuals who was influenced by the Black Muslims in this period remarked that Lumumba's death was the equivalent of "the international lynching of a black man on the altar of colonialism and racist supremacy...

...The initiator and main organizing figure of this conference was Rev...

...By the early 1970s there were fifteen congressional representatives among the six thousand elected black officials nationally, and several of these had attained enough seniority to head crucial foreign policy committees...

...These militant black American intellectuals founded several magazines during the early 1960s that supported African decolonization movements—magazines like Liberator and Freedomways...

...Conclusion: Dilemmas of Trans-National Ethnicity As American ethnic groups gain social mobility and move from the margins of society—where they were once denigrated as "Micks," "Wops," "Kikes," "Niggers," "Chinks," and so on—to the center of influence, they typically project their new influence upon the stage of world politics...

...There is, however, a fundamental flaw at the core of the Afrocentric orientation toward the black-American—African nexus...