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No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American
Activists over Half a Century, 1950-2000
Edited by William
Minter, Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr. Africa World
Press, 2007.
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No Easy Victories
Repudiating the
Legacy of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hunton
Book Review by
Jean Damu
No Easy Victories is the latest book to focus on
the Africa solidarity movement in the US. Four
organizations, the editors would have us believe, were
the movement’s cornerstones.
Of these
organizations, the American Committee on Africa,
TransAfrica, the American Friends Service Committee, and
the Washington Office on Africa (an outgrowth of the
American Committee on Africa), ACOA was by far the most
influential; the one with the longest standing and the
most controversial. It is the organization to which many
activists interviewed in
No Easy Victories constantly return when
acknowledging their earliest influences in the African
liberation solidarity movement.
But who and what
was ACOA?
In contributor Lisa
Brock’s feature on ACOA and its founder George Houser,
Brock delineates the role of an earlier organization,
the Council on African Affairs [CAA], that was first
formed in 1937 and was ultimately led by
W.E.B. Du Bois,
Paul Robeson and Dr. Alphaeus Hunton. The Council on
African Affairs called for not only the overthrow of
colonialism in Africa but promoted an anti-imperialist
vision for Africa as well.
In his interview
with Brock, Houser claims he founded ACOA because he
didn’t agree with the politics of the CAA and felt it
his duty to bring noncommunist whites into the movement.
However in his
autobiography, “No One Can Stop the Rain” (a curious
title for a book about African liberation), Houser goes
quite a bit further.
In May of 1953,
Houser says he and his friends did a survey of the
organizational scene in the US, and ignoring the
existence of the CAA said there needed to be an American
Committee on Africa because there was no other
organization concerned “with the overall continent of
Africa.”
Therefore, as early
as 1953 under the leadership of George Houser and
presumably to counter the CAA’s radical leadership, the
ACOA ignored Black America’s role in the movement to
support Africa and sought to supplant it, which thanks
to the aid of the US government, it did.
Further reflecting
ACOA’s concern with communist participation in the
movement, Houser goes on to quote letter written to him
by his longtime aid Homer Jack after his return from a
visit to South Africa.
“He (Dr. Yusuf
Dadoo, president of the Indian People’s Congress) is a
devoted man,” writes Jack, “ albeit an unabashed
Communist…If I were in South Africa I would definitely
participate in the campaign and work overtime to oust
the commies from control.”
These Cold War
attitudes expressed by Jack and Houser set the tone for
the work of the ACOA for the next thirty five years.
While members of
the Council on African Affairs were subjected to US
conditions of apartheid and finally forced to shut down
because its leaders were either imprisoned, forced to go
underground, subjected to national house arrest by
having their passports confiscated, or forced to turn
over its records to the Justice Dept, Houser and the
American Committee on Africa never once stood up to
protest.
A key ally of ACOA
was Tobias Channing and the Phelps-Stokes Fund which
played an important role in convincing liberal Black
leaders to embrace the anti-communist, pro-US
imperialist policies of the Truman Doctrine. That
doctrine linked advances in civil rights legislation to
efforts to convince the world the US was the world’s
leader in promoting human rights, despite Truman’s
refusal to intervene in a rash of lynchings after Black
servicemen returned from WWII. More about the
Phelps-Stokes Fund later.
Curiously and
sadly, despite Brock’s rigorous attempt to highlight
Houser and the ACOA as enthusiastic Cold War warriors
other contributors to
No Easy Victories get sidetracked (perhaps
willfully) and fail to heed the warning signs that
indicate when the anti-colonialist, anti-communist path,
trail blazed by Houser, diverges from the far more
radical anti-imperialist path, trail blazed in large
part by the African Blood Brotherhood of the 1920’s (who
advocated the armed destruction of colonialism) and
later by DuBois, Robeson and Hunton of the Council on
African Affairs.
Though the book is
ample with interviews with solidarity activists, many of
them respected fighters for African liberation like
Prexy Nesbitt or the late Damu Smith, still it promotes
the concept that ACOA and its related organizations were
the foundations of the African solidarity movement and
creates the false impression that mostly white people
were the engines of the movement.
This perception is
enforced by the time period covered in the book,
1950-2000. ACOA was created in 1953. Before then no
significant number of whites outside the communist
influenced Council on African Affairs were involved in
Africa solidarity work. If the editors had chosen to
review the period as far back as 1919 with the creation
of the African Blood Brotherhood or Marcus Garvey’s UNIA,
then they would have had to acknowledge Black America’s
anti-imperialist role in the Africa solidarity movement
until it was crushed by the government.
Furthermore the
book does not note the modern role in the movement of
America’s Black press. The important contributions of
the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the National
Conference of Black Lawyers or any of the many radical
national white or multi-racial organizations are also
ignored.
The 1980 national
Southern Africa solidarity conference held at NYC’s
historic Riverside Methodist Church featured African
National Congress leaders Oliver Tambo, Tabo Mbeki,
leading members of Namibia’s South West Africa People’s
Organization, Shirley Chisholm and others. Current
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, then representing Congressman
Ron Dellums, served as the conference secretary. It was
the largest and most important African solidarity
conference ever held in the US. Unbelievably, it also
warrants no mention in No Easy Victories.
The relationship
between US Civil Rights organizations and leaders with
South Africa is totally ignored. The role of Madie Hall
Xuma, the social worker from North Carolina who married
Albert Xuma, who became president of the ANC, and who
founded the modern version of the ANC Women’s League
goes unmentioned. Nor is there any mention of the
historic relationships between African American church
organizations and Africa.
What is evident
from
No Easy Victories, despite participation from a
substantial number of Blacks is a sense of white
paternalism towards Africa and Black America.
This paternalism
can be traced back to George Houser whose politics
No Easy Victories seems to mimic.
“I felt that the US
civil rights struggle was not essentially
revolutionary,” wrote Houser. “It aimed more narrowly
against discrimination and segregation…It could not be a
model for South Africa.” The CAA leaders were too
revolutionary and the civil rights leaders were not
revolutionary enough.
In either case
Houser did his best to try and utilize the ACOA as a
prophylactic for the Africa solidarity movement to
prevent it from being infected by those who may have
been influenced by the thinking of Du Bois, Robeson and
Hunton. This approach serves to mask the almost
universally acknowledged belief that it was the
existence of the socialist countries throughout most of
the 20th century that created the geopolitical space
that allowed the national liberation movements,
particularly of Asia and Africa, to succeed.
In fact, however,
it was the anti-apartheid movement, as defined mainly by
ACOA, that was narrow. Gaye McDougal, a noted human
rights attorney, who worked in close proximity to ACOA
in the Washington, D.C. area noted “In many ways it (the
anti-apartheid movement) was a shallow movement
politically.”
Similar feelings
are expressed elsewhere in the book.
If the book’s
editors had come down into the trenches of the Black
communities and organizations that supported African
liberation, likely the summary feelings would have been
far different.
Longshore workers,
who refused to unload cargo from South African ships in
the Bay Area will tell you the movement was the high
point of their lives; something they will remember with
pride until the day they die.
The Bay Area’s
noted Vukani Mwethu, a choir that has been promoting
US-South African solidarity since the early 1980’s is as
strong and politically relevant as ever-but no one from
Vukani Mwethu was interviewed.
Recently the
American Committee on Africa and the Washington Office
on Africa merged with the Africa Policy Information
Center to create what is known as Africa Action.
Today Africa
Action, as did the ACOA in earlier times, often appears
to consider the US government an ally, albeit from time
to time a wayward ally, as evidenced by its scolding the
Bush Administration for not being more aggressive toward
Sudan on the Darfur issue while ignoring US policies
that inflame the crisis there.
Even though the
Cold War is apparently over Africa Action continues to
embrace its old Cold War time partners.
Consider this. The
executive director of Africa Action, Gerald LeMelle, was
a long time fundraiser for the Phelps-Stokes Fund, that
primary pillar of the Truman Doctrine. Although today
the foundation provides scholarships for Africans to
study in the US, for much of the 20th Century it was the
primary source of funding for the American Colonization
Society, the organization that encouraged the removal of
free Blacks from America, until it mercifully went out
of business in 1964.
Have they no shame?
Jean Damu organized the
1978 Bay Area Trade Union Conference in Solidarity with
South Africa and along with Alameda County Supervisor
John George, noted labor journalist David Bacon and
former National anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity
with African Liberation chair Franklin Alexander and
others, founded the Bay Area Free South Africa Movement.
posted 4 February 2008
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Lynchsong
By Lorraine Hansberry
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes
The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
1951
Source:
AmericanLynching |
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Writer Lorraine Hansberry's
sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the
hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of
five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi,
to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for
allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in
a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by
an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal
struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals
defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US
Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene.
With the legal
lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee
in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979;
Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New
York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie
McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham
1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as
his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug.
Before Abzug became a representative in
Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the
Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War.
Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered
Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil
rights . . .
https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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