| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Penny M. Von Eschen. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 259. Cloth $39.95, paper $16.95.

This intriguing book is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on African Americans and U.S. foreign policy. It confirms the argument in Brenda Gayle Plummer's superb Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (1996) that African-American journalists and intellectuals had a sustained interest in foreign affairs and were crucial in linking domestic and global racism. 1

To Penny M. Von Eschen, African Americans not only were attentive to international issues but offered a radical critique of U.S. diplomacy. Inspired by World War II, the creation of the United Nations, and the growth of anticolonial nationalism in Asia and Africa, black intellectuals, trade union officials, and the African-American press called for "a genuine transformation of global power relations" (p. ix). Led by Paul Robeson, Max Yergan, Alphaeus Hunton, and the Council on African Affairs (CAA), African Americans argued they "not only shared an oppression with colonized peoples but that their fate in the United States was intertwined with the struggles of those peoples" (p. 40). This led them to a radical analysis of international relations that demanded both global political, and economic independence. Fearful that American imperialism would replace European empires, they advocated not only an end to colonialism but also restraints on American corporate power and a more equitable redistribution of the world's wealth, a "worldwide New Deal rather than the American Century" (p. 157). . . .

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