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"Made-in-America Revolutions"? The "Black University" and the American Role in the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic
Jason C. Parker
| The global race revolution of the twentieth century is arguably the central story of modern international history. The end of European empires in what Cold War intellectuals and policy makers christened the "Third World" forces historians to rethink traditional periodizations. Scholars speak of a "pre-Columbian" era before the spread of Western empires overseas; the retreat of those empires logically suggests the arrival of a post-Columbian era. As colonized peoples seized self-rule, ethnic minorities led a parallel fight for equality in the West. In both cases the basic mission was the same. In the colonized lands creating nations meant delineating "imagined communities" and sovereign states to house them. In the metropoles the fight for civil rights meant redefining existing nationalities to encompass ethnic minorities and to fulfill a long-denied promise of equal citizenship. The chronological coincidence of these struggles, in retrospect, was not mere coincidence. Both hark back to fundamental, constitutive questions of citizenship and nationhood, questions long disallowed under both imperial and segregationist rule. The literature on these intertwined developments—Third World decolonization and American desegregation—has coalesced into a synthesis of international history, one underscoring the millennial importance of the global race revolution.1 |
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Perhaps most striking about this synthesis is its revelation of the length of the race revolution, which proceeded by fits and starts for the better part of a century. Its post-1945 landmarks can easily and falsely obscure that fact. Moreover, though the process culminated in legalisms—juridical sovereignty of new nation-states and constitutional equality of citizens—it had not begun in legal realms alone. It also began as communities were imagined and debated within contested lines of race. The legal-political victories were in a sense the formalization of identities explored earlier by such visionary nonstate actors as W. E. B. Du Bois, who rallied black intellectuals to a globally conceived freedom struggle. The historian Nikhil Pal Singh has argued that the importance of black intellectuals' creation of this "black counter-public sphere cannot be underestimated." Their efforts spun "the web of diasporan identities and concerns" that the historian Paul Gilroy identified as "the Black Atlantic." Over time, this web drew together the domestic and foreign theaters of the race revolution. The achievement of sovereignty and citizenship in Africa and its diaspora was not due only to the retreat of bankrupt empires or to grudging American forbearance. It was also thanks to Du Bois and his fellows, who created an imagined community spanning an ocean and a century.2 |
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However, a crucial part of this network has been largely overlooked. The role of free-agent thinkers such as Du Bois and C. L. R. James has been well covered, but the role of academic institutions has not. Led by a handful of professors, black colleges such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania actively engaged the race revolution around the Atlantic world. This engagement exerted influence on, and was influenced by, decolonization abroad and the civil rights struggle at home. From the 1920s to the 1960s, black institutions of higher education hosted an honor roll of black Atlantic nationalists as students, faculty, or guests. On black American campuses, those nationalists found teachers and colleagues who were the cream of the African American intelligentsia and who were remaking the intellectual landscape of race in America. The foreign-born presence at such sites helped internationalize and radicalize black thinking about the freedom struggle. Less dramatically, those foreign students who did not go home to become heads of state—which is to say most of them—returned with the technical skills needed to run the new independent nation-states. The black campus nurtured not only a vanguard of visionary leaders but also the first cohort of African technocrats. While there had always been an international presence on black campuses, it was only in the post–World War II era that it achieved a critical mass. Moreover, the universities themselves were altered by this exchange: faculty pushed their employers to abet Pan-African activism, and administrations exploited their international role for institutional advantage.3 |
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