ABSTRACT
Melvin Small has observed that among the attentive public in the United States: “organized ethnic groups have exerted a major influence in national foreign policy debates. Ethnic political activism has been a unique problem for diplomats representing the multicultural United States.”1 Yet it has also been suggested that during the Cold War the interests of American ethnic and racial groups were effectively subordinated to the “national interest,” defined simply as opposition to communism.2 There is some validity in the argument that during the early Cold War African American interests were sublimated in the political struggle against communism. Civil rights activists who drew international attention to the state of American race relations and criticized the colonial practices of US allies were considered “Un-American.”3 However, the mid-late 1950s proved to be something of a watershed with the waning of McCarthyism, the schools desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the resistance to desegregation at Little Rock, Arkansas. These not only gave impetus to the efforts of the civil rights movement, but also shone the light of international scrutiny on American domestic politics and race relations.4 US policy-makers were faced with an obvious dilemma, as Mary Dudziak has observed: “How could American democracy be a beacon during the Cold War, and a model for those struggling against Soviet oppression, if the United States itself practiced brutal discrimination against minorities within its own borders?”5 African Americans increasingly sought to take advantage of international concern about racial issues, linking their own civil rights campaign with the struggle of oppressed African majorities in South Africa, the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and Britain’s Central African Federation. This chapter is situated in that context; it analyzes the nexus between US domestic politics and foreign policy toward Southern Rhodesia, with particular reference to the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), the “only substantial attempt at organized group activity on behalf of Africa by black Americans” at the height of the independence movement in Africa.6
