Kwame Nkrumah and the Relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War 1950s-1960s - Research Paper Example

? Kwame Nkrumah and the Relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War 1950’s- 1960’s Date of Submission Introduction The purpose of Kwame Nkrumah was to abolish colonialism in Africa. His dream was the rebuilding of the dignity that went astray due to colonization and slavery to give the African people the opportunity to operate freely in the globalized world as a capable, competitive actor and ally. The decolonization movement and process in Africa was launched with resolve, vitality, and passion in 1947, when Nkrumah went back to the Gold Coast to become the secretary of the first political party created to gain self-government for the Gold Coast—the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC).i The movement and process would endure for almost six decades or until 1994 when South Africa-- the remaining colony in Africa-- would achieve independence. This research paper discusses the vision of Kwame Nkrumah for Ghana and the whole of Africa, and his contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the relationship between the movement and the Cold War. Kwame Nkrumah: The Golden Leadership of Ghana In essence, Kwame Nkrumah was a staunch advocate of peace and nonviolence but he had to gain access to vast resources, which two power blocs during that time had: the United States and Russia. In relation to this, it is important to mention that it was the huge support that Nkrumah received from Russia which allowed him to fulfill his dream of building a Science City, also known as the Ghana Atomic Reactor Center.ii However, it was also the assistance of the U.S. which translated the Akosombo Hydroelectric Project into a reality. When he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1961, he intensely praised Lenin as an exceptional figure of the twentieth century.iii Lenin embraced the idea that a society rooted in oppression and corruption is decadent and should be reformed and he dedicated himself not only for the people of Russia but to the entire world and triumphed in creating a social system that has greatly influenced human history. From his college years at Lincoln University in the United States to his eventual passing, Nkrumah was fully dedicated to the African liberation. He was driven by the principles of social justice, independence, and equality.iv These ideals strengthened his aspirations for independence for the Gold Coast. He believed that all peoples in Africa had a part to fulfill in organizing for political self-government through a movement of affirmative strategies. This Gandhian approach of educational programs, publicity, protests, and boycotts engaged trade unions, farmer organizations, youth associations, and women.v Nkrumah believes that Ghana or the Gold Coast was a small-scale version of his dream for the whole Africa. He claimed: “The independence of Ghana was the first crack in the seemingly impregnable armor of imperialism in Africa. It created and furnished the bridgehead for organized assaults upon colonialism in Africa.”vi As a result, when Nkrumah gained power he invested the resources of Ghana in helping other African states achieve independence. Moreover, Nkrumah provided financial and physical aid to many African liberation campaigns and permitted African activists to relocate in Ghana. Nkrumah’s detractors and opponents criticized him for “sacrificing Ghana on the altar of Pan-Africanism”vii, for misusing the economic resources of the nation in Pan-Africanist agenda. But for Nkrumah the economic development of Ghana was strongly connected to the core political, social, and economic progress of the whole of Africa. Nkrumah believes that Africa and Ghana were one and the same. Their prospects and fates were joined at the hip. Nkrumah stated, in his ill-reputed work Neocolonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism: “Economic unity to be effective must be accompanied by political unity. The two are inseparable, each necessary for the future greatness of our continent, and the development of our resources.”viii Nkrumah believes that the Continental Union Government for Africa should be strengthened by unity for “it is the first requisite for destroying neocolonialism”.ix He defines neocolonialism as the political and economic association between the fraudulent ruling elite of Africa who together with Western leaders kept on draining off the riches of Africa at the cost of African people. Nkrumah claims that although African states were politically unrestricted, they do not possess real economic liberty. He firmly believes that “only a united Africa can redeem its past glory and renew and reinforce its strength for the realization of its destiny. We are today the richest and yet the poorest of continents, but in unity our continent could smile in a new era of prosperity and power”.x In his work Africa Must Unite, which he handed out extensively to African leaders prior to the momentous formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, Nkrumah presents his strongest argument for the economic and political consolidation of Africa’s societies and resources.xi The objective was to gain the approval of his colleagues in order to attain Continental Union Government for Africa. As he proclaimed: We need the strength of our combined numbers and resources to protect ourselves from the very positive dangers of returning colonialism in disguised forms. We need it to combat the entrenched forces dividing our continent and still holding back millions of our brother. We need it to secure total African liberation.xii Nkrumah made a warning that “At present most of the independent states are moving in directions which expose us to the dangers of imperialism and neo-colonialism”.xiii Nkrumah believes that continental economic policy would make the best use of the economic and industrial resources of Africa in a reasonable and synchronized way. It would thwart the “dubious advantages of association with the so-called European Common market”.xiv Likewise, the formation of an integrated defense and military agenda would discredit “separate efforts to build or maintain vast military forces for self-defense which would be ineffective in any major attack upon our separate states.”xv He regards the outcomes of inability to integrate military assets for continental defense as probable to create uncertainty and the prospects of reaching defense agreements with powerful foreign states, which would threaten the security of the whole of Africa. Ultimately, a collective foreign policy would give Africa the power “to speak with one voice in the councils of the world”.xvi He envisioned a continental government made up of an upper house to guarantee equality of the allied nations, irrespective of population and size, and a lower house to talk about issues confronting Africa. He demanded that the path toward continental parliament must start with a core of several states devoted to the goals of economic and political integration and “leave the door open for the attachment of others as they desire to join or reach the freedom which would allow them to do so”.xvii Nkrumah claimed that Canada, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States were exemplars of the advantages of unity. Nevertheless, he was cautious in stressing that any cosmopolitan system for Africa did not imply an invalidation of national independence. He stressed that African nations “would continue to exercise independent authority except in the fields defined and reserved for common action in the interests of the security and orderly development of the whole continent.”xviii In general, he maintained “that the continental union of Africa is an inescapable desideratum if we are determined to move forward to a realization of our hopes and plans for creating a modern society”.xix He concluded his book with an interpretation of the historical prospects African union showed to the African people and leaders. He strongly proclaimed: Here is a challenge which destiny has thrown out to the leaders of Africa. It is for us to grasp what is a golden opportunity to prove that the genius of the African people can surmount the separatist tendencies in sovereign nationhood by coming together speedily, for the sake of Africa’s greater glory and infinite well-being, into a Union of African states.xx Regardless of his colleagues’ interpretation of the prospect of Africa Must Unite, it built the political foundation for him to strengthen his campaign for Pan-Africanism. Nkrumah profoundly knows that the difficulties confronted by peoples of the world would not be completely resolved if Africa’s predicament was not dealt with, and so he vowed to devote the rest of his life to this task. In this movement, Nkrumah had considerable support from other advocates, because they also realized the urgency of resolving the African issue. Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan foretold at the African/African-American Summit in 1991 the restoration of Africa as a region and invited all African people to take part in this campaign for he thought that the economic recovery of the whole world was in the hands of Africa.xxi He proclaimed Africa as the world’s economic solution. Likewise, Ali Mazrui declared in 2001, “Africa in the twenty first century is likely to be the final battle ground of the forces of globalization—for better or worse”.xxii Kwame Nkrumah, the Cold War, and Civil Rights Movement The African American revolutionary movement, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, is an issue buried in historical misinterpretation and obscurity. One of the most surprising misinterpretations about African American militancy involves their collaboration and, at crucial moments, union with dominant politics. It has become spontaneous for numerous scholars to disregard African American radicalism, emphasizing its peculiarity or arguing that it is detached from African American people and interests. Here, African American nationalists and American liberals have been in a surprising consensus. Therefore, to understand the African American revolutionary movement is to remember the circumstances that facilitated social and personal changes. Primarily, there was a time wherein Black revolutionists stressed the connection between African liberation campaigns and U.S.-rooted civil rights movement and faced the postwar rise of American global power. Black revolutionists’ condemnation of the inconsistency between American principles of freedom and the rejection of voting and civil rights was gradually reaching an agreement in American and global youth, over the repression of rebellion during the Cold War.xxiii Furthermore, prospects for freedom were shown in the energy of African American popular culture. Moreover, after the Second World War, modern jazz was a place for intercultural African diasporic unity and worldwide political consciousness.xxiv Ultimately, the rise of African states from colonialism, most notably Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership, contributed to the strengthening of the historical thrust of U.S.-rooted freedom movements and motivated African diasporic unity. These occurrences were barely negligible but profoundly and naturally foundational. At these times, for numerous individuals, features of cultural extremism determine the mainstream; they nurture new identities, goals, and visions and involve a sense of involvement in the process of history-making.xxv Black revolutionists, alongside the southern African American masses organized in rebellion against segregation, were one of the first advocates of a growing agreement for social change and freedom in the latter part of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, motivated by the campaigns for African freedom and civil rights.xxvi This is not to refute conflicts or gaps among and between African American revolutionists and their supporters. Moreover, it would not be correct to refute that there were basic conflicts between Black revolutionists and liberal on the important issue of the connection between African freedom and the civil rights movement to the cold war. The impact of African freedom and Ghana on the political thoughts of the world is revealed by the singularity of Black expatriates, whose political perspective was illustrative of that period’s sense of revolutionary tendency. Between the 1950s and 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, a large number of African Americans, involving members of trade unions, artists, teachers, technicians, and intellectuals, moved from the U.S. into Ghana, the first country in the sub-Saharan region to achieve its independence from colonialism.xxvii Nothing is unexpected about this remarkable migration. The first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, studied in the U.S. in the 1930s. In the 1950s, in a number of visits to the U.S., Nkrumah toughened his bond to the Black intellectuals, inviting its members to help Ghana achieve its cause on behalf of Pan-African unity.xxviii For instance, W.E.B. Dubois devoted his final years as Ghana’s citizen and the head of the Encyclopedia Africana program.xxix Ghana was an attraction for the Blacks, whose approval of Nkrumah’s radical Pan-Africanism, African regional solidarity, and politics of non-alignment was strengthened by their resentment toward the cold war injustices and racial prejudices of the American society. Ghana’s independence, as well as that of the developing African states, had an influence on the awareness and perception of African Americans. Black emigrants in Ghana embodied an autonomous African American revolutionary scrutiny of cold war liberalism. In the early period of the civil rights, Ghana was, for the emigrants and other advocates, a motivating representation of African American power.xxx Representative of this earlier embodiment of African American power, Blacks all over the world hailed Ghana and Nkrumah for their courage and guidance on behalf of Pan-African freedom. The case of Ghana reconfirmed for numerous civil rights advocates in the U.S. the belief that history was their ally. For other people, Ghana represented the achievement of long-established Black ambitions for African nationhood, which were already present since the formation of the Pan-African tradition, the 1930s Italian occupation of Ethiopia, and Garveyism.xxxi With African Diaspora scholars like Richard Wright and C.L.R. James, and others predisposed to go beyond Soviet and European Marxist traditions, the nonaligned nation of Ghana functioned as a typical manifestation of their socialist political perspective.xxxii As Ghana tried to create a status of nonalignment in the cold war that was autonomous from the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the African American emigrants in Ghana and their supporters in the U.S. conducted the same movement for autonomy against cold war ideals and the efforts of the American government to enforce restrictions on the political medium and strategies of Black campaigns and militants. The revolutionary guarantee of the first republic of Ghana and its possible impact on the nature and conditions of activism in the U.S. outside movements for official equality and civil rights resulted in rigorous formal policies of suppression and surveillance.xxxiii Indeed, throughout the early period of the civil rights, Black revolutionary activism was conveyed in moral criticisms of cold war liberalism, support for African liberation, approval of the Cuban Revolution, a promotion of armed self-protection against the alleged formal acceptance of segregationist hostility, and support for the removal of the House Un-American Activities Committee.xxxiv The African American activism was like this throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and this revolutionary perspective revealed a major inclination in African American politics, though barred or disremembered. The achievement of Black politics in the 1960s cannot be completely appreciated without the mention of Ghana and the global militancy represented by the emigrants or expatriates. Black revolutionists, inspired by the militancy of Ghana and Nkrumah, were involved in a continuous discussion over Pan-African individuality throughout the cold war. Throughout the Second World War, assertions of Black unity linking Black radicalism with the independence movement of Africans were vital to Black revolutionary politics. However, as argued by Penny Von Eschen, with the cold war maltreatment of Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others, the support of African Americans for anticolonial campaigns in Africa chanced official scrutiny as unbearable condemnation of both the national and international policies of the American government.xxxv With the coming together of African liberation campaigns and the civil rights movement, Black jazz artists, scholars, and performers questioned and defied the prevailing cold war criticisms that tried to limit the political individualities of African Americans and, in fact, to wipe away the political radicalism of the postwar period from the memory of African Americans. The hyped liberation of Ghana from colonialism in 1957, concurrent with hostile racial discontent in the South, triggered resurrection in Black unity and radicalism.xxxvi The latter part of the 1950s also witnessed the formation of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC). The organization aimed to encourage cultural interaction, cooperation, and greater collective consciousness between African American and African scholars.xxxvii Even though its dominant scholars were cold war liberals, the organization accommodate liberal and radical African authors, artists, and musicians to freely demonstrate their global images of unity. Black journalists were also integral to this organization of radical scholars. Popular authors like James Baldwin and Lorrain Hansberry justified the movement and criticized the efforts of cold war liberals to get rid of independent African American rebellion.xxxviii African American emigrants in Ghana also embraced the perspective of the revolutionary activists in the U.S. who were keenly opposed to a one-sided civil rights program, interventionist approach of the U.S. foreign policy, federal apathy top segregationist hostility, and cold war anticommunism.xxxix This organization greatly prioritized African and African American campaigns for equality and declined to replace these objectives with cold war anticommunism. The organization praised Robeson for his defiance to silence his opinions against American racial discrimination by surrendering to anticommunist witch persecutions.xl The experiences of Du Bois, Robeson, and others enlightened this global group of Black activists that cold war anticommunism was a hindrance to the struggle against racism. From the beginning, these activists were very cynical of the American government, which appeared all over the 1960s to be more focused on the African countries’ views of a U.S. rent with racial conflict than on dealing promptly with the claims of civil rights activists.xli For American legislators who were inclined to view racial conflict as a publicity boon for the Soviet Union, it was vital that Black leadership, African countries, and the national civil rights movement avoid publicly questioning American foreign and national policies. For the emigrants, there were many routes to Ghana, from unforced relocation to involuntary exile. However, they were unified in their aversion toward U.S. racialism and their support for the objective of African freedom. From their distinctive standpoint, such personalities as the art scholar Sylvia Boone, the author Maya Angelou, the social thinkers W.E.B. Du Bois, and Elizabeth Drake, and their supporters expressed in the 1960s criticisms of U.S. imperialism and racism that would become widespread by 1968.xlii As the masses demonstrated for liberation and employment opportunities in 1963, a group of Ghana emigrants protested the U.S. embassy in Accra, criticizing the decision of Kennedy to intervene in Vietnam and Cuba, the government’s pacification of the apartheid administration in South Africa, and its delaying tactics on civil rights.xliii As the politically involved scholar among the Ghana emigrants, Julian Mayfield participated passionately in these protests. In 1961, Mayfield arrived at Ghana, running away from federal authorities probing his part in Robert Williams’s armed self-protection campaign in North Carolina.xliv Mayfied became the speech writer of Nkrumah in Ghana and the editor-in-chief of an independent radical newsletter on Pan-African political affairs—the African Review. The written works of Mayfield endorsed Ghana’s call for socialist politics and regional solidarity and were extensively distributed all over the U.S. and in Africa.xlv His articles frequently contained vivid accounts of the hostile opposition of white southerners to voting rights for Africans and desegration. The conditions of Mayfield’s banishment to Ghana and his efforts here reveal the tensed relationship between American bureaucracy and the expatriates, and as well as with the dominant civil rights movement. Mayfield and others challenged the campaign’s focus on peaceful demonstrations and called for the expansion of the movement to include the economic predicament of the Black people in northern slums. From their point of view, peaceful demonstrations do not have force or persuasive ability when the American government itself appeared hesitant to castigate segregationist defenders or safeguard civil rights activists.xlvi The cynicism of expatriates about nonviolence was influenced not just by Jim Crow’s reign of terror but also by the brutal suppression of African peoples and their campaigns for liberation, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo in 1961 and the carnage in Sharperville, South Africa.xlvii The Ghana emigrants and their supporters in the U.S. were very much doubtful of traditional accounts of national race relations. In fact, their global attitude was an outcome of the range of international and national episodes of white racialism in Harlem’s multicultural Black community.xlviii With the military takeover of the administration of Nkrumah in 1966, militant expatriates moved on to their next destination—Tanzania.xlix For Black expatriates, Nkrumah’s Black Power was many-sided. They encountered Africa and Ghana diversely as a political refuge, as a harbor for practical and professional prospects unrestricted by racial prejudice, and, primarily, as the final haven for human freedom. More idealistically, some expatriates considered African and Ghana as home. The important message is that for these expatriates, the forefront of the Black movement is ‘home’, and throughout the 1960s this was regarded as Ghana.l Somewhat unfettered there by the oppressive cold war environment that labeled antiracist rebellion ‘un-American’ and that despised efforts to link global and local movements for democracyli, the expatriates celebrated in the widened prospects in Ghana for African identity and African nationhood. Conclusions Kwame Nkrumah was a visionary, a leader that promoted peace but struggled toward African unity. Although his mission to unite the whole of Africa failed, Nkrumah became one of the strongest inspirations of the civil rights movement. His efforts to achieve independence for the Gold Coast and to unify African states further drove the fight for civil rights in the United States. The Ghana expatriates attest to this fact. Because of Nkrumah, the world was reminded once more that Black activism, as a reaction to colonialism, racial prejudice, and state aggression, is critical to the continuing fight for equality and justice. Notes Read More