Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that African Americans were part of a broad and multifaceted effort to isolate South Africa in the global political arena. By repeatedly attempting to offer direct support to African liberation movements and calling for America to renounce its political and economic ties with the National Party, their actions made life difficult for white politicians in ways that that would continue to inform the global anti-apartheid movement beyond the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. This argument is not meant to downplay the disruptive influence that anticommunism had on black protest. Rather, it is designed to shift the focus onto the ways in which black activists, with different political visions, responded to state power. Finally, given the broad response of African Americans to the anti-apartheid movement, this concluding chapter suggests that we might need to move towards a more expansive definition of black internationalism – one that accounts for the anticolonial political agenda and transnational solidarities forges by both African American leftists and liberals.

Crossing the Black Atlantic

This chapter explores how trans-Atlantic travel provided an important avenue through which black activists related to one another’s struggles. It also demonstrates how the U.S. and South African governments worked to regulate and restrict transnational black travel during the early Cold War. Focusing in on the lesser-known transatlantic journeys of Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, and Z. K. and Frieda Matthews, the chapter argues that these individuals acted as important cultural translators that physically connected the struggle against racism in both countries. Finally, by tracing the international opposition to the removal of Paul Robeson’s passport, the chapter shows how experiences of state repression could be negotiated in ways that further strengthened bonds of solidarity between African Americans and black South Africans.

Selling White Supremacy in the United States

This chapter traces South African foreign policy responses to the civil rights movement in the United States. It explores how the National Party engaged with the racial politics of the Cold War in an attempt legitimize apartheid to an increasingly sceptical global audience. The National Party did not shy away from challenging negative portrayals of apartheid. In the United States, South African diplomatic officials mounted a systematic propaganda campaign to correct “misconceptions” and present the apartheid system in a positive light. Equating black protest with communist subversion, South African diplomats engaged in a deliberate and sustained effort to defend apartheid in the United States.

Black Internationalism, Anticommunism, and the Prison

Chapters 5 and 6 both document how African Americans and black South Africans established the prison as a key site of black international protest in the 1950s. Specifically, chapter 5 examines how anticommunism operated as a global language that was employed to bolster white supremacy and limit black protest. However, this section of the book also demonstrates how black activists responded to their arrest and imprisonment by strategically connected white settler colonialism in southern Africa to racism in America. This resulted in political prisoners on both sides of the Atlantic being configured as icons of resistance, heroic figures through which black international solidarities were launched and maintained.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of racial politics in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. It traces how African Americans and black South Africans have historically configured their struggles as being interconnected, while documenting how anticommunism limited opportunities for transnational black activism between both countries during the early Cold War.

The National Council of Negro Women and Apartheid

This chapter examines the anti-apartheid politics of the Washington-based National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Outlining the organization’s broader commitment to black international politics, it shows how its leadership worked with the State Department as it ought to expand its international activities in this era. As such, the chapter demonstrates how black liberals adapted to the climate of the Cold War when attempting to challenge colonialism overseas. Finally, by tracing the involvement of the NCNW with the African Children’s Feeding Scheme initiative, the chapter documents how highly gendered representations of the African family worked to promote a diasporic consciousness among African Americans. During the 1950s, images of the oppressed African mother, the poor and malnourished African child, and the African family in need of protection were deliberately employed as gendered motifs around which black women could build international alliances.

Motherhood, Anti-Apartheid, and Pan-African Politics

This chapter examines how the gendered language of motherhood informed black international connections between South Africa and the United States. It argues that global black motherhood – defined as a form of transnational maternalist politics based around the shared experiences of black women in white supremacist societies – shaped racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates how black women in the United States and South Africa transformed the domestic sphere into a site where citizenship claims could be made. By privileging their position within the home, as primary caregivers for the black family, they worked to stress the political significance of black motherhood in the global fight against white supremacy.

South Africa, the United States, and the Racial Politics of the Cold War

This chapter examines the relationship between anticommunism and transnational black activism. The racial politics of the United States and South Africa became even more closely interconnected during the early Cold War. The political, economic and military ties that were established between the U.S. and South African governments at this moment dramatically reshaped how African Americans and black South Africans engaged in one another struggles. As the apartheid state positioned themselves as a key bulwark against the spread of communism in Southern Africa, black activists on both sides of the Atlantic mobilized to challenge this relationship.

Political Prisoners

This chapter examines the gendered language political prisoners used to frame their experiences and the moral legitimacy of their struggles. In South Africa, prison was where this heroic vision of black masculinity could be forged. Black political prisoners used their carceral experiences to construct specific gender identities that affirmed their status as political leaders in the public sphere. In this configuration, the prison experiences of African women were often neglected. This led to black women often being cast as vulnerable figures in need of protection and denied their agency as political actors. Finally, the chapter traces how groups such as the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) and the ANC Women’s League engaged with and challenged this masculinist vison of black protest.

African American Culture, Consumer Magazines, and Black Modernity

Cultural exchange provided another vitally important avenue through which black South Africans engaged with, understood, and were influenced by African American life. Images of black cultural and economic success from across the Atlantic directly challenged white supremacist assumptions, providing black South Africans with a lens to assess the extent to which their lives were constrained and circumscribed by the modern apartheid state. These cross-cultural connections featured heavily in the pages of South African consumer magazines, especially the popular monthly publication Zonk!. The magazine’s transatlantic coverage gives an insight into how black South Africans envisioned and engaged with African American culture in the aftermath of World War II.