This episode explores how the civil rights movement in the US was connected to similar movements in other countries around the world.
Transcript: Civil Rights: International Connections and Broad Movements
Penny: So the story of race in America is really complicated. Could you define for me what Pan- Africanism means?
Eric: A belief in the unity of African peoples, whether they’re on the continent or in the diaspora, the unity of African peoples and sharing of destiny.
Will: So, again, these these are very much local stories with global connections.
Penny: Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome to this episode in the diversity inclusion for all projects of Calvin University. This is a mini-series inside of this project on the topic of Race in America. And today's episode, we're looking a little bit again at the civil rights movement in the United States and its connection to other movements, especially in the broader global context. Our guests today again are Eric Washington and Wil Katerberg.
Can you help us understand a little bit how the civil rights movement in the United States was connected and what kind of effects it had in other areas of the world where oppression was a problem?
Eric: Yeah, I think the most celebrated case of how civil rights movement United States connected globally would be during the 1950s as African-Americans are protesting for …, for their own civil rights and United States. They're also connected to what's going on in the 1950s in South Africa. It’s the era of apartheid in South Africa and the African National Congress especially is undergoing its own type of civil rights movement fighting against white supremacy and white supremacist policies and using basically the same tactics that the African-American civil rights organizations are using. So the news news is traveling. The African-American press is covering what's going on in South Africa. And there's this convergence of cause where you do see African-Americans on the streets in the United States who are carrying placards talking about “end apartheid.” You can see that during 1950s.
And one thing want to add to that is the presence of African-Americans in March of 1957, at the dawn of independence in Ghana. Martin Luther King (and) the African-American civil rights leaders are there in March 1957, This is interesting line, the story that's told Kevin Gaines's book on Americans, American Africans in Ghana. Nixon is actually there in Ghana in 1957. And he's elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder with a black man. And he asks the black man, he says, How does it feel to be getting your independence? The black man tells Nixon. I don't know. I'm from Alabama.
Will: Oh, man. It's worth noting the other side of the story, too. So if African-Americans, both those who think in terms of civil rights and those who think in terms of black nationalism are closely watching and interested in and feeling common cause with independence movements among African nations that were still colonies of European countries or opponents of apartheid in South Africa, the same is true on the other side of the line. As desegregation movements get going, you get the formation of what were known as white citizens councils in the south, which defended segregation. And they published newspapers. And if you read those newspapers, you'll see that they comment on what's going on in African colonies, particularly places like Rhodesia now Zimbabwe or Kenya or Algeria, where there were large white settler populations. And they see common cause with what's happening in South Africa. So they see their story as white segregationists, as part of a global story of maintaining white supremacy and preventing black freedom.
Penny: How does the civil rights movement in the United States…how is that viewed by, for example, different groups in South Africa or in Rhodesia or in the other places in Africa, where there was sort of decolonization starting to happen at that time?
Eric: I mean, we can go all the way back to the the teens 19-teens, in terms of how, say, the African National Congress is borrowing civil rights type ideologies from the diaspora, specifically W.E.B. DuBois's idealogy about about civil rights and integration, but also from Marcus Garvey at the same time. In fact, even though Marcus Garvey is not a U.S. citizen, he's a Jamaican citizen but living living in the United States at that time, Marcus Garvey is Universal Negro Improvement has a branch in Cape Town, South Africa. It has branches in Liberia, although Liberia is in struggle for independence. But nevertheless, that shows you the influence of civil rights type ideology is coming from the diaspora that are making their way across across the ocean. And uh Mussolini invades Ethiopia in 1935, that sets off movements and associations in the United States among African-Americans to support and perhaps …[…] and also support the the commitment to get the Italians out of the Ethiopian. You have African-American men want to go fight for them, but they’re disallowed by by the federal government. But so basically, you have you have a stream and an unending uninterrupted stream.
You can also talk about Pan Africanist movement that that begins at the very beginning of the 20th century, where you have conversations with DuBois, C.L.R. James he’s from Trinidad. But also he spends time in the United States, also in England. Kwame Nkrumah Ghanna, the first president of Ghana, he spent time in the United States. He's rubbing elbows with with both Dubois and James, and he rubs elbows with others of the diaspora in London during the time he's bringing back Pan-Africanist ideas back to then the Gold Coast, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. He's in London during the 1940s and he's bringing back pan-Africanist ideas back to Kenya, their struggle for independence. So, yeah, there's this stream that you see throughout those nationalist movements in Africa that have direct connection to what's going on in the diaspora in the United States.
Penny: Could you define for me what Pan-Africanism means?
Eric: Most scholars, and I wouldn't see myself in this, we we look at the writings of Henry Silvester Williams, who was a Trinidadian lawyer, who's basically like the father of pan-Africanism, and he as well as that would be W.E.B. DuBois in the United States, would define an Africanism as a belief in the unity of African peoples, whether they on the continent or in the diaspora, the unity of African peoples and sharing of destiny, because all by this time, all African peoples were either under the colonial rule, Africa and the Caribbean, or in a semi-colonial situation of African-Americans and in the United States. And the beliefs, the political beliefs that all Africans and people of the African diaspora, their political destinies are intertwined. So the struggle the United States is is not disconnected from the struggle in the Caribbean and the struggle (there is not) disconnected from the struggles and in Africa, …Pan Africanism.
Penny: And the idea of all Africans having some common sense of togetherness and fate or calling and purpose does that refer to what is sometimes called “black Africa” as opposed to white Africa or the more Mediterranean area, or is it all of Africa as the continent?
Eric: All of Africa as a continent. All of Africa. So when Gamal Nasser in the early fifties in Egypt, stages a coup. Yes. Africans throughout the continent. African diaspora by Nasser …He’s…He's considered just like anybody else on the continent. Same thing will be with what's going on what is going on in Nigeria in the late 50s and early 60s.
Penny: So it seems like the Pan-Africanism movement is in some ways really a reaction or a direct response against different colonial… colonialism, colonization that had happened in the previous decades.
Eric: Yeah, it’s a response against. Again, it's well, it's a.. It's a response to slavery because mid just to late 19th century, when you have the, I would say, nascent pan-African movement as it’s just beginning. So in the United States, what you're about a generation removed from from enslavement, in the Caribbean, about a generation and a half, maybe two generations. Yeah, it's definitely anti-colonial. And the legacies are the legacies of the slave.
Will: That common cause that Eric is describing leads to a new kind of common identity that, you know, historically Africans wouldn't have thought of themselves as a collective, but they would have thought of themselves in terms of different ethnic or national groups, not unlike Native Americans. They wouldn't have thought of themselves as Indians or as Native Americans or First Nations that the term often used in Canada, they would have thought of themselves as Iroquois or Ojibway or what have you. And their common experiences in response to the arrival of Europeans and conquest and being segregated on to reservation on territories are reserves, as they're called in Canada, creates in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, a sense of common identity as Native Americans. And something similar is happening with Europeans and whites that first in the Americas and later in Europe, people begin to see themselves not just as a French or Italian or Dutch or German or English descent, but as Europeans or as white. And so these are these are once again, sort of global kinds of stories that… and people are anti-racist in the United States and in Africa, are finding common cause in this common cause leads to a sense of common identity.
Penny: And the causes of the civil rights of the United States were really, really echoed in other areas where there had been oppression and colonization and enslavement. And so in some ways, the the civil rights movement was kind of inspiring, kind of a way to galvanize around some common causes, even in other places in the world, especially in Africa.
Will: And those who oppose them similarly so, if you were to read or listen to the rhetoric of white people, say, in Rhodesia now Zimbabwe or South Africa or Alabama or other parts of the United States, you would see them similarly outraged and baffled by decolonization and civil rights movements because they would see themselves or they would have seen themselves as civilizing or uplifting people of color, bringing them civilization, bringing them Christianity. And kind of like ungrateful children, you know, suddenly rebelling against those who were just trying to make their lives better. And, you know, from my point of view, and I'm assuming all three of our points of view, this idea is baffling, but nonetheless, it's there. And then in the more racist, the more corrosive, racist proponents of white supremacy would have seen common cause, that they're trying to maintain something not just where they are, say, in Rhodesia, South Africa, or part of the American south, but once again, part of a global story of of of of racial struggle. And we can see that in contemporary forms of white nationalism and white racism in the 21st century and just in the last few years the globalization of movements of white racism and white supremacy.
Eric: That's interesting, Will, and there's this commonality you see, because you mention settler societies and…
Will: Mmhmm. Yes.
Eric: in South Africa, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia at the time, Algeria, they all settler societies.
Will: Yes.
Eric: And they they have commonalities. In fact, Kenya's white supremacists see their whites use laws, as do the land…They're inspired from what South Africa had done as early as 1913 with the Native Land Act that allotted, what, 80, 86, 87 percent of the land for whites, only 13 for four for Africans. And so so the United States now Algeria, Kenya. So the Rhodesia, South Africa, they're like all in this together in terms of their defense of white supremacist laws and policies and practices. You put all that together to study …that’s an interesting study.
Will: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And you could you could connect that as well to indigenous peoples, that people become aware that their local experience is connected nationally, say, of Native Americans and globally as indigenous peoples. And once again, on the other side, you see the same thing. So so again, these these are very much local stories with global connections.
Penny: And the idea of this settler mentality where white males or white culture is coming in and civilizing and bringing Christianity and all these other good things to otherwise deprived people groups…That's that's the foundation that's sort of the start of our thinking about race in America. It's it's the backdrop for everything that happens after that.
I'm wondering if we can explore a little bit how the civil rights movement affected other groups besides the African-Americans that are so central to the what we associate with Martin Luther King Jr. and the fifties and sixties civil rights movement in the United States. How did the civil rights movement in the United States play out and effect or not, other oppressed or marginalized groups in the United States?
Will: What comes to mind for me is loosely parallel stories. So in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as African-Americans are starting things like the Niagara movement and the NAACP, you find something similar with with Native Americans and their white allies creating what they would have been called Indian rights associations and movements, promoting political equality, promoting sovereignty on reservation territories, in other words, promoting Native American rights. And those organizations or their descendant organizations flourish after World War II, not unlike the civil rights movement for African-Americans does. We tend to think of civil rights, whether for for African-Americans especially, but for Native Americans as a post-World War II thing. But their roots go back to the late 19th and early 20th century. And so Native American organizations in the 1950s and 60s are fighting court cases. They're promoting what was then called tribal, we would probably more today say national, sovereignty on reservation territories. And just like with civil rights among African African-Americans, they start to have some success in the 1950s, but especially the 1960s. And both face determined opposition.
There also were movements among Mexican Americans or Hispanic Americans, especially in the Southwest, but also in California. One of the most famous figures associated with these, of course, is Cesar Chavez. And there part of the story is the rights of migrant workers. But, yeah, with similarly fine efforts to oppose and overcome civil rights inequalities that Chicanos faced, whether it was in housing or registering and voting or holding public office.
I know the story of Asian American movements less well. One of the most distinctive parts of that story is forcing Japanese Americans into what effectively were concentration camps during World War II, where the bulk of the Japanese American population was removed from the Pacific Coast and forced inland into what effectively were called …were concentration camps. They were called relocation camps. And so that that's part of the story for Asian-Americans. But but again, these these are national stories replicated across people groups from different parts of the world seeking equal rights. And in the case of Native Americans, the United States living up to the treaties and the sovereignty that reservation territories were to have by those treaties.
Penny: So the story of race in America is really complicated.
Will: Yes.
Penny: We hope that this episode has helped draw some connections between the civil rights movement in the USA and similar related movements in other parts of the world and among racial groups other than African-Americans.
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