Gaines, Kevin. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Summary
Intertwining biography of such figures as George and Dorthy Padmore, W.E.B. and Shirley Graham-DuBois, Efua Sutherland, Maya Angelou, Pauli Murray St. Clair Drake and Julian Mayfield with the larger context of the time period, Gaines’ American Africans examines how the national independence of Ghana and other African nations informed African American’s struggles for equal citizenship and sparked political contest in both the United States and Africa over the image of the American nation and the formation of modern black and African subjects. “The simultaneous upheavals touched off by decolonization in Africa and civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. South,” Gaines writes, “shaped the political outlook of black intellectuals and activists in northern cities.” (5) Ghana thus became a haven for African American intellectuals and activists “working at the intersection of anticolonial, civil rights, leftist, and pacifist movements.” The story of these expatriates in Ghana illuminates the “challenges and contradictions posed by Cold War liberalism and American hegemony during the 1960s.” (11) America’s declared support of desegregation and decolonization masked the repression of black radicals. The account of these African American expatriates, Gaines contends, resituates the U.S. Civil rights movement within a key development of the 20th century: “the challenge to the bipolar vision of postwar global order posed by the emergence of new African and Asian states.” (12) (*Challenge/debate to the notion that they – expatriates – were Americans first) It also reveals that the articulation of American liberal ideology was far from being race-neutral and, Gaines further argues, was an ideology “formulated in direct response to an oppositional black politics skeptical of integration and animated by anticolonialism.” All of this expatriates – in varying degrees – attempted to use Ghana (symbolically) to articulate a different vision/identity of African Americans, in particular a black internationalism/pan-Africanism; yet, the political context of the Cold War and the limitations of Nkrumah’s government in Ghana (and its own repressive policies) limited the possibilities of this vision.