Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937- 1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Summary
“This book traces the rise and fall of the politics of the African diaspora from the late 1930s to the early cold war years.” (p. 2) and the political leaders, intellectuals, journalists, and activists that articulated the bonds between African Americans and all oppressed people, focusing on Council on African Affairs (Paul Robeson, Max Yergan, Alphaeus Hunton), and NAACP (Walter White). By looking at the 1945 Manchester Pan African Congress, the African American support of the Nigerian trade union and the Southern African miners, and the joint efforts of African Americans, South Africans and the government of India in the early days of the UN, African American activists linked anticolonial politics with the emergence of the United States as a world power. Activists thus formed an internationalist politic (diasporic politic) to advocate and agitate for civil rights in the United States. “Architects of the politics of the African diaspora,” Von Eschen writes, “forged an identity of passions through a powerful cross-fertilization of socialist internationalism and the struggles of colonial peoples for independence.” (p. 6)  These African American activists argued that their struggles against Jim Crow were inextricably tied to the struggles for African and Asian peoples struggle for independence. This political project animated African American activists for a brief time. However, “The embrace of Cold War American foreign policy by many African American liberals, as well as US government prosecution of activists such as Robeson and the CAA, fundamentally altered the terms of anticolonialism and effectively severed the black American struggle for civil rights from the issues of anticolonialism and racism abroad.” (p. 3) As a result, the anti-colonialism of the 1940s was eclipsed by the politics of the 1950s where questions concerning economic and social rights “in an international context were neglected in favor of an exclusive emphasis on domestic political and civil rights.” (3)