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‘To the benefit of Africa, the world, and ourselves’: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) Mission to Nigeria, 1966–1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2021

James Austin Farquharson
James Austin Farquharson*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: james.farquharson@acu.edu.au
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Abstract

Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which Black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.

Keywords

African AmericanNigeriaBiafraBlack InternationalismCivil War

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Article
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Journal of Global History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 457 - 476
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 ‘4 To Try For Peace in Nigeria’, New York Amsterdam News, 23 March 1968, 2.

2 Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 330–1.

3 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Beyond Vietnam’, (speech, New York, April 4, 1967), The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/kingpapers/documents/beyond-vietnam. For a work that explores King’s global moral and political commitments see Lewis V. Baldwin, ed., “In a Single Garment of Destiny”: A Global Vision of Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).

4 Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122–3.

5 See Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘The World House’, (speech, 1967), The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, http://pluralism.org/document/the-world-house-martin-luther-king-jr-1967/.

6 Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 103–104.

7 Ibid.

8 Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 204–207.

9 Plummer, In Search of Power, 194–9.

10 For an example of how Black Power ideas reshaped the black internationalism of the African American community see Benjamin Talton’s biography of Congressman Mickey Leland. See Benjamin Talton, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

11 Three early works that capture the international dimensions of the Nigerian Civil War are Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2015). The Biafra Story was originally published in 1969. See Also Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafra War 1967–1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972); John de St. Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972).

12 For works that explore this angle see Bonny Ibhawoh, ‘Refugees, Evacuees, and repatriates: Biafran Children, UNHCR, and the Politics of International Humanitarianism in the Nigerian Civil War’, African Studies Review 63, no. 3 (2020), 568–92; Brad Simpson, ‘The Biafran Secession and the Limits of Selfdetermination’, Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 2–3 (2014), 337–54; See also Chapter Seven of Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Brian McNeil, ‘“And Starvation is the Grim Reaper”: The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question During the Nigerian Civil War, 1968–1970’, in Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970, eds. A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerten (New York: Routledge, 2018), 278–300.

13 ‘[T]he emergence of African states from colonial rule’, wrote historian Kevin Gaines, ‘further lent a sense of historic momentum to U.S-based freedom struggles and inspired black diaspora solidarities’. See Kevin K. Gaines, ‘African American Expatriates in Ghana and the Black Radical Tradition’, in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, eds. Vanessa Agard-Jones and Manning Marable (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 294.

14 See Bayard Rustin, ‘How Black Americans see Black Africa – and vice versa’, in Time of Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, eds., Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise (San Francisco: Cleis Press Inc, 2003), 314–17; John A. Davis, ‘Black Americans and United States Policy towards Africa’, Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 2 (1969), 242–43; Plummer, In Search of Power, 199; Roy M. Melbourne, ‘The American Response to the Nigerian conflict, 1968’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 3, no. 2 (1973), 39; Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 14.

15 Plummer, In Search of Power, 194.

16 Meriwether noted that ‘African Americans found that bringing attention to bear on liberation movements that were fighting readily identified proponents of white supremacy offered a much more effective rallying point than did independent countries that were struggling to combat subtler enemies – economic, political, and cultural conundrums that had no ready-made solution’. See Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 239240.

17 Plummer, In Search of Power, 20.

18 ‘The Negro looks to America’, New York Amsterdam News, 8 December 1962, 13.

19 Ibid.

20 Plummer, In Search of Power, 123.

21 M.S. Handler, ‘Negroes ask role in foreign policy: leaders to meet in capital – White House interested’, New York Times, 9 July 1964, 15.

22 For works exploring liberal black internationalism see Jason C. Parker, ‘“Made-in-America Revolutions”? The ‘Black University’ and the American role in the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic’, The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009), 727–50; James Meriwether, ‘“Worth a lot of Negro votes”: Black voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign’, The Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008), 737–63; Carol Anderson, ‘Rethinking Radicalism: African Americans and the Liberation Struggles in Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea, 1945–1949’, Journal of The Historical Society 11, no. 4 (2011), 385–423.

23 Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2. Historian Manfred Berg also makes a similar point, but with more focus on domestic civil rights. See Manfred Berg, ‘Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War’, The Journal of American History 94, no.1 (2007), 75–96.

24 Robert Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, transcript of an oral history conducted on August 20, 1968 by Robert Martin, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington DC, 1968, 1–9.

25 See Nicholas Grant, Winning Our Freedom Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Christopher Tinson, Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

26 Paul Hoffmann, “Bunche says ‘60 is year of Africa: symposium finds new unity in anti-colonialism – U.N. membership rise seen”, New York Times, 17 February 1960, 15.

27 For a more detailed analysis of the depth of this relationship see James Farquharson, ‘“Black America Cares”: The Response of African Americans to the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970’ (PhD diss., Australian Catholic University, 2019), 24–100.

28 Memorandum From Theodore E. Brown to Dorothy Height, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, 21 March 1967, Box A42, File “NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69,” The Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (TRNAACP), Library of Congress (LOC), Washington, DC.29 Memorandum From Theodore E. Brown, 21 March 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.

29 ‘Eastern Area warned by Leader of Nigeria’, New York Times, 15 March 1967, 10; Lloyd Garrison, ‘Lagos is warned by East Nigeria’, New York Times, 14 March 1967, 11.

30 Transcript of Aburi Conference, 7, Organisation of African Unity, Box 8, Nigeria Biafra Clearing House (NBCH), Swarthmore College Peace Collection (SCPC).

31 ‘Nigerian Unity’, The Chicago Defender, 28 January 1967, 10.

32 James Baldwin, ‘A Negro assays the Negro mood’, New York Times, 21 March 1961, SM 25.

33 Simon Anekwe, ‘Two sides to Nigeria’s troubles presented in conferences here’, New York Amsterdam News, 25 March 1967, 20.

34 ‘Help for Nigeria’, New York Amsterdam News, 25 March 1967, 14.

35 Ibid.

36 Memorandum From Theodore E. Brown to Dorothy Height, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, 21 March 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69,’ The Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (TRNAACP), Library of Congress (LOC), Washington, DC.

37 Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, 10.

38 See Parker, ‘“Made-in-America Revolutions”? ’, 728.

39 Memorandum From Theodore E. Brown to Dorothy Height, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, ‘The Nigerian Crisis’, 13 September 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC. 41 Letter from S.O. Adabo to Theodore Brown, 28 March 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966-69’, TRNAACP. LOC.

40 Letter from Aggrey K. Oji to Theodore Brown, March 28, 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

41 Letter from Theodore Brown to Roy Wilkins, 21 April 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’” TRNAACP, LOC.

42 Cablegram from Ade Martins to Theodore Brown, 26 April 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

43 Memorandum from Theodore Brown to King, Randolph, Wilkins & Young, 28 March 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

44 ‘Americans offer mediation of Nigeria division crisis’, New York Amsterdam News, 20 May 1967, 34,47 ‘The Nigerian Tide’, New York Amsterdam News, May 27, 1967, 16.

45 Ibid.

46 Memorandum from Theodore Brown to all Conference Participants, 17 May 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

47 Memorandum from T.E. Brown to R. Wilkins, W. Young, A.P. Randolph, M.L. King, ‘RE: Nigeria’, 14 June 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

48 Memorandum from Brown, 13 September 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.

49 Ibid.

50 Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, 11.

51 Memorandum from Brown, 13 September 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.

52 Memorandum from Brown, 13 September 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.56 Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, 9.

53 Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, 53.

54 Plummer, In Search of Power, 187.

55 Komozi Woodard, ‘Amiri Baraka, The Congress of Africa People, and the Black Power Politics from the 1961 United Nations Protest to the 1972 Gary Convention’, in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 56–57.

56 Memorandum from Theodore E. Brown to Call Committee ANLCA, ‘Third Biennial Conference and proposed permanent organization’, 29 June 1966, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

57 Steven Metz, ‘Congress, the antiapartheid movement, and Nixon’, Diplomatic History 12, no. 2 (1988), 169.

58 Letter from Roy Wilkins and A.P. Randolph to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, 28 September 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 ‘The government officials [including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Joseph E. Palmer, II] expressed warm approval of the Negro leaders efforts in seeking ways and means to resolve the humanitarian aspects of the problem and they assured the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, through the Executive Director, that our efforts met with the approval of our government’ See Memorandum from Theodore Brown, September 13, TRNAACP, LOC.

62 Memorandum from Theodore Brown, 13 September 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.

63 Ibid.

64 ‘Nigeria in trouble’, The Chicago Defender, 28 October 1967, 10.

65 ‘Guest editorial: Nigeria’s travails’, Call and Post, 14 October 1967, 5B.

66 ‘WCC appeal for Nigeria’, New Pittsburgh Courier, 21 October 1967, 6.

67 Simon Anekwe, ‘Africa Today – Search of Peace’, New York Amsterdam News, 28 October 1967, 17.

68 ‘Press release: Four top rights leaders considering Africa trip’, 17 December 1967, Box A42, File ‘NAACP Administration 1966- General Office File American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa 1966–69’, TRNAACP, LOC.

69 ‘4 top rights leaders consider Africa trip’, The Chicago Defender, 23 December 1968, 32; ‘civil rights leaders may go to Nigeria’, New York Amsterdam News, 13 January 1968, 26; ‘leaders may visit country: concern is shown over Nigeria war’, New Pittsburgh Courier, 30 December 1967, 23; ‘local churches to hear Dr. King’, Los Angeles Sentinel, 14 March 1968, D4.

70 ‘The American Negro community and the Nigerian Civil War’, The Crisis, January 1968, 20.

71 See Sarah Claire Dunstan, ‘Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment’, Callaloo 39, no. 1 (2016), 133–50.

72 Simon Anekwe, ‘Africa Today – The Leadership’, New York Amsterdam News, 27 January 1968, 15. In using the term ‘Black Power’, Anekwe demonstrates the malleability of the term both in a domestic and international context, and how it could be easily coopted by a broad spectrum of individual and groups – ranging from liberals to radicals – in the black freedom struggle. See Simon Hall, ‘The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966–69’, The Historian 69, no. 1 (2007): 49–82. 77 Martin, ‘Interview with Theodore E. Brown’, 17.

73 For an overview of the dynamics of foreign intervention in postcolonial Africa see Chapter one of Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign interventions in Africa from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18–33; see also Odd Arne Westad, Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131–43.

74 John J. Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 114.

75 ‘Nigeria needs the O.A.U’, New York Times, 28 September 1967, 46.

76 Heerten, The Biafran War, 72–76; Stremlau, The International Politics, 94–96.

77 For further reading on this tradition in the black diaspora see Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: PanNegro Patriot 1832–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 19; Brandon R. Byrd, ‘Black Republicans, Black Republic: African-Americans, Haiti, and the promise of Reconstruction’, Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 4 (2014), 546; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 83–84.

78 Memorandum from Brown, 13 September 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.84 ‘The American Negro community and the Nigerian Civil War’, 20.

79 Hollis R. Lynch, K.O. Mbadiwe: A Nigerian Political Biography, 1915–1990 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 219.

80 Ben A. Franklin, ‘Dr. King hints he’d cancel march if aid is offered’, New York Times, 1 April 1968, 20.

81 ‘US Leaders Urge End to Hunger in Biafra’, The Crisis, October 1968, 291; Roy Wilkins, ‘Wilkins Speaks: Nigerian War saddens all Blacks’, Afro-American, 31 December 1968, 4; Whitley M. Young, ‘To be equal: The Biafra crisis’, New York Amsterdam News, 21 September 1968, 14.

82 Moses Newson, ‘Brooke says U.S can’t go into Nigeria at will’, Afro-American, 18 January 1969,1; ‘Diggs blast idea of link to Biafra’, Afro-American, 24 May 1969, 1; ‘Biafra picture colored – Diggs’, Afro-American, 8 March 1969, 1.

83 See Position Paper of the Joint Afro Committee on Biafra, undated, Box 3, Folder ‘Joint Afro Committee on Biafra, 1969’, American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive Collection, Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford, CA.

84 Memorandum from T.E. Brown to R. Wilkins, 14 June 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.

85 ‘Press release Negro leaders offer to mediate Nigerian civil crisis’, 27 March 1967, TRNAACP, LOC.