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.