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)