THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
H I S T O R Y N O T E S
The Making Of A Pan-African: Kwame Nkrumah In America
By Paul Lee
Posted by RUNOKO RASHIDI
In the 20th century, probably no one except Marcus Garvey did more to bring freedom and dignity to black people worldwide than Kwame Nkrumah, the liberator and first president of the West African nation of Ghana.
Yet few today know his name.
His memory is cherished by a dwindling number of veterans of the movements for black liberation in the United States and national independence in Africa and the Caribbean, but even these devotees know little of a key period in his life—his 10 years in the U. S.
Yet it was his American sojourn that shaped Nkrumah into the leading pan-Africanist of the latter half of the 20th century.
Black Star
Nkrumah’s star burst upon the world stage on March 6, 1957. That date was the culmination of, as a British colonial official called it six years earlier, the “most daring political experience yet carried out in Africa.”
At midnight, Nkrumah presided over a solemn ceremony at Black Star square in the capital city of Accra as the symbol of a century of British colonial rule over the Gold Coast, the Union Jack, slipped beneath the floodlights.
Rising in its place was the tri-color flag of red, gold, and green, with a black star at its center, the standard of the new, independent nation of Ghana, the first British colony in Africa to achieve sovereignty in the 20th century.
Ghana, as Nkrumah explained in a 1953 speech, was named after an ancient West African empire. “Thus we take pride in the name of Ghana, not out of romanticism, but as an inspiration for the future,” he said.
On the platform, Nkrumah was flanked by nationalists who, like him, had been imprisoned by the British for demanding “Independence Now.” Resplendent in traditional kente cloth, they proudly donned their prison caps again—this time in victory.
His faced streaked with tears, Nkrumah electrified the crowd when he declared: “At long last, the battle has ended. Your beloved country is free forever.”
After a decade in the U. S. and two years in Britain, Nkrumah’s pan-African connections and sympathies were well established, as was his acute sense of history. Both were poignantly expressed as he inaugurated Ghana into the family of free nations.
“I want simply to thank those who have come from abroad to witness this occasion,” he said. These included such African American luminaries as Ralph Bunche, the chief United Nations trouble-shooter; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fresh from the success of the Montgomery bus boycott; A. Philip Randolph, the grand old man of the civil-rights and labor movements; and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Harlem congressman and pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist church, which a wide-eyed Nkrumah visited during his student days.
Pan-African Education
Nkrumah’s road to the pan-African pantheon began in a small Akan village in southwestern Gold Coast, where he was born in 1909. However, it did not begin in earnest until he left his homeland.
In 1935, Nkrumah arrived in America. With little formal education to commend him and almost no money to sustain him, Nkrumah nevertheless showed promise, winning the confidence of Horace Mann Bond, the president of the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
He studied economics, sociology, and theology, and later did graduate work in philosophy and education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
But Nkrumah’s early years in America were difficult. During summers off, he peddled fish on the streets of Harlem, with meager results, worked in soap factory, which played havoc with his health, and served as a waiter on merchant ships plying the coastlines of the U. S. and Central America.
He also learned what it meant to be black in America—a hard-knocks education that would later make him unique among African heads of state familiar only with the former European colonial powers.
At Lincoln, he quickly developed close relationships with his African American cousins and an avid and enduring interest in their history and culture. In fact, he wrote a “Negro history” series for Lincoln’s student newspaper and taught classes on it at U Penn.
“I was interested in two sociological schools of thought in the States,” Nkrumah recalled, “one represented by the Howard Sociologists led by Professor Fraser [sic], and the other led by Dr. M. J. Herzkovits [sic], Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University.”
Nkrumah was referring to E. Franklin Frazier, the African American author of The Black Bourgeoisie, a professor at Howard University in Wash., DC, and Melville J. Herskovitz, author of the classic The Myth of the Negro Past.
“The Howard school,” Nkrumah wrote, “maintained that the Negro in America had completely lost his cultural contact with Africa and the other school, represented by Herzkovitz, maintained that there were still African survivals in the United States and that the Negro of America had in no way lost his cultural contact with the African continent.
“I supported, and still support, the latter view,” he maintained, “and I went on one occasion to Howard University to defend it.”
In his autobiography, Ghana, Nkrumah recalled that he acquainted himself “with as many political organizations that I could”—that is, groups concerned with black rights and Africa—including the National Urban League and the NAACP.
It was the latter’s special research office that would prove most significant to his pan-African future. It was headed by the brilliant scholar Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, a co-founder of the NAACP, founder and longtime editor of its organ, The Crisis.
Du Bois has been called the “Father of Pan-Africanism” in the 20th century (though Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, convener of the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, has a better claim to the title).
Nkrumah met DuBois near the end of his sojourn in America, about the time the elder intellectual returned to the NAACP after breaking with it a decade earlier over his advocacy of temporary “self-segregation.” Keenly interested in the possibilities for colonial freedom in the wake of the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations, DuBois considered the special research office as “sort of a foreign affairs department of the NAACP.”
Nkrumah also worked with the Council on African Affairs, co-founded by African American social worker Max Yergen and the renaissance man of the 20th century, Paul Robeson.
At the same time, Nkrumah deepened his studies into classic African civilizations by attending meetings of the Blyden Society for the Study of African History in Harlem, New York, during summer breaks. The society, named in honor of the great 19th century pan-Africanist scholar Edward Wilmot Blyden, author of the prodigious Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, was founded by the black educator Willis N. Huggins (father of the late historian Nathan I. Huggins).
Several Blyden Society alumni later became well known, including a bright young man from Alabama with a insatiable thirst for knowledge, who later became the premier black historian of his generation: John Henrik Clarke.
Another was a West African student who attended Lincoln several years before Nkrumah. Like his younger friend, he would also become the father of his nation: Nnamdi Azikiwe, known the world over as “Zik,” later the first president of independent Nigeria.
In April 1945, he helped the venerable DuBois organize an international “Colonial Conference” at the old Schomburg Library in Harlem. This little-known conclave was something of a dress rehearsal for the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress, which both men helped to mount in Manchester, England, in October of that year.
One of the continental Africans who assisted them would become yet another father of an African nation: Jomo Kenyatta, known as Mzee (“wise old man”), later the first president of independent Kenya.
Synthesis
Though close to DuBois, Nkrumah also found inspiration in one of his mentor’s old nemeses—the president-general of the Universal Improvement Association and the African Communities League of the World (UNIA-ACL), the largest black mass movement in modern times, a man considered by millions to be a “Black Moses.”
In a famous passage from his autobiography, Nkrumah recalled: “But I think that of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Garvey, with his philosophy of ‘Africa for the Africans’ and his ‘Back to Africa’ movement, did much to inspire the Negroes of America in the 1920’s.”
Thus, this young continental African embraced the two great streams of Western pan-Africanism: Garvey’s global nationalist vision of “Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad,” and DuBois’ continental vision of a socialist Africa.
In time, Nkrumah would achieve something that neither of these historic rivals would likely have contemplated or approved—a novel synthesis of their competing, yet not wholly uncomplimentary, visions of a free, united, and socialist African nationality.
African American Imprint
After Ghana became independent, Nkrumah expressed his profound debt to Garvey and DuBois.
He resurrected and made ubiquitous the UNIA’s black star symbol. Ghana’s capital square, the old polo grounds, bore its name, and the symbol sat in the center of the nation’s flag. Moreover, the flag’s colors were based on the UNIA’s red, black and green standard.
An even more direct link was the Black Star Steamship Line, named after Garvey’s ill-fated attempt to link the black world in commerce.
Some elder Detroit black nationalists recall the visit of a Black Star steamship in August 1964. Malcolm X’s eldest brother, the late Wilfred Little Shabazz, himself a son of Garveyites, told the author of his pride at meeting the ship’s captain and posing for photographs, one of which appeared in Now, a black nationalist magazine published by Detroit attorney Milton Henry.
In 1961, Nkrumah invited the ancient DuBois, then under fire in the U. S. for his opposition to America’s Cold War policies, to live out his final days in Ghana. In the shadow of Christianborg Castle, Nkrumah supported DuBois’ long-cherished dream of producing an Encyclopedia Africana.
On Aug. 27, 1963, the day before the great March on Washington, Du Bois died in Accra at the age of 95, bringing his lifelong identification with Africa full circle.
Make It Plain
Finally, Nkrumah’s American sojourn fitted him for his future in one more essential respect—it forged him as a uniquely compelling speaker. While a freshman at Lincoln, Nkrumah won second-place in an oratorical contest. Upon graduating from Lincoln’s seminary school, he delivered the “graduation oration” on a topic dear to black nationalists for at least a century before him: “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.”
To help support himself, Nkrumah spoke regularly in black churches in Philadelphia and Wash., DC, but discovered a more practical model on the streets of Harlem amid the racial passions that were inflamed by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia—the ancient empire evoked in Nkrumah’s farewell oration.
“My favorite amusement at that time,” he recalled in his autobiography, “was to stand and listen to the soap-box orators at the street corners. I was quite happy to spend my evenings there either quietly listening or, as was more often the case, provoking arguments with them.”
Julian Mayfield, the African American novelist, who worked as a speechwriter for Nkrumah, told the writer that this unique combination of African American church, street-ladder, and traditional African oratory greatly contributed to Nkrumah’s popular appeal when he returned in Gold Coast in 1947, and began the “Positive Action” campaign.
But that, as the saying goes, is another story.
Copyright © 1998 Runoko Rashidi. All rights reserved. Posted/Revised: April 25, 2002. Webpage design: Kenneth Ritchards