side with the seceded eastern region of the country having renamed itself the Republic of Biafra and support their grievance of an oppressed nation-within-a-nation; or refrain from any of the above to combat the specter of displaced and starving refugees as the conflict surged on unabated.
Leaders of the barely five-year old ANLCA thought differently. This assemblage of civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Asa Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Dorothy Height, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Jr., and labor activist Theodore Brown as executive director, reasoned that although a political implosion was on the horizon in Nigeria—a country believed by Africa watchers as the embodiment of a new Africa—it did not lend itself to a confrontation-oriented anti-colonial critique. Great Britain was no longer the principle foe of the first half of the twentieth century. When confronting imminent war in Nigeria the ANLCA was more comfortable with a moderate approach they believed could realistically nurture an African American relationship with Africa. Their collective background had been the peaceful mediation of disputes involving racial discrimination in the United States. This olive-branch strategy to tackle inflammatory issues was the ANLCA method of operation rather than an armed struggle mandate. The Nigerian civil war erupted as a complex matter internal ←4 | 5→to Nigeria that eviscerated armed struggle advocacy by third parties. The ANLCA jumped at the opportunity to fill the void.9
Negotiating a Destiny explores the attempt of the ANLCA to help end the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, and to expand Nigeria’s evolving links with African Americans. It is not a history of the Nigerian-Biafran war; rather it is an attempt to bring substantive attention to a new approach African American leaders had for the war in the interest of their constituencies. In doing so they widened what constituted decolonization activism of that time, and in like manner later ideas about African American relations with Africa.
The breadth of how the ANLCA established links to an emergent continent seemed apparent as the research unfolded. The narrative suggests that a battle of equal importance was the ANLCA winning acceptance as mediators to the Nigerian conflict. This study, therefore, presents the organization as having momentarily opened another avenue to assist with resolving new problems of a post-colonial territory. Moreover, since African liberation and African American liberation fed into each other, Negotiating a Destiny also insists that a historical marker was set when the ANLCA stepped into the internal Nigerian affair as part of an episode in the early post-colonial life of a country struggling for a mature political and social identify.
Another notable aspect herein presented is that the ANLCA diplomacy was characteristic of a state-to-state relationship that added a certain formality to their African encounter. The ANLCA effort was more than a series of written appeals to stop the fighting. Instead I assert their effort was a new, dynamic diplomacy rather than a static anti-colonialism, though in no way diminishing the historic value of the latter. Civil rights as a historically domestic construct now deigned to extend its reach in a way different from prior strategies that involved, say, African American delegations confronting colonialism at the United Nations in 1945. Framing the argument this way sheds a fuller light on the sophistication the ANLCA brought to such an unexpected circumstance. As the reader will see in these pages, ANLCA executive director Theodore Brown displayed the deftness of a diplomat as he journeyed back-and-forth between the United States and Nigeria (and other countries) on behalf of the organization. As best as can be determined, this account ←5 | 6→is the first full treatment of his excursions and a highlight in African American foreign affairs.
Furthermore, the position of the ANLCA in the trajectory of a U.S. foreign affair with an African nation was a twist on bipartisanship, much as an independent elected official works with Democrats or Republicans on legislation. As both the House of Representatives and Senate in the American political system have foreign affairs committees, my review of new and former primary and secondary sources indicates that something akin to two foreign policies—one by the government and another by African American activists—emanated from the shores of the United States. A new era of U.S. relations with Africa was underway having resulted from a collapsing European colonialism. United States diplomats were unable to close-out the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria when their efforts to help resolve the simmering discord there were exhausted. As another first-time angle offered in these pages, this happenstance defaulted into an opening that enabled the ANLCA to enter the diplomatic fray. This was not a defeat for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but rather an informal observance of a moderation in their influence to an international event. This too is a new opportunity to study another way how a non-governmental organization established a presence in foreign affairs when a dominating state power faltered during a crisis.
All factors considered, addressing problems of a new post-colonial African nation appeared to have required a different strategy by interested African Americans other than mass mobilization at every turn. For example, ANLCA leaders attempted to build a record of successes up to the civil war by private meetings with U.S. foreign affairs leaders around ending government support for the remaining European colonial empires in the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Central African Republic. While persistent dialogue was their standard method for pro-Africa activity, supplemented with educational forums, press statements and conferences it represented a new attitude on African matters apart from mass mobilization by this segment of African Americans—radical in their own right—as the empire system flitted about for new forms of control. Often, groups such as the American Committee on Africa, and the American Society on African ←6 | 7→Culture participated in ANLCA activities.10 Yet the challenge that faced these groups was the departure of the ANLCA from a high public profile. It was a simple matter of flexible thinking. Nigeria-Biafra seemed to make it more efficacious. Choosing the brokerage approach to resolve the Nigerian-Biafran conflict was more conducive to what had already been underway—negotiations—and in the midst of political dynamics in Nigeria unfamiliar to most African Americans. I contend that research about African American activism in the 1960s has overlooked the ANLCA as a topic deserving qualitative attention, this when according to Carl Watts it may have been “the only substantial attempt at organized group activity on behalf of Africa by black Americans” throughout the decade.11
With a goal and objectives independent of the United States government, ANLCA leaders carved out an exclusive niche for the group when Nigerian and Biafran (Igbo) leaders permitted them to become part of the negotiating team to broker a peace settlement. Unprecedented in its recognition, mediation was an opening for a new African American relationship with Africa that differed from earlier ANLCA projects, and of other African American organizations also having an Africa focus. It was a success generally unaccounted for in the freedom movement, though costly if the loss of lives during the war are not ignored.
As an achievement along a spectrum of trans-national projects since the early twentieth century, this specific ANLCA endeavor is contextualized with other pressing issues of that day. Thus, the story line when viewed parallel to, rather than detached from, the attention-grabbing headlines of the Cold War, Vietnam war, Arab-Israeli conflict and Black Power movement is a coterminous but generally obscured episode in African American freedom work of the 1960s, and in U.S. foreign affairs. It was the sort of activism no less an invitation to danger given the procession of post-World War events particularly if associated with decolonization. That the ANLCA cultivated a privileged relationship with Nigeria and its secessionist movement, amid, for example, U.S. government demands for Cold War conformity, was both an achievement and invitation to possibly damaging scrutiny of their operations. An unavoidable contextualization.
←7 | 8→
Yet the ANLCA would, in fact, expand its political arsenal with the Nigeria-Biafra circumstance. The group had to readjust its civil rights moorings when Nigeria descended into chaos borne of intricate and complex internal problems. They had to consider if Nigeria had become a victim of its own domestic missteps. Any inclination for an anti-colonial analogy common among African Americans
