into the diplomacy of the war during his first trip to Nigeria revealed the depth of the challenge he faced. Moreover, the broader context of other events, including the Cold War, decolonization, Black Power, and a rising human rights movement, though given light treatment in these pages, nonetheless bore some influence on Brown’s efforts. A hopeful meeting of the contending forces at Aburi Gardens in Ghana, brokered by then-president General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, is mentioned, more for the atmosphere its legacy created for Brown. In this regard chapter three describes how Brown’s conflict-negotiating skills enabled him to face the barrage of persons and events as he sought to help end the war and fulfill the moderate pan-African objectives of the ANLCA. The chapter makes the argument that at this point the ANLCA secured a relationship with Nigeria that opened a new avenue for cooperation ←15 | 16→between African Americans and Nigerians, and by association with the rest of Africa.
Chapter four primarily concerns the adjustments Brown made in his diplomacy as attempts to end the civil war did not sufficiently advance. The Organization of African Unity took the lead in negotiations, with Brown complementing the effort. Talks by then had become increasingly complicated and at this point some African leaders thought the ANLCA had more to contribute. As readers will see, by late 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the ANLCA were asked to directly assist Brown by scheduling a trip to Nigeria for meetings with the war contestants in mid-April 1968. As fate would have it, however, King’s assassination of April 4 ended this opportunity. This major setback saw the ANLCA continue to have a presence in war-ending talks, though now more a meandering creek than the rushing river they were when the sojourn began. Chapter four concludes with a discussion of what appeared to be sporadic engagement of a fragmented ANLCA around the war, along with some opinions of and activities by other African Americans, including Congressman Charles Diggs Jr and Senator Edward Brooke. Theodore Brown’s extensive interview in mid-1968 proved to be a highly valuable primary source on his involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra episode and other aspects of his life.
Chapter five covers a post-war (January 1970) ANLCA finding new markers to define its existence. This involved an important medical program in Nigeria that hoped to link African American medical personnel and supplies to Nigerian medical institutions. Finally, after providing a summary of the group’s legacy, the conclusion asserts that the group succeeded in an arena larger than that of other similarly focused groups. The sad paradox was the unfortunate loss of lives that compelled the ANLCA into Nigeria. To set the events of the ANLCA—Nigeria affair in its proper historical framework, however, the narrative begins with challenges to the European empire system in the first half of the twentieth century by persons of similar activist proclivities. These individuals and organizations helped pave the way for a new approach by the ANLCA to a post-colonial circumstance.
←16 | 17→
A Note on Sources
One of the challenges for historians is accumulating quantities of source materials, particularly primary, as the basis for their studies. Negotiating a Destiny was daunting on this score. Available sources included scattered papers, reports, articles, meetings, speeches, interviews and similar items stashed away in libraries, archives, document compilations and a few audio recordings. And of course there were secondary references, but not a single monograph. I viewed this as more of an opportunity to explore an interesting event in African American civil rights and nationalist-oriented histories, and asking: what distinct influence did their efforts have on persons involved in Africa policy formation? I must point out that one likely reason for the dearth of materials is the difficulty locating any cache of ANLCA files and papers that could serve as the foundation to build other sources around; but this does not deter one’s research.
Fortunately, there were adequate and sufficient materials to do the writing. Seminal in this regard was the Brown interview of 1968 in the midst of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. It helped to tie together the documents not only chronologically, but in understanding the thinking of Brown in his own words on what the group set out to achieve during the war. From what I can tell, other accounts on the ANLCA and especially their involvement in the civil war do not reference this interview. Comparable primary sources on Brown of similar value were regrettably unknown to me. Nonetheless as the work progressed the picture of the ANLCA as having expanded African American options for establishing relations with Africa by way of the Nigerian affair became larger and clearer.
Notes
1. 1 Norman Stone, The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 38–73; George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 538–94; Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), 562–607.
2. 2 Daniel Hutchinson, “Defending the Lands of Their Ancestors: The African American Military Experience in Africa During World War II,” in Africa and World War II, ed. Judith Byfield, et al., 401–19; Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21–29. The African–African American history of joint action during the 1950s and 1960s was fraught with ambiguities, however, as discussed in Brenda Gayle Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2; still a good first-hand source on the topic is George Padmore, Pan Africanism or Communism? (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1971), 342–45; Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor R. Getz, Empires and Colonies in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 457, 459; Hollis Lynch, “Pan-African Responses in the United States to British Colonial Rule in Africa in the 1940s,” in The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization, 1940–1960, ed. Prosser Gifford and William R. Louis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 57–86.
3. 3 New York Amsterdam News, “Leaders Offer Help in Nigerian Crisis,” April 1, 1967.
4. 4 “Leaders Offer Help in Nigerian Crisis,” New York Amsterdam News, April 1, 1967.
5. 5 See chapters 2, 3, and 6 in Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
6. 6 James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 178–205; Martin Staniland, American Intellectuals and African Nationalists, 1955–1970, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 178–205; Lynch, Transfer of Power, 69–70, 86.
7. 7 Plummer, In Search of Power.
8. 8 John Kent, “United States Reactions to Empire, Colonialism, and Cold War in Black Africa, 1949–1957,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33, no. 2 (2005): 195–220, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086530500123804;
