In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 by Brenda Gayle Plummer (review)

African American internationalism and global black history are emerging new fields that can help scholars better understand the intersections of modern pan-Africanism, civil rights, decolonization, and “Black Power” in a global context. Brenda Gayle Plummer’s In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 is a welcomed and important contribution to these burgeoning new areas of inquiry. In Search of Power asks two important questions: “Why did a militant international racial discourse emerge before the ink on the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was dry?” and “Why did it continue long after formal civil equality had been achieved?” (6). In answering these questions, Plummer asserts that a “hybrid history that challenges the bounded construction of history’s subfields” emerges (12). Despite its title, In Search of Power is actually an exploration of the use of race, or more specifically “blackness,” by American political, economic, and social elites; both black and white, in their aims to shape the Cold War global political economy.

Plummer details how white American political and economic elites sought to use deliberately selected African Americans to serve as formal and informal ambassadors to newly independent nations of color to dictate the narrative of America’s favorable approach to democracy and inclusion as opposed to the posturing of the Soviet, Cuban, and other radical left-leaning blocs. Simply, they wanted to prevent these newly independent nations from falling under the influence of socialists and communists. Furthermore, they wanted to curb the actions and influence of more radical and critical African American elements’ ability to expose and propagate the notion of a failed pluralistic American society that was racist in nature and discriminatory in deeds.

This is contrasted with the desires of various African American ideological camps that either wanted to connect the African American freedom struggle to a global nonwhite freedom and liberation struggle or who averred that global considerations are, and should be, separate from domestic freedom endeavors. In doing so, it is revealed that for many of the African American actors discussed, regardless of their political leanings, the search, acquisition, and wielding of any form of political and economic power lay at the core of their initiatives.

In Search of Power’s most significant contribution may perhaps be its exploration of how those two competing narratives are counterbalanced by an important and overly ignored exploration of how the postcolonial realities of African civil wars and the distinctly different racial projects of Latin America, particularly the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, unraveled and delegitimatized much of the American white and black elites’ understandings of race in the Cold War global context. These previously marginalized narratives complicated the use of “blackness” to shape and interpret the Cold War global political economy by American neoimperialists and pan-Africanists alike. For example, as a result of her analysis, Plummer asserts that the Biafra conflict in Nigeria revealed that “Pan-Africanist discourse and practice lacked forceful language to address the problem of the late twentieth century” (199). For Plummer, the Biafra crisis, contrasted to the Western white response to the Congo crisis, reveals a great deal about their attitudes in and toward postcolonial Africa. Moreover, scholars of the black studies and black power movements will appreciate her treatment of Dominican and Puerto Rican Americans, with our critical understandings of their contributions and challenges to those movements.

As previously stated, In Search of Power is primarily a study of elites, despite the stratification of who and what an elite is or was. More explicitly, it is a top-down approach to a “big man’s” history. Governmental, corporate, and organizational histories dominate Plummer’s text; be it the American federal government or the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, President Lyndon B. Johnson or Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, the common everyday layman’s voice is all but muted. Thus...