The World and African Americans

Brenda Gayle Plummer has been in the vanguard of one of the most important trends in historiography today: seeking to write the history of domestic affairs by clear and direct reference to global currents. Her previous work has—in part—addressed the fraught matter of the connection between the retreat of Jim Crow in the U.S. and the connection between this epochal development and Washington’s increasingly prominent global role.

To wit, how could the U.S. credibly charge Moscow with human rights violations in the post-1945 era when Jim Crow continued to stain the national escutcheon? More to the point, how could Washington credibly win hearts and minds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America when so many U.S. nationals with roots in these lands were treated like second-class citizens simply because of their national origin?

In her latest contribution to this scholarly discourse, Plummer picks up the story in 1956 as Jim Crow is under assault at home, as the Bandung conference in Indonesia in particular is signaling loudly the forceful entry onto the world stage of newly independent—and formerly colonized—nations who were in no mood to accept blithely U.S. apartheid.

Her diligent excavations of the archives turns up a now sadly forgotten but quite revealing episode: Secretary of State Christian Herter encouraged a Ghanaian diplomat to go to Georgia to witness a “showcase of democracy” as elections were held. Decidedly unimpressed “local whites” repaid his curiosity rudely when they “roughed him up,” apparently unwilling to accept that an African—even one from a growingly important nation—should be treated with even minimal courtesy (p. 88).

Thus, her narrative—cinematically—switches back and forth from the U.S. to sites abroad, at once connecting the dots between earthshaking events and, in the process, producing a new kind of history. That is to say, in resorting to telling a global story to illuminate how and why Jim Crow was eroded, the author makes an implicit rebuke of the U.S. itself—and practitioners of history writing—in demonstrating that Jim Crow was so calcified, so ossified in this country, that merely resorting to domestic forces to explicate why it dissipated simply will not do. Yet, at the same time, this raises other searching questions, relevant to both politics and historiography: if the conservatism that inhered in Jim Crow was so strong, does this suggest we should look abroad for global currents also in explicating all manner of domestic reform? If so, what does that tell us about the historiography—or the reformers themselves for that matter—who have stuck resolutely to their domestic knitting?

For example, if Jim Crow was so hardened that it required global pressure to erode it, what about slavery? Should not historians of the “peculiar institution” be scouring archives in London—the citadel of abolitionism—for explanation and insight, with failure to do so amounting to malfeasance of the rankest sort?

One of the many contributions of this revelatory volume is to remind those who have forgotten—including more than one historian—that African Americans were “never completely cut off from global currents” (p. 146). Even those enslaved in the dankest precincts of Dixie knew about following the North Star to Canada—or, if in Texas, simply heading to Mexico, or to the Bahamas if in Florida

Plummer unsurprisingly anticipates this turn in the historiography, noting at one point: “A recent trend in writing American history places considerable emphasis on multi-archival sources, which usually means only the state papers of more than one nation. Historians strive to keep up, employing graduate students and others to supply a patchwork of sketchy foreign documentation to grace themes that remain essentially U.S. history” (p. 13). This is largely true. But these words remind us of a number of related points. The development of the internet has meant that, increasingly, archival aids—and primary sources—are accessible worldwide...