Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the Black Freedom Struggle

This paper investigates the reception of the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the German Democratic Republic from 1949-1989. East Germany’s solidarity with the black freedom struggle was tied deeply to the regime’s ideology. According to this ideology, racism, imperialism, and anti-communism were profoundly intertwined and viewed as enemies of international peace and progress. East German leaders eagerly embraced what they considered the “other America” of black civil rights activists, focusing especially on those who openly shared their Marxist and socialist convictions.

Due to America’s elevated role in the Cold War and the global reach of its political and military power, the institutionalized racism in the U.S. was of particular significance. East Berlin’s domestic and foreign policymakers frequently referred to it to discredit the Western system of democracy and capitalism. Moreover, the state funded a variety of solidarity campaigns on behalf of the civil rights struggle and sponsored visits from key representatives of the movement such as W.E.B. Du Bois in 1958, Paul Robeson in 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, as well as Ralph Abernathy in 1971. East Germany also welcomed African American military deserters with open arms and produced a flood of literature on the black freedom struggle in the decades after World War II. The climax of these solidarity efforts was the spectacular solidarity movement for Angela Davis from 1971-73, which turned Davis into a communist pop star.

This paper seeks to situate these transnational interactions within the emerging historiography on the global dimension of the African American freedom struggle. At the same time, employing a dual perspective, it aims to contextualize them within the East German government’s larger campaigns for racial justice in Africa and elsewhere.