Legacies of the Anti-colonial Front

This paper will give an account of one source of the tumultuous interaction between the dynamics of decolonization and those of the Cold War which did so much to define the 1960s across the globe. By taking up the legacies of a political formation I am calling “the anticolonial front” – a network of postwar activists and intellectuals who insisted on a connection between struggles against imperialism in the “Third World” and the fight against white supremacy in the United States – this paper will historicize the decade that this panel is convening to consider. At conferences such as the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945 or the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris during 1956, and in publications such as Political Affairs, The Crisis, and Freedom, the anticolonial front advocated a wide freedom agenda that confronted the inequalities of transnational racial capitalism. During the 1950s, that challenge was blunted but not eviscerated by the political imperatives of the Cold War. What I show here, though, is that the anticolonial community in and beyond the United States in the fifteen years before 1960 played an influential role after that important year. Specifically, I will highlight the contributions of Cold War deportees from the United States, the work of former members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress within the US, and the complex politics of the American Society for African Culture in order to show that we need to trace the routes of the anticolonial fifties in order to fully grasp the roots of the global sixties.