Remembering the Bandung Generation: Black Women and Radical Critiques of US Foreign Policy in the 1950s

This paper analyzes Black women’s internationalist politics in the 1950s as a key element of the growing Black Freedom movement in this era. It considers the role of journalist Ethel Payne, whose critical reportage about the Korean war and insights on the Bandung Conference influenced Black popular opinion; writers like Lucy Smith and Sarah Wright who wrote poetry critical of war and injustice; and radical women organizing against imperialism around Paul Robeson’s “Freedom” newspaper. Cold War politics fueled, rather than dampened, these women’s anti-colonial and anti-racist critiques of US foreign policy. They women built community and found political homes in spaces that served as radical incubators of ideas that would form the nucleus of a grassroots Black internationalism that was attentive to race, gender in its critique of US actions in the world. These women laid the groundwork for Black women’s central role in the movement against the Vietnam war as activists, theorists, writers and polemicists.

Centralizing Black women’s activism in the 1950s transforms understandings of black anti-imperialism and challenges the assumption that Black women were absent as critics of US foreign policy. Using insights from Black women’s studies, intellectual history, social history and US in the world/diplomatic history, this locates these women’s presence in movements of their own creation.