In Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960, Brenda Gayle Plummer “attempts to resolve two controversies: the apparent contradiction between the absence, until recently, of an articulated foreign policy strategy in the black community and, paradoxically, the abiding interest of black Americans in global issues and the identity and characteristics of an Afro-American attentive public” (pg. 1). To this end, she places “foreign affairs interest and activism in the broad context of modern Afro-American history” while “probing the linkages between a black American foreign policy perspective and the nature of black interaction with governmental and nongovernmental institutions and agencies of social and political change” (pg. 5-6).

She begins with an examination of black activists unsuccessfully attempting to institute anti-imperialism and equal rights protections into the peace accords after World War I. She writes, “Investigation reveals a clear and well-documented record of Afro-American involvement with international issues going back to the eighteenth century. Those concerns quickened with the late-nineteenth-century appropriation of Africa by the imperialist powers. Concerned blacks in the diaspora did not approach the collapse of African sovereignty in the late 1800s with detachment” (pg. 35). Further, “The Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36 was the first great manifestation of Afro-American interest in foreign affairs. Advocacy of Ethiopia led to boycotts of Italian American businesses, petitions by black churches to the pope, fund raising for Emperor Haile Selassie’s beleaguered subjects, and the organization of volunteer militias” (pg. 37). This activism continued with the joining of foreign policy with domestic civil rights goals in the Double V for Victory campaign.

Though postwar nongovernmental organizations successfully inserted a human rights clause into the United Nations Charter, they quickly found support for anti-colonialism diminished in the face of new Cold War concerns. Despite this, Plummer writes, “Once admitted into the councils of power, nongovernmental organizations were determined to press onward with their agendas. The experience reaffirmed for Afro-Americans the growing sense of an interrelation between domestic and foreign affairs” (pg. 152). Of the early Cold War years, Plummer writes, “Opinion surveys conducted in 1947 indicated less enthusiasm for the Truman Doctrine among Afro-Americans than might be the case if one assumed black neutrality on foreign policy issues that lacked explicit racial content. This negativity did not derive from ‘isolationism’ or ‘backwardness’ but from growing hostility to an administration perceived as more interested in the status quo overseas than in economic security and democracy at home” (pg. 187).

Plummer concludes, “In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East both revolutionary and gradual politics succeeded in creating new governments, but these had yet to find a secure rank in the world community. New states faced a host of internal problems, because their development had not been a priority for the imperial powers. Western governments considered them prime candidates for communist subversion. These nations understood enough about Stalinism to view the Soviet invasion of Hungary with repugnance but found the West’s continuing colonial attachments and the frequently cavalier treatment it accorded minor countries rankling” (pg. 257). Further visits from Fidel Castro and Gamal Nasser to Harlem continued to link anti-imperialism with domestic civil rights activism into the 1960s. ( )