helpful for providing sufficient overview of the background to the subject include Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa,” 168–75; Plummer, In Search of Power, 192–99; Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 61–92; Kairn A. Klieman, “U.S. Oil Companies, the Nigerian Civil War, and the Origins of Opacity in the Nigerian Oil Industry,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 2012): 155–65; Peter Dumbaya, “The United States and West Africa: The Institutionalization of Foreign Relations in an Age of Ideological Ferment,” in The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 237–54; Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 193–205; a very good pre-war analysis is in Olayiwola Abegunrin, Nigerian Foreign Policy under Military Rule, 1966–1999, (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 17–50; Robert Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, 1945–1963, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 261–89.
13. 13 Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92.
14. 14 Robert Shepard, Nigeria, Africa and the United States, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 35–41; F. Chidozie Ogene, Interest Groups and the Shaping of Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies of United States African Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 62–67; Oye Ogunbadejo, “Nigeria and the Great Powers: The Impact of the Civil War on Nigerian Foreign Relations,” African Affairs 75, no. 298 (January 1976): 14–32; a brief mention of African American attention to the war but not its pre-war stage is found in Roy M. Melbourne, “The American Response to the Nigerian Civil War, 1968,” Issue: A Source of Opinion 3, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 33–42; Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 147.
15. 15 Shepard, Nigeria, Africa and the United States, 37–38; John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 351, 356–68; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 499, 610–16; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 68–69; William R. Louis, “American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire,” International Affairs, 61, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 397, 406, 417–20; Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa,” 173–81; and especially Kent, United States Reactions, 195–217. On the effort of France to maintain its empire in Africa, see Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 55–115.
16. 16 Mention of the ANLCA as ill-conceived can be found in Herschelle S. Challenor, “The Influence of Black Americans on U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Africa,” in Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy (revised edition), ed. Abdul A. Said (New York: Praeger, 1981), 160; Ogene, Interest Groups, 71–72; Carl P. Watts, “African Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa and the Rhodesian Crisis,” academia.edu/1921011/The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa and the Rhodesian Crisis, 112–13, accessed October 13, 2014; Theodore E. Brown, interview by Robert Martin, August 20, 1968, audio transcript, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, 12–19; Milton Morris, “Black Americans and the Foreign Policy Process: The Case of Africa,” Western Political Quarterly 25, no. 3 (September 1972): 458–59.
17. 17 Plummer, In Search of Power, 122–27.
18. 18 Meriwether, Proudly, 205–7
19. 19 Albert B. Tillery Jr., “G. Mennen ‘Soapy’ Williams and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa: Rethinking the Origins of Multiculturalism in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis, ed. Hanes Walton Jr., Robert L. Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 45–65.
20. 20 Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press), 199–205. Moreover, a fuller discussion of the ambiguities of the Eisenhower administration toward Africa and its spillover into the Kennedy presidency is noted in Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 122–34.
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Sourcing the Prelude to 1960: Great Britain, Nigeria, African Americans, and the United States
Historiographical currents that led African Americans to engage the Nigerian civil war in 1967 had been well underway before colonialism, anti-colonialism and post-colonialism were terms to describe the years of African independence. These currents, to be discussed shortly, of not only previous decades but arguably previous centuries throughout the Atlantic World were background to the above-mentioned terminologies that fomented a relationship between Africa and African Americans. Rather than present an assemblage of facts to showcase the big picture, this chapter seeks to point to a few important links on a chain of events that helped place the later activities of the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa in a chronological framework to better consider why the group pursued its negotiations course. Beginning this first chapter with the encounter between the ANLCA and Nigeria in 1967, therefore, would evade the necessary transition of eras that helped establish the climate for a contested post-colonial war, and an invitation to the ANLCA to participate in conflict resolution discussions. By reviewing select secondary sources, this prelude more than anything else attempts to tie what may appear to be unrelated ←21 | 22→occurrences together onto a larger portrait of empire, peoples and its aftermath in a contracting Atlantic World.
Movement within an Atlantic Empire
It might be asked how African Americans as distant relatives to the victims of European colonialism were impacted by the breakup of western empires following World War II. Nigeria prior to independence in 1960 would provide an answer to this question of empire.1 That large West African territory had been a location where a significant percentage of African American ancestors originated during the trans-Atlantic slave trade that began in the fifteenth century. Nigeria came into existence as a sizeable territory when Great Britain imposed its colonial order onto a region that in its broadest configuration became West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Equally important to an understanding of the role Nigeria would have in anti-colonial