The Past Speaks

“The story of the movement that led President Obama’s father and thousands of other young Africans to study abroad in the 1950s and 1960s is much more complicated than is usually thought, according to Dan Branch, a historian of Kenya and alumnus of the National History Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization.

In a talk at the Library of Congress July 28, Branch argued that Kenyans stress that the students returned home to build a new nation, while historians of civil rights point to the program as one of the first times that African Americans were able directly to influence American foreign policy. But he said this misses a crucial element: students were sent not just to the United States and Western Europe, but to Communist states in Eastern Europe and China. Their experiences, both positive and negative, injected the politics of the Cold War into the politics of Kenyan decolonization.”

See more here.

This talk is very interesting in light of the historiography on the connection between the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. Some historians argue that the US government’s actions to enforce racial equality in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s were part of a strategy to ensure that the newly independent countries of the Third World did not go Communist.