SEEKING ALLIES OVERSEAS
African American international activism began in the early nineteenth century, when black people who escaped the cruelties of slavery sought support from abolitionists overseas. In the mid-1840s, Frederick Douglass toured the United Kingdom for 19 months, forging relationships with English and Irish leaders who opposed human bondage in the United States and raising funds that would later help him launch an influential abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.
In the decades after the Civil War, when newly emancipated people faced economic deprivation and political terrorism, African American leaders again sought allies abroad. In the United Kingdom, pioneering black journalist Ida B. Wells found a receptive audience for her 1890s-era campaign against the omnipresent threat of lynching. British support for African Americans was especially helpful, Wells wrote, because white Americans viewed the United Kingdom as morally and culturally superior; American journalists and religious leaders had largely ignored lynching, but British criticism would be impossible for them to ignore. The British activists Wells mobilized helped generate the campaign’s early momentum—and embarrassed American leaders by demanding that they publicly denounce mob violence.
As the European empires consolidated in the early twentieth century, African Americans joined their African and Caribbean counterparts at a series of Pan-African Congresses with the goal of reforming colonial institutions that were founded on racial domination and developing strategies to resist antiblack racism. Although these efforts suffered a blow in 1919, when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and other Western leaders rejected Japan’s proposal to insert a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, the struggle against racism was coming into sharper focus as a broad-based, global movement.
The United Nations formed at last in 1945, and the U.S. government gave the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Council of Negro Women ceremonial roles as observers at the founding conference, in the hope of encouraging domestic support for the new institution. Washington was displeased, however, when, in 1947, the NAACP submitted a 96-page petition to the UN Commission on Human Rights, asking it to investigate human rights violations against African Americans in the United States. Edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and titled “An Appeal to the World,” the document began with a pointed denunciation of American hypocrisy. “A nation which boldly declared ‘that all men are created equal,’ proceeded to build its economy on chattel slavery,” Du Bois wrote. India and the Soviet Union displayed interest in the petition, and more insightful U.S. officials realized that critics and enemies could make political capital of a race problem that could no longer be sequestered.