Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Nicholas Grant

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world.

This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.

324 pages, Hardcover

Published November 13, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Christopher Robin Nicole was born on 7 December 1930 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), where he was raised. He is the son of Jean Dorothy (Logan) and Jack Nicole, a police officer, both Scottish. He studied at Queen's College in Guyana and at Harrison College in Barbados. He was a fellow at the Canadian Bankers Association and a clerk for the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown and Nassau from 1947 to 1956. In 1957, he moved to Guernsey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom, where he currently lives, but he also has a domicile in Spain.

On 31 March 1951, he married his first wife, Jean Regina Amelia Barnett, with whom he had two sons, Bruce and Jack, and two daughters, Julie and Ursula, they divorced. On 8 May 1982 he married for the second time with fellow writer Diana Bachmann.

As a romantic and passionate of history, Nicole has been published since 1957, when he published a book about West Indian Cricket. He published his first novel in 1959 with his first stories set in his native Caribbean. Later he wrote many historical novels set mostly in tumultuous periods like World War I, World War II and the Cold War, and depict places in Europe, Asia and Africa. He also wrote classic romance novels. He specialized in Series and Sagas, and continues to write into the 21st century with no intention of retiring.

He signs his books as Christopher Nicole and uses several pseudonyms, some of them female. Pseudonyms used include: Peter Grange, Andrew York, Robin Cade, Mark Logan, Christina Nicholson, Alison York, Leslie Arlen, Robin Nicholson, C. R. Nicholson, Daniel Adams, Simon McKay, Caroline Gray and Alan Savage. He wrote disaster thrillers in collaboration with his wife, Diana Bachmann, under the penname Max Marlow. Under his different pseudonyms he has worked with many publishing houses: Jarrolds, Hutchinson, Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann & Geoghegan, Jove, Michael Joseph, Mills & Boon, and Severn House.

Reviews

[DH · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nicholas Grant has done some important research, but in his insistence on foregrounding black agency he concentrates on a few trees that are not representative of the full forest. His chosen time frame of 1945-60 is arbitrary in that he does not emphasize Sharpeville as a watershed, nor does he mention that 1960-61 is when independence blossomed across Africa. Defining the reason for his end date might have sharpened his conclusions.

Grant overstates the significance of the Council on African Affairs. After 1953 CAA barely functioned, so stretching the timeline to 1960 just to include a few other small efforts is questionable.
The author evaded evaluation of the entwinement of the CAA with the Communist Party issue, preferring to elevate symbolic radicalism over the tangible achievements of the American Committee on Africa.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This textbook argues inextricable transnational ties between African-American civil rights activists and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Not always successfully.

The chapters in this book each cover a transnational interaction between the US and South Africa. Some work to support the argument, like the chapters about Cold War politics, and others don’t, like the chapters including case studies about a movie shoot and a South African lifestyle magazine. The book argues the political nature of such things successfully, as well as how they connect the black culture in one country to the other, but not necessarily how a shared black culture translates to linked international activism.

I think this book’s premise works somewhat, because the Cold War governments of South Africa and the US prevented transnational activism. At least this book’s stance is arguable even if it isn’t as defensible as it could be. This book takes the same stance that Paul Robeson, a black American international civil rights activist, took. The title is even a quote from Robeson. So even if other historians disagree with this book, at least it has clout from fifties primary sources.