PRIMA Home | Current Issue | Previous Issues

Perspectives on International and Multicultural Affairs Volume1, Issue 1

By Daniel W. Aldridge, III

In the World War II era, a number of parties believed that the events of the Second World War meant that the relationship between colonial powers and their subjects would have to be re-examined. Third world nationalists believed that a war fought to restore self-government to European countries also should support their right to seek national independence. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted an international security organization to undertake the task of encouraging colonial powers to prepare their colonies for independence. Within the United States, African American public intellectuals were particularly interested in the postwar fate of colonial empires.¹ Their personal experience of racial oppression in the United States led them to identify strongly with the struggles of colonial subjects. For African Americans the abolition of colonialism was a cardinal war aim.

Those who believed that the war should result in the abolition of colonialism held high hopes for the United Nations Organization. These hopes inevitably would be dashed. The UN Charter created toothless international legal provisions, which failed to require a colonial power to prepare a colony for democratic independence. This paper will examine the parallel, yet curiously disconnected, efforts of the Roosevelt Administration and African American public intellectuals to create a United Nations Organization that would play a meaningful role in terminating colonialism.

Historians have tended to underestimate the importance of anticolonialism among FDR’s motivations for supporting the UN.² Roosevelt believed that third world nationalist demands for independence from recalcitrant colonial powers would destabilize the postwar world unless the UN managed decolonization in order to forestall widespread colonial conflict. Roosevelt wanted to place certain colonial territories under UN-supervised trusteeships intended to prepare those countries for democratic independence. He also wanted the UN to require all colonial powers to prepare their possessions for democratic independence.

FDR’s anticolonialism should not be interpreted as a form of racial egalitarianism in a contemporary sense. Roosevelt presumed, as did most whites of his generation, that the white peoples and nations of the world were more advanced than non-whites, and that non-whites would have to be "prepared" for independence. FDR also presumed that the United States and the major European powers would continue to be the dominant political and economic players in a capitalist world order. Roosevelt’s views on the future of colonialism amount to the replacement of traditional colonialism with what a later generation would call a "neocolonial" relationship: third world countries would have political independence within a white-dominated, capitalist-oriented world order. Nonetheless, when compared to contemporary world leaders such as Winston Churchill, FDR’s views about race and colonialism were objectively progressive. Further, as we shall see, Franklin Roosevelt’s views on colonialism were not so far removed from those of mainstream African American public intellectuals.

African American public intellectuals were also quite interested in colonial affairs.³ During the wartime era, black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam News provided the primary outlet by which African American public intellectuals transmitted their views to a broader black public. An examination of the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely-read African American newspaper of the wartime period, demonstrates interest in using the UN as a means of terminating colonialism. The Courier circulated nationally and published editions in many regions of the United States. Despite the fact that it was a Republican paper, it was nonetheless fiercely anticolonial; the Courier gave extensive coverage to conditions in colonial areas and to third world nationalist movements. It hailed the successes of colonial troops.⁴ Throughout the war, the Courier published weekly columns by an Indian nationalist, Kumar Goshal; a Chinese writer, Liu Liang Mo; and an African nationalist, Prince A. A. Nwafor Orizu of Nigeria.⁵ Not only did the Courier provide a ready platform and a sympathetic audience for colonial nationalists, but also it was read by people in the colonies.⁶ The Courier’s anticolonial stance and featuring of African, Indian, and Chinese columnists demonstrates that African American newspapers and public intellectuals were not only concerned with parochial African American issues. African American public intellectuals developed a consciousness that linked the concerns of African Americans to those of colonized peoples of color throughout the world.

The Courier reflects the broad diversity of African American thought in the 1940’s. Mainstream leaders like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph urged African Americans to support the war while seeking the achievement of racial equality at home and the abolition of colonialism abroad.⁷ It also published regular columns that frequently discussed international affairs by a Pan-Africanist Marxist, George Padmore; by a black nationalist popular historian, J. A. Rogers; and by a curmudgeonly Menckenesque anticommunist, George Schuyler. The distinguished Howard University historian, Dr. Rayford W. Logan, then the most prominent African American specialist on international relations, also wrote frequently about international affairs for the paper.⁸

Despite the ideological diversity of the African American public intellectuals whose writings appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, one can find some areas of commonality. African American public intellectuals were deeply distrustful of Great Britain and held some antipathy for Winston Churchill, whom they viewed as a bigoted Tory reactionary committed to maintaining both colonialism and white supremacy.⁹ African American public intellectuals, George Schuyler excepted, were generally friendly towards the Soviet Union, which they saw as a revolutionary power opposed to both colonialism and racism.¹⁰ African American public intellectuals’ position on these issues was at odds with that of many white Americans who regarded Britain as a fount of democracy and who were wary of postwar Soviet designs.

What is at first surprising is that the Roosevelt administration did not make significant attempts to capitalize on African American anticolonialism in order to build widespread public support for its trusteeship plans. This demonstrates the limitations imposed by the racial politics of the 1940’s. The Roosevelt administration enjoyed substantial support from African Americans, but it was even more dependent upon the support of white southern Democrats. Roosevelt refused to take action on issues, such as the poll tax and lynching, which would have alienated many whites, particularly in the South. Using the African American community as a base upon which to build support for anticolonialism was probably unthinkable to the Roosevelt administration. In addition, African Americans in the 1940’s, for the most part, were not included as high ranking members of the State Department, or in prestigious newspapers and magazines, or as faculty at major national universities. They lacked a presence among the "foreign policy public" whose opinions could sway policymakers.

Nonetheless, FDR and others in the administration did work to promote anticolonialism. FDR refrained from publicly endorsing Winston Churchill’s contention that the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-government did not apply to colonial empires.¹¹ Further, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, FDR’s personal friend and close adviser, made a widely publicized speech on May 30, 1942, declaring that the age of imperialism was over and that the principles of the Atlantic Charter applied to all peoples.¹² Welles’ remarks were the lead item for the June 6, 1942 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, which hailed his talk for its commitment to applying the Atlantic Charter to colonial empires and to eradicating racial discrimination.¹³

By the summer of 1943, the State Department had prepared plans for League of Nations Mandates, colonial territories dislodged from the Axis powers, and certain strategic points to be placed under a trusteeship system.¹⁴ For colonial territories managed by Allied powers, the State Department drafted a "Declaration on National Independence" which pledged colonial parents to prepare their charges for self-government according to a definite timetable. This scheme of combining a supervised trusteeship for Mandates and Axis colonies, with a voluntary obligation by Allied powers to prepare their colonies for self-government, would be maintained by the Roosevelt administration for the rest of the war.

The Roosevelt administration was unable to make any headway with the British on the colonial issue during the war. FDR tried on a number of occasions, both directly and through intermediaries, to get the British to see the wisdom of preparing for orderly decolonization. London remained unmoved. The State Department also failed to get the British to accept its "Declaration on National Independence." At the Quebec Conference of 1943, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden flatly rejected the Declaration because of its promiscuous use of the word "independent." Eden declared that peoples of some colonies were so "backward" that they would never be able to govern themselves.¹⁵ After this rebuff, the Roosevelt administration focused its anticolonial efforts on inclusion within the charter of the forthcoming United Nations Organization provisions intended to support the termination of colonialism and the transformation of colonial possessions into independent democratic states.

The four major Allies formally committed themselves to the creation of a postwar security organization at the Moscow Conference in October 1943.¹⁶ FDR made it clear at a meeting with State Department officials in February 1944 that he wanted the proposed organization to be empowered to investigate and make reports on conditions in all colonial areas.¹⁷

President Roosevelt made his only declaration in support of colonial trusteeship during a February 1944 press conference with a group of African American newspaper publishers. Previously, the Roosevelt administration had not admitted African American newspaper reporters to White House press conferences.¹⁸ Undoubtedly realizing that the black vote would be important in the upcoming elections, FDR agreed to meet with the publishers, who presented him with a statement of African American postwar aims which mainly related to domestic issues such as discrimination, lynching, and voting rights. The publishers also requested that the promises of the Atlantic Charter be applied "to all colonial and other exploited peoples."¹⁹

In response to a query about colonial independence, FDR maintained that "backward" areas would need social and economic development before being granted political independence. To illustrate his point, he referred to the Gambia, a small British colony in West Africa. FDR blamed the sorry condition of the Gambia on British misrule. To prevent such situations, Roosevelt told the newspaper publishers, the United Nations should be empowered to prepare colonies for self-government by improving their social and economic conditions and by conducting international inspection of colonies to ensure that parent countries were properly preparing their charges for eventual independence.²⁰

Buoyed by Roosevelt’s verbal support for colonial reform, African American public intellectuals were hopeful that the summer 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, at which the U.S., the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China met to draft a preliminary plan for the United Nations Organization, would address colonial issues.²¹ They were to be sorely disappointed. U.S. military officials opposed the trusteeship plan, which they believed would jeopardize postwar U.S. control over strategically important Pacific islands and prevailed upon State Department planners to postpone discussion of trusteeship until after Dumbarton Oaks.²² W.E.B. DuBois (recently reconciled with the NAACP) blasted the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for their failure to address colonial issues at an October 1944 meeting with State Department officials.²³ African Americans were also dismayed by Dumbarton Oaks’ failure to endorse a Chinese resolution supporting racial equality.²⁴

FDR’s trusteeship policy came under increasing fire after Dumbarton Oaks. FDR insisted in November 1944 that trusteeship matters be managed through the United Nations Organization and maintained that he opposed the military’s desire to take outright control over Pacific islands.²⁵ Roosevelt, however, did not, or perhaps could not, compel military officials to agree with his trusteeship plan. Roosevelt’s trusteeship plan was also firmly opposed by Great Britain. Winston Churchill vociferously opposed trusteeship at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, and only agreed to allow it to be discussed at the forthcoming San Francisco Conference, at which the United Nations Organization was officially created, when he was assured that trusteeships would only be applied to existing League of Nations Mandates, to territories detached from the enemy, and to colonies voluntarily placed under trusteeship.²⁶ Churchill, as Fred Pollock and Kimball have noted, blundered when he agreed to accept discussion of the trusteeship proposal; British League of Nations mandates would be placed under trusteeship.²⁷ Further, the Roosevelt administration was well aware that the British would not immediately agree to have all of their colonies placed under trusteeship. What FDR hoped was that world opinion, expressed through the UN, would create pressure that would force colonial powers to place their colonies under trusteeship.

In the few weeks of life remaining to him after Yalta, Roosevelt continued to promote his trusteeship conceptions. In March 1945 he told Charles Taussig that independence, rather than self-government, should be the goal of the trusteeship he planned for French Indochina.²⁸ He also scheduled a meeting for April 19 with State Department and military officials concerning trusteeship. The meeting was never held, due to his death on April 12, 1945.²⁹ Roosevelt’s death removed from the scene the most influential advocate of colonial trusteeship. Without Roosevelt’s influence, trusteeship policy shifted decisively toward the military and colonial points of view.

African American public intellectuals were disappointed that the Yalta accords failed to endorse the restoration of sovereignty to colonial areas.³⁰ In the weeks leading up to the opening of the San Francisco Conference on April 25, 1945, the Pittsburgh Courier gave extensive coverage to the forthcoming conference. Where mainstream newspapers emphasized issues such as the composition of the Security Council, the vast majority of the Courier’s coverage concerned the future of colonialism.³¹

African American civic organizations also became involved in trying to have the United Nations structured so that it would play a meaningful role in terminating colonialism. In March 1945, the NAACP sent a letter to Edward Stettinius asking if colonial issues would be considered at the Conference and requesting that spokesmen for colonial peoples be allowed to participate in the Conference.³² On April 6, 1945, a conference was held at the Harlem YMCA, which brought together African American leaders and third world nationalists. There was considerable debate within the group over whether they should request immediate independence or the creation of a trusteeship system to guide colonies towards independence. Many of the third world nationalists present, such as Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, advocated complete and immediate independence. Many African American delegates, such as Dr. Rayford W. Logan, advocated the creation of a trusteeship system that would guide colonies towards independence, self-government, autonomy, dominion status or first class citizenship, depending upon the wishes of the colonial subjects involved. In the end the conference adopted Dr. Logan’s position, favoring trusteeship rather than immediate independence.³³ The conference’s outcome demonstrates that the colonial policy of mainstream African American leaders and public intellectuals was not so far removed from that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Educated middle-class African Americans also tended to believe that colonial subjects were too "backward" to be entrusted with immediate independence and would need some preparation in governing skills and democratic practices before being granted control. Mainstream African Americans like Dr. Logan were also willing to consider alternatives to complete independence, such as autonomy or dominion status provided that those arrangements reflected the desires of the colonial subjects involved.

African American public intellectuals would not be able to realize their hopes that the San Francisco Conference would begin the abolition of colonialism. Without FDR’s guidance, American priorities on the trusteeship issue shifted towards devising a system that would satisfy the military’s desire to control Pacific bases and would avoid acrimonious conflict with the British and French. The initiative on trusteeship was taken by Great Britain, which largely succeeded in creating weak UN Charter trusteeship provisions.

Pittsburgh Courier writers soon came to realize that the delegates were planning to create a trusteeship system that was more shadow than substance.³⁴ The NAACP sent Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary McLeod Bethune to San Francisco as official consultants. Although the NAACP presented a proposal to the Conference on April 26 requesting that the colonial system be abolished and that the equality of races be recognized, they soon discovered that the delegates largely ignored the consulting organizations.³⁵

The United States’ retreat from Rooseveltian anticolonialism towards a more centrist position on colonial affairs did not go unchallenged within the American delegation. At a May 18, 1945 meeting of the American delegation, Charles W. Taussig, FDR’s confidant on colonial affairs, read an impassioned statement arguing that the United States would have poor relations with the non-white peoples of the world if it refused to support independence for colonial possessions. However, the majority of the delegates backed Isaiah Bowman’s argument that strong support for anticolonialism would sacrifice Great Britain’s support in a hypothetical conflict with the Soviet Union.³⁶ Presented with the choice of whether to solidify U.S. ties with the Western colonial powers or to support third world nationalism, the delegates chose to align themselves with the colonial powers. The delegates’ action is an early example of the choice, which U.S. policymakers made until the end of traditional colonialism in the 1960’s. The United States, whose own origins as an independent state were due to a successful revolt against colonial rule, decided to act as a half-hearted ally of European colonialism in the third world in order to forestall what was viewed as the greater evil of Soviet expansion.

After much wrangling over language, the San Francisco Conference passed trusteeship provisions that were entirely satisfactory to the colonial powers. Articles 73 and 74 of the UN Charter are a declaration regarding the management of all colonies. Even though Article 73 makes the development of "self-government" an objective of colonial rule, this obligation is heavily qualified by the proviso that it should be done "according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement." The determination of whether a colony was "ready" for self-government was left to the discretion of the colonial power. Further, colonial subjects were not given a right to appeal to the United Nations for redress should a colonial power violate its obligations. In addition, the United Nations was not given a right to inspect colonies to ensure that the colonial parent honored its obligations.³⁷

The Mandates, former Axis colonies, and voluntarily placed Allied colonies subject to the trusteeship provisions of Articles 75-91 of the UN Charter were to be prepared for "independence," but this obligation was largely vitiated by qualifications about the "particular circumstances of each territory," and the "terms of each trusteeship agreement."³⁸ Further, the UN could not independently investigate conditions in a trusteeship area but could only examine written petitions in consultation with the trustee. In addition, if all or part of a trusteeship area was deemed to be of strategic significance, that area would be under the ultimate control of the Security Council, where colonial powers such as Britain and France could use their veto powers to prevent any UN interference.³⁹ While the obligations imposed by a trusteeship sound superficially impressive, the UN was given no real power to compel a trustee to prepare its charges for independence or to closely supervise trusteeship conditions.

The Pittsburgh Courier realized that the San Francisco Conference had been a colossal failure so far as colonial peoples were concerned. In a June 23, 1945 editorial, the paper opined that the "colonial peoples all over the world who yearn for self-government will wonder, after studying the conference action, just what was gained by their sacrifices in helping to win the war."⁴⁰

The San Francisco Conference’s failure to create an effective UN system for colonial reform was a lost opportunity both for the United States and for the UN; while the United States sacrificed much of the good will it had built among third world nationalists, the UN was deprived of the chance to supervise the decolonization process in order to ensure that it would be peaceful and would lead to the creation of democratic postcolonial regimes. This story also shows the interconnectedness between foreign policy and domestic racial conditions. Had African Americans been more fully included within the American political community, they could have been a force to influence American policymakers towards a more progressive colonial policy. The failure at San Francisco was a tragedy on numerous levels.

Back to Contents

End Notes

¹ For the purposes of this paper a "public intellectual" is defined as a person who seeks to communicate ideas to a broad general public. Public intellectuals need not have higher academic training or an academic affiliation. Persons such as journalists, civic leaders, members of the clergy, and academics who present ideas in public addresses aimed at a broad audience, or in newspapers or in popular books or journals would all qualify as "public intellectuals."

⁴⁰ Editorial, "Death Blow at Frisco," Pittsburgh Courier, June 23, 1945.

PRIMA Home | Current Issue | Previous Issues