UCLA

In the postwar period, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the largest African American women’s organization in the United States, positioned themselves as representatives of Black women’s interests on the world stage. Previous studies of founder Mary McLeod Bethune’s internationalism has highlighted her prominent role in this arena primarily through the United Nations, as well as the ways NCNW carried this legacy through their efforts to build relationships with women across the diaspora. But beyond highlighting their activism and the connections they made, the substance and meaning of these relationships as the Cold War and African independence introduced new political terrain has been underexplored.

Africa’s prominence on the world stage by the late 1950s reinvigorated the need for Black diaspora activists to strengthen their relationships on the continent. Toward this end, NCNW leaders such Dorothy Ferebee, Vivian Mason, Dorothy Height forged connections with their counterparts across the Atlantic. African women such as Ghana’s Mabel Dove and Evelyn Amarteifio, Tanzania’s Lucy Lameck, among numerous others played critical roles within their respective independence movements. They called on diasporic and continental experiences through conferences, participating in exchange programs, and coordinating training to prepare women for new roles in emerging nations. This project fit neatly within Council women’s own domestic struggle for full citizenship and inclusion through, in part, fighting to expand their sphere of leadership and influence.

This study argues that together, NCNW and African women nationalists collaborated to collectively to develop their own autonomous agenda toward strengthening women’s inclusion in the nation building process. In this process, they constructed alternatives to deeply masculinized notions and methods of nation building. In their efforts to work across borders, the terms of their solidarity would be shaped and confined by national Cold War priorities, with various implications. This study brings together Civil Rights, African decolonization, and women and gender histories to understand the possibilities and limitations of making women’s issues part of the larger African liberation struggle in the early Cold War period.