The Foreign Service Journal, May 2008

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attracted the lion’s share of attention from both the media and Ghanaians themselves. Nixon’s trip report recommended a new and assertive Africa policy of universal presence, economic devel- opment assistance, support for edu- cation, vibrant and visible cultural and information programs, and the creation of a Bureau of African Affairs headed by an assistant secretary. His approach offered a coherent vision of partnership with a region that has remained the hallmark of U.S. policy. Nixon pressured State in subsequent months to move forward with creation of the new bureau. Historian Jonathan Helmreich has concluded that Nixon’s aggressive needling was crucial in pushing the department’s bureaucracy to follow through quickly on what was already a widely supported objective. In fact, Nixon’s report dovetailed with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ well-established view that an orderly decolonization process was in the American interest to minimize Soviet influence. It is also clear that the ambitious Nixon was moving to beef up his foreign pol- icy resumé for a presidential run, and Africa offered a non-controversial opening that neither Eisenhower nor Dulles opposed. All that said, Nixon’s legacy is more than a bureau- cratic reorganization. Over the ensuing years, the Africa Bureau would succeed in nurturing a corps of Africanists. AF’s first assistant secretary, career FSO Joseph Satter- white, set this process in motion, taking full advantage of the positions at all ranks suddenly being offered in dozens of new embassies. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, former Michigan Governor G. Mennon Williams raised the bureau’s public profile in Washing- ton and around the country with his campaign skills and political access. Serving under Secretary of State James A. Baker III a generation later, FSO Herman Cohen seized the oppor- tunity presented by the end of the Cold War to achieve a remarkable series of policy successes in southern Africa that helped pave the way to majority rule in South Africa itself. (For a full chronology of AF assistant secretaries, visit www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/po/12045.htm. ) These and other assistant secretaries, and the profes- sionals they led, have become what one renowned Africanist, Professor Emeritus Crawford Young of the University of Wisconsin, describes as “regionalists within the system.” These advocates did not often win the big policy bat- tles with other regions and with what Young called “globalists,” but they generated the kind of well-informed perspective that had been missing. Burying Jim Crow Eisenhower and Nixon also faced the changing land- scape of racism back home. They saw clearly that segre- gationist policies were undermining America’s credibility as the world leader for freedom and democracy. Those policies stood in stark opposition to the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the seminal human rights documents of the post-World War II era. Africans perceived this contradiction more acutely than anyone. As the rhetoric of the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Union took full advantage of Jim Crow to win African hearts and minds. Africans didn’t have to be reminded that white Europeans had built up their empires on the backs of black men, leveling or co-opting their pre-European institutions in the interest of imperi- al stability and profit while keeping them subordinate within the colonial system. Soviet propaganda had only to add that white Americans had built their own prosper- ity on the back of black descendants of Africans, and kept them subservient under Jim Crow. Marxism offered the easy answer of an ideology that categorized racism as cap- italistic, promising that the dictatorship of the proletariat would eliminate such prejudices. At the same time, it is not commonly known that the State Department, beginning during the Truman administration, had encouraged civil rights efforts to defeat legally based racial discrimination. In a land- mark 1948 restrictive covenant case, Shelley v. Kraemer , the Justice Department filed an amicus curi- ae (friend of the court) brief that used State Department language asserting the damage to foreign relations of racial discrimination at home. A similar amicus brief was filed in support of what became Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), in which the Supreme Court ruled racially segregated public schools inherent- ly unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The Brown F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 8 Until the late 1950s, State treated Africa functionally as an adjunct of Europe.