The Foreign Service Journal, September 2022

44 SEPTEMBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Vice President Richard Nixon and Second Lady Patricia Nixon unexpectedly meet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, for the first time during Independence ceremonies in Accra, Ghana, on March 7, 1957. Griffith “Griff” Davis, a pioneer photojournalist and African American Foreign Service officer with USAID from 1952 to 1985, took this famous shot. An Atlanta boyhood friend of Martin Luther King Jr., Davis had been assigned by U.S. Information Service (USIS) in Washington, D.C., as the official photographer to cover Nixon’s inaugural visit to Africa, which was also King’s first visit, only months after the end of the Montgomery (Ala.) Bus Boycott and the launch of the civil rights movement in the U.S. The Kings had been invited by Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. The resulting photograph was not officially published in the U.S. at that time. At the time of this assignment, Davis was finishing his first tour of duty as the first audiovisual adviser at U.S. Embassy Monrovia, the first U.S. embassy in a noncolonized African country. Davis’ daughter, Dorothy, president of Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives, recounts her father saying, “It was ironic to me that Montgomery, Alabama, and Washington, D.C., had to meet at Accra, outside the United States. However, it was only a short time later that M.L. and his nonviolent movement entered upon the national scene in America.” (This photo and story about Griffith Davis appeared in the opinion section and on the front page of the Tampa Bay Times , January 17 and 20, 2020, respectively.) ©GRIFFDAVIS/GRIFFITHJ.DAVISPHOTOGRAPHSANDARCHIVES in the Republican platform. Accordingly, he shared the liberal racial views of many of his party’s stalwarts, including recent nominees Thomas Dewey and Wendell Willkie. Still, Nixon needed to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, as well as win Black support. Seeing Africa as the answer to both, he became the GOP’s go-to Africanist, representing the United States at the widely publicized independence ceremo- nies of Ghana in 1957. There, Nixon unexpectedly met the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., fresh off his leadership of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. The photograph of their encounter appeared in Black media throughout the U.S., send- ing the message that Nixon had his ear to the rising civil rights movement as well as to Africa. Meanwhile, Kennedy calculated similarly. The precarious New Deal coalition of pro–civil rights Northerners and a segre- gationist Southern base suggested a formula that might achieve just enough to win: avoid civil rights and talk about Africa. The balancing act was realpolitik for Democrats. In 1952, despite Adlai Stevenson’s winning 79 percent of Black votes nation- ally, Eisenhower swept the North and carried several Southern states. Stevenson’s numbers fell to 61 percent in 1956, and Rev. King and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) announced their votes for Eisenhower. Democrats thus could no longer take either Black Northerners or white Southerners for granted, yet still needed both to win. Kennedy would spell out his approach to Africa on July 2, 1957, in his first major foreign policy address, later known as the Algeria speech. “The most powerful single force in the world today is … man’s eternal desire to be free and indepen- dent,” he said. “The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperial- ism.” In recognizing that the imminent process of decoloniza- tion would profoundly alter the geopolitical landscape, he distinguished himself from the older generation of politicians and their Eurocentric bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Though both Nixon and Kennedy asserted that the Cold War would be fought and won in the so-called Third World, Kennedy defined winning differently. He asserted that nation- alism was more strategically important than communism and insisted that America back the nationalists, even against Wash- ington’s European allies. African independence leaders such as Sékou Touré, Tom Mboya and Kwame Nkrumah saw him as