In October 1946, Esther Cooper (later Esther Cooper Jackson) gave the opening remarks to the annual conference of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) in Columbia, South Carolina. With the Second World War over, Cooper envisioned a coming alignment between the priorities of segregationist politicians in the American South and the priorities of “our State Department which is aiding the fascist regime of Franco Spain, subsidizing the increased fascist government in the Philippine Islands and supporting the return of King George to Greece and revival of reaction in Germany” (75). At the end of her speech, Cooper invited her audience to turn to the back of Township Auditorium in Columbia and gaze upon the portraits of African American members of Congress during Reconstruction. Their success – if only momentary and partial – in the struggle against white supremacy in South Carolina in the nineteenth century, Cooper suggested, informed the struggles against imperialism, fascism, and white supremacy on the world stage in the twentieth.

John Munro's The Anticolonial Front recounts many such stories of the internationalist visions and intergenerational bonds that animated African Americans’ engagements with global decolonization. While the Reconstruction generation had long since passed away by the time Munro picks up the action, he argues that black anticolonial activism in the postwar period was a resumption of a long-standing opposition to white rule around the world. Munro subtly criticizes the scholarship on the global Cold War, insisting that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union “did not represent a global historical departure so much as it marked another phase of struggles around race, colonialism, and capitalism” (8). Removing the “Cold War lens” allows Munro to unearth a wealth of intergenerational connections among the African American activists and intellectuals, most of them on the left, who are his focus.Footnote ¹ Decolonization was not merely an important issue for these figures. It was the very ground on which they forged their political visions and strategies.

The Anticolonial Front is persuasive and insightful as both an organizational and an intellectual history of African Americans’ involvement with global anticolonial movements in the early postwar years. Munro makes a major contribution to the literature on African American internationalism by elevating organized labor and student movements as important sites of transnational anticolonial politics after 1945. In two chapters, covering the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester and the 1946 Southern Negro Youth Congress respectively, Munro illuminates the ways in which organizations like the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Great Britain and the National Maritime Union (NMU) in the United States were crucial vehicles for the spread of anticolonial ideas and the formation of anticolonial networks. The NMU alone was home, at one point or another, to Communist Party leader Harry Haywood, future Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, and SCLC leader Jack O'Dell. In the words of Haywood, “NMU ships were a school for ideological and political struggle” for anticolonial Americans across various divides on the left (95).

Munro carefully parses the intersections and disjunctures between liberal and left visions of anticolonialism. He demonstrates a surprising level of intellectual overlap among figures aligned with the Communist Party and those associated with the NAACP and the American Society for African Culture, even in the Cold War era, although he notes that the liberal version of anticolonialism “had relatively little to say about the relationship between capital accumulation, white supremacy, and US imperialism” (11). At the same time, Munro overlooks important shifts in some African American intellectuals’ visions for the political organization of the postcolonial world. In 1944, Du Bois still believed that international trusteeship, not national independence, was the political form that offered the greatest chance for decolonizing Africa to avoid the pitfalls of neocolonialism. By 1963, while still wary of the limitations of “flag independence,” he had embraced the postcolonial nation-state to such a degree that he chose to take Ghanaian citizenship. How did this trajectory in the political imagination of Du Bois, or of other African American thinkers, for that matter, relate to the shifting orientations in global anticolonial thought toward the nation-state, which scholars such as Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder have traced?Footnote ² Although the question remains unanswered, the fact that it can be posed speaks to the richness and originality of Munro's work.

Munro's final chapter is a brisk tour through the lines of influence exercised by the anticolonial front of the early Cold War years on numerous civil rights and black power organizations in the 1960s. It suggests numerous fruitful areas for further research. The resurgence of an anticolonial politics among black activists who “grew up in an era defined less by McCarthyism than by decolonization” (282), Munro's ambitious and perceptive book shows, owed much to the visions of solidarity and the networks of collaboration fashioned by a previous generation.