What did the People's Republic of China mean to black radical travelers in the 1950s and 1960s? In this important book, Robeson Taj Frazier argues that contact with the People's Republic of China (PRC) enabled political-intellectual leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Worthy, Vicki Garvin, Mabel Williams, and Robert Williams—in many ways the Cold War philosophes of radical and transracial internationalism—to “fashion” new practices of struggle built on channels of political solidarity and transnational media that connected communist Asian revolutions with black American demands for social and economic justice (pp. 3–4). The transnational politics that resulted from their communicative activities and travel widened the black American public sphere to include discourses drawn from leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, particularly by the 1960s, North Vietnam. Within the growing body of scholarship on what is loosely referred to as “Afro-Asian” history, The East Is Black stands as the first book-length account connecting “twentieth-century black internationalism, African American radical media, and Chinese political communication with foreign groups” (p. 12). As such, it serves as an important model for how histories of China and Asia can be insightfully connected to North American—and global—political and intellectual history.

The book does not draw primarily on Chinese sources but nonetheless makes use of archives, interviews, and secondary literature to draw a rich portrait of its subject matter. Interviews with members of the Bergman family (Leibel Bergman, a former member of the Communist Party USA, traveled to the PRC from San Francisco in 1965 and there met and married Vicki Garvin); Mabel Williams and John Williams (son of Robert F. and Mabel Williams); Carlos Moore (an Afro-Cuban activist whose time in Havana overlapped with the Williamses’); and Sidney Rittenberg (an American-born supporter of the CCP and international propagandist for its leaders) provide an intimate, lively account of internationalist, anti-imperialist radical politics during the 1950s and 1960s. Archival sources drawn from the US government, the Robert F. Williams papers, and the Vicki Garvin papers provide additional rare perspectives on how black American travel to the PRC was orchestrated and experienced. Other materials, such as the Anna Louise Strong papers held at the PRC National Library in Beijing, are used to fill in further details concerning the tenor of Beijing-centered internationalism as directed by the CCP, and provide convincing evidence concerning the importance of the African American Civil Rights Movement as a symbol within the PRC of the inevitability of a global, Maoist, and anti-imperialist overturning of existing political orders. Indeed, one of the main subtexts of The East Is Black concerns the ways in which black American travelers used connections to China—as well as Korea, Cuba, Ghana, and Vietnam—to themselves create a distinctive internationalist vision that privileged events outside of the United States as significant for understanding the likely future course of both domestic and global struggle against white supremacy.

The book's first part, on the 1950s, opens with a short overview of China's major political parties, the CCP and Nationalist Party (Guomindang), and the 1945–49 civil war between the Communists and Nationalists. It situates CCP nurturance of “Afro-Asian and Third World solidarity” (p. 29) within the geopolitical and ideological context of US containment, drawing parallels between containment and US government domestic politics of segregation and suppression of radical agendas. Such parallels were highly visible to W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois who, as discussed in chapter 1 (“Ruminations on Eastern Passage”) found in the image of the PRC a vision of independent nation-building for people of color and thus formed a public alliance with CCP leaders in Beijing, traveling to the PRC in 1959 and again in 1962. The Du Bois–authored vision of a “Pan-Colored proletarian partnership” (p. 49), disseminated widely to readers in the United States, offered an internationalist alternative to Jim Crow intended “to create transnational political connections between black Americans and China” (p. 61).

The possibility of such connections was also explored, and largely anticipated, by journalist William Worthy (chapter 2, “A Passport Ain't Worth a Cent”), whose 1957 visit to the PRC as a journalist for the Baltimore African-American followed on a trip to Asia earlier in the decade, during which he reported back in compelling terms on the black POW experience during the Korean War and the rising tide of Asian anti-colonial nationalism. Unlike the Du Boises, however, Worthy was notably critical of what he experienced while abroad in the PRC, particularly with respect to social inequality and totalitarian state control, though he did praise CCP leaders for having created a country “free of color discrimination” (p. 100).

The second part of The East Is Red, on the 1960s, follows black American internationalist practices of travel and media production into an increasingly radical era. A brief introductory chapter ties PRC anti-Soviet politics to the emergence of an anti-white supremacist strain in Maoist foreign policy, particularly with respect to the socialist Third World. Black radicals were treated by the Beijing government as “unofficial government surrogates,” appointed like other Western expatriates to carry out international propaganda, and whose presence at state functions was used to legitimize the pre–Cultural Revolution foreign policy of the CCP (p. 112). Mabel and Robert F. Williams, political travelers to the PRC by way of Monroe, North Carolina and Havana, joined their “personal propaganda machine” with Beijing's preexisting expatriate information network in exchange for Mao Zedong's personal support for black militancy in the United States (chapter 3, “Soul Brothers and Soul Sisters of the East”). The Williamses were themselves forerunners of militant aspects of black nationalist ideology, and their relationship to Mao played an important role in joining—at least in symbolic terms—black-radical struggle with the PRC's vision of global anti-imperialist insurrection.

A fascinating exploration of the life and work of Victoria “Vicki” Ama Garvin (chapter 4, “Maoism and the Sinification of Black Struggle”) highlights the creativity with which black Americans attempted to apply Maoism systematically to pragmatic issues such as foreign language education. Indeed, the chapter on Garvin tacitly makes the case that her name belongs alongside that of Paolo Freire as a radical pedagogical visionary. Garvin's student-centered approach to the teaching of English can also be seen as anticipating best practices of liberal education today.

Two concluding chapters address legacies of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as tensions, in black American experiences of the PRC. The first (coda, “The 1970s: Rapprochement and the Decline of China's World Revolution”), written from a sweeping historical perspective covering the decade of the 1970s, describes both the positive aspects of transnational solidarity—most notably the use of the PRC to explore how an industrializing, militant, and nonracist society might be created—and the negative aspects, such as the sense of hypocrisy and betrayal elicited by the PRC's turn toward a more imperialist foreign policy in Africa. The second (postscript, “Weaving Through San Huan Lu”) is written from a personal and autobiographical perspective, and argues that the PRC remains a productive site for exploring the complex of interrelated themes that stand at the center of The East Is Black and its transnational methodology: ideologies of race, the international circulation of bodies, and cultural production (p. 216).

Dissent gives rise to new solidarities, some of which cross national boundaries. One strength of this book is its unwillingness to shy away from the reality that dissenters may also be oppressors, whether (as nation-states) of disenfranchised subjects within their borders or (as individual members of radical networks and families) of women; of viewpoints that do not accord with their own; and, though less directly, as beneficiaries of the systems of travel and privilege amid which cosmopolitan identity often takes shape. (The book is itself perhaps more of a meditation on black American global citizenship than on black radical imagination generally.) Other strengths include the ease of its methodological transitions (between close reading and narrative history, for example); the liveliness and, for lack of a better term, openness of its writing; and the uniqueness of many of its sources. The East Is Black will appeal to specialists in Cold War transnational history, American studies, and US politics and, at the same time, can be read profitably by a wide range of students engaged in the study of Cold War intersections between the personal and political within a transnational frame. This is in part because the book raises, though does not always address or answer, key questions concerning the first decades of the Cold War as a whole: What distinguished the decade of “The 1950s” from that of “The 1960s”? How did US-PRC relations evolve during the period prior to normalization? How did black Americans think about and encounter policies of containment, and connect these to the lived reality of racial segregation? How were the relationships between categories such as “race,” “color,” and the “Third World” understood? For students of China and Asia in particular, The East Is Black would perhaps be most profitably read alongside a more detailed narrative history focusing on internal national or regional politics, as well as a more top-down perspective on Cold War international relations. Viewed from a scholarly perspective, this ground-breaking work of research and synthesis deserves high praise for having successfully “transnationalized” histories and theories of race in the post-1945 United States.