African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without
accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just
as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told
without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s,
Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American
mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation
of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to
liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II,
Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined
the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism,
imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated
in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black
Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and
Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and
sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of
"Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries,
rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to
Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa.
Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War
as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the
Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States
and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern
Africa.
By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation
movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border,
continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the
revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's
Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of
this history.