Nico Slate on the Intellectual History of Global Antiracist Solidarities

In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought, interviews Nico Slate, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, about his most recent journal article, “Beyond Cold War Civil Rights: Decolonization, The New World of Negro Americans, and the Intellectual History of Global Antiracist Solidarities.”

Professor Slate’s research and teaching focus on the history of social movements in the United States and India. He is the author of six books: The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India (HarperCollins India and the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024); Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race (Temple University Press, 2023); Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2019); Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (University of Washington Press, 2019); The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is also the editor of Black Power Beyond Borders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), and co-editor, with Professor Harald Fischer-Tiné, of Indo-US Entanglements: The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonisation (Leiden University Press, 2022) and, with Professor Rajeshwari Dutt, of India in the World: 1500-Present (Routledge, 2023). He is currently at work on two books: a collective biography of seven people who survived the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, and a history of the civil rights movement through the lens of the Highlander Folk School.

His new article in Global Black Thought explores the intellectual history of global antiracist solidarities by examining an underutilized archive. In the late 1950s, the political scientist Harold Isaacs interviewed several dozen African American social, cultural, and political figures while gathering material for a book that would be published in 1964 as The New World of Negro Americans. The interview notes Isaacs kept offer a unique window on the way African American thinkers and activists saw decolonization as an opportunity to mobilize links with people of color throughout the world.

Ashley Everson: Your work reframes the “Cold War Civil Rights” thesis by centering Black activism. How does this reframing shift our understanding of the Cold War era?

Nico Slate: For many decades now, historians have enriched diplomatic, international, transnational, and global history by moving beyond the ideas and actions of presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and other obvious powerbrokers. Under the broad aegis of social history, these new histories have helped us see how “ordinary” people transformed history in far from ordinary ways–often by transgressing and reframing national borders. The Cold War Civil Rights thesis maintained, by contrast, a strong emphasis on the ideas and actions of traditional powerbrokers. Many histories that advanced the thesis took civil rights crises for granted (thus ignoring one dimension of Black activism), ignored the impact of Black activists on foreign opinion (missing another key dimension of Black activism), and marginalized the many Black activists who envisioned and articulated the link between the Cold War and civil rights.

Centering Black activism does more than add another key voice to a multifaceted history; it transforms our understanding of the Cold War era by recognizing how the struggle against racism defined the way many understood the Cold War itself.

Everson: What led you to examine Harold Isaacs’s underutilized archive, and what surprised you most in those interview notes?

Slate: The historian David Hollinger alerted me to the richness of the archive, and I remain deeply grateful to him for his generosity. I knew of Isaacs because of his early work, Scratches on Our Minds, which explores how Americans perceived China and India. I did not know about his work on African American transnationalism, and had never heard of the remarkable interviews he conducted. When I began to look at the interview notes, I was surprised both by their length (many of the interviews lasted for multiple hours) and by their richness. There is so much in those notes that I hope other scholars will explore.

Everson: You emphasize the importance of transracial solidarities. How do you see these alliances operating in today’s movements for global racial justice?

Slate: Ours is a world so overrun with injustice that it can overwhelm and paralyze people of goodwill. Where should we begin? What can we do? I find inspiration in the way that many of those featured in this essay–people like Pauli Murray, for example–fought injustice throughout the world while remaining dedicated to struggles at home.

Everson: How might scholars resist the tendency to marginalize Black internationalist voices within Cold War historiography?

Slate: One approach is to keep searching for new sources. The Isaacs papers themselves offer a lot to scholars who want to resist such marginalization. But sources alone are not enough. As my essay demonstrates, we also need to sharpen our ability to read against the grain of our sources and to recognize their biases and the way that even something designed to give voice could at the same time be silencing.

Everson: What lessons can contemporary diplomats or activists learn from figures like Pauli Murray or Cedric Dover regarding cross-racial coalition building?

Slate: This question makes me think of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s famous speech, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” I highly recommend that speech. Reagon makes a range of important points, but the key takeaway for me is that coalition building is hard by definition. It requires patience and humility and quite a bit of creativity. Ultimately, that might be what most impresses me about figures like Murray and Dover–not just their determination but also their creativity.

Everson: In what ways did anticommunist liberalism, as you discuss, distort the narrative of global antiracist solidarities, and how can historians correct this record?

Slate: One key distortion has to do with the nation state itself. When I look at the global antiracist solidarities built by figures like W.E. B. Du Bois in the first half of the twentieth century, they are expressly transnational. The goal is not just to achieve civil rights within a particular country but to fight against the limitations of borders of many kinds.