Re-Thinking the Emergence of the Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States: Max Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, 1922–1946

Abstract

This article is about how African American missionary Max Yergan and other African American anti-colonial activists working through the Council on African Affairs (CAA) contributed to the emergence of the struggle for South African liberation in the United States. It subsumes Yergan's arrival in South Africa in 1922 through the establishment of the Council and its initial campaigns on behalf of black South Africans. My intent is to show that the struggle for South African liberation in the United States developed from transnational contact between African Americans and black South Africans, and that the struggle began not in the United States as is most often assumed but in South Africa under the leadership of Yergan, that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 pushed Yergan and other anti-colonial radicals more assuredly into the fight for South Africa's liberation, and that the Council on African Affairs was critical to the emergence of the struggle in the United States during...