The ANLCA, post-colonial Africa and Nigeria in turmoil

‘The Negro recognizes now that he lives in a world community’, intoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the founding conference of the ANLCA at Columbia University’s Arden House in November 1962. ^{Footnote 18} ‘There was a time’ continued King:

Bringing together a who’s who of African American civil society including leading civil rights leaders and Black intellectuals as well as diplomats and observers from the United Nations and newly established African states, the gathering in the august surrounding of Arden House marked a significant event in trans-Atlantic Black internationalism. Evoking the Pan-Africanist intellectual W.E.B Du Bois, King called on the Black community to challenge ‘racial provincialism’ and look beyond ‘125th Street in New York or Beale Street in Memphis’ particularly as the decolonization process in Africa fundamentally reshaped global politics. According to Plummer, ‘[w]hat distinguished the committee that drafted the call to create an Africa-orientated group from past efforts is the conscious linkage it made between decolonization and antiracism on the continent and civil rights in the United States’. ^{Footnote 20} The New York Times reported in July 1964 that the ANLCA’s primary goal was ‘to make the views of America’s 20 million Negroes an important element in the formulation of United States policy towards the newly independent countries of sub-Sahara [sic] Africa…. These [ANLCA] leaders believe that the cultural and political cohesiveness of the American Negro population is interrelated with the future of the African peoples’. ^{Footnote 21} The lobbying efforts of the ANLCA reflected a more complex tradition of Black internationalist activism. ^{Footnote 22} Rather than radical or leftist Black activists and organizations having a monopoly on anti-colonialism and engagement with the Global South, liberal civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, demonstrated that lobbying, and sometimes cooperating, with the US government and international institutions could advance a global political vision closely intertwined with challenging racism at home. ^{Footnote 23} This sense of interconnection was a critical element in defining how the ANLCA leaders would respond to the Nigerian Civil War, a conflict that shattered the early 1960s optimism many in the African American community had for Nigeria and post-colonial Africa. Throughout the first half of the 1960s the ANLCA, under the deft leadership of Theodore E. Brown, emerged at the forefront of African American engagement with post-colonial Africa. ^{Footnote 24}

The conference’s origins and mission reflected the ebullience of the 1960s in terms of the civil rights revolution and the concurrent end of European empire throughout Africa. Across the states of the old Confederacy, civil rights organizations and activists were challenging the racial inequality of Jim Crow through non-violent sit-ins, Freedom Rides and other forms of mass protest. ^{Footnote 25} At the same time, across the Atlantic, beginning with Ghana in 1957, newly independent African states were emerging from European colonial rule to assert themselves on the world stage, with seventeen gaining their independence in 1960 alone, a year dubbed by the United Nations, the ‘Year of Africa’. ^{Footnote 26} The emergence of so many independent states from European colonial rule signalled that the normative legitimacy of colonialism, as a system of racial hierarchy and imperial domination, was no longer tenable.

Nigeria, a former British colony that was one of the seventeen to gain independence in the ‘Year of Africa’, had a special place in the worldview of African Americans. Beginning in the early twentieth century, African Americans and Nigerians had forged personal, educational, institutional and intellectual connections that had transcended the Black Atlantic.

The ideas and initiatives of the First Pan-African Congress organized by Du Bois in Paris in 1919 had helped spark the fires of early anti-colonial agitation in the British Crown colony. The Garveyite movement expanded from the Western Hemisphere to influence nascent anticolonial activists, intellectuals, religious figures, newspaper editors and students in Lagos and into the colonial hinterland. In 1925, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who would go on to be Nigeria’s paramount independence leader, the so-called ‘Nehru of West Africa’, travelled to the United States to receive his formative education at both Howard and Lincoln Universities, two of the leading Black tertiary institutions in America, from some of the leading Black intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century including philosopher Alain Locke and historian William Hansberry. In Azikiwe’s footsteps came other Nigerian students on the eve of the Second World War. These students, that included Kingsley Mbadiwe, Mazi Mbonu Ojike and Prince Abyssinia Akweke Nwafor Orizu, helped thicken the relationship between African Americans and Nigerians through developing new organizations such as the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR) to raise awareness about African affairs. They also forged links with the NAACP and used the Black press to articulate the importance of Nigerian independence for the Black diaspora. African Americans in turn became avid supporters for the cause of Nigerian independence, and in doing so linked it to their quest to achieve equal citizenship and end racial discrimination in the United States.

With independence achieved, Nigeria was viewed as one of the critical new nation-states in Africa by the African-American community, due to its commitment to parliamentary democracy, its status as the largest state (in terms of population in Africa), its economic potential and its active diplomacy – aimed at accelerating the process of decolonization and confronting white-minority regimes in Southern Africa and also calling out the lack of racial progress in the United States. However, within six years, the hopeful vision of Nigeria had fractured in an orgy of political, ethnic and religious violence that had the potential to lead to civil war. ^{Footnote 27}

Nigeria was a heterogeneous colonial construct that included hundreds of different tribal and ethnic groups, with the three predominant ethnic groups being the Hausa and Fulani in the Northern region, the Igbo in the Eastern region and the Yoruba in the Western region. The origins of the coup of January 1966 and the subsequent coup of July that same year lie in the turbulent power dynamics that afflicted the relationships between these ethnic groups in post-colonial Nigeria. The first coup was launched by a group of middle-ranking predominantly Igbo army officers frustrated with how Hausa interests had dominated the post-independence polity. The second coup was a reaction to the first. Although the July coup plotters aimed to prevent the development of Nigeria as a unitary state, that had the potential to subsume Northern sectional interests, it rapidly evolved into a series of pogroms aimed at Igbo migrants living in the North, who were seen as complicit in provoking the political instability. Tens-of-thousands were killed in the ensuing violence that led to millions of Igbo fleeing back to their traditional homeland in the Eastern Region and provoking calls for secession, as the Republic of Biafra, as the only way to protect the Igbo minority.

An opportunity to mediate

‘It is generally agreed’, wrote Theodore E. Brown in a letter addressed to the Call Committee of the ANLCA, ‘that a very serious crisis is imminent regarding the future of the nationhood of Nigeria. Unfortunately, unless some new element, or elements, are introduced, this African state will experience, and the world will observe, a horrible civil war’. ‘The situation’, according to Brown, ‘presents a unique but extremely vital opportunity for Negro American leaders to aid in a troubled situation’. ^{Footnote 28} Brown became the central diplomatic figure in the search for a peaceful resolution to the crisis in Nigeria. While the members of the Call Committee were engaged in seeking a mediated solution to the conflict through their activities in the United States, Brown was at the coalface of the ANLCA campaign. He travelled to and from Africa on behalf of his colleagues, meeting with Nigerian and Biafran officials as well as heads of state of other crucial African countries such as Ethiopia and Ghana in an effort to build consensus behind the goal of the ANLCA leadership acting as a mediator between the divided parties.

Brown’s letter outlining a potential role for the African American civil rights leaders in pursuing a peaceful settlement, dated 21 March 1967, came at a time when the political situation in Nigeria was approaching a dangerous crisis point. On 14 and 15 March, respectively, two articles appeared in the New York Times that exemplified the growing tensions between the Federal Military Government led by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu ‘Jack’ Gowon, and the Regional Government of the Eastern Region, led by Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (both articles appeared as clippings in the papers of the NAACP related to the role of the ANLCA in the Nigerian crisis).²⁹ The acrimony between the two men and their respective causes was palpable. Gowon denounced Ojukwu as ‘the butcher [of] the [Federal] Constitution; while Ojukwu declared before a gathering of foreign correspondents in Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region, that ‘the East will secede if attacked – a physical attack or an economic blockade. We all know when you pick up a pistol and shoot a man it’s called murder – and equally so when you strangle him’. ^{Footnote 29}

At the centre of the inflammatory rhetoric used on both sides, and at the centre of the concern of the ANLCA, was the implementation of the Aburi Agreement, a diplomatic agreement signed in Ghana on 5 January 1967. The agreement negotiated between the Federal Government and the Eastern Region was an attempt to end the cycle of ethnic violence and establish greater political stability, which could serve as grounds for political reconciliation between the regions. The mass killings of Igbo throughout the North had had a deep physical, emotional and psychological impact on the Igbo majority in the Eastern Region. For Ojukwu and his advisors, there was acute concern about whether it was possible to integrate the East back into the Federal state after the indifference that Federal authorities had shown regarding the massacre of Igbo. ^{Footnote 30}

In the United States, and particularly in the African-American community, the signing of the Aburi agreement provided a glimmer of optimism after the bloodshed of the anti-Igbo pogroms. In the Black press, after months of reporting on the slaughter of tens of thousands, Aburi presented an opportunity to resolve ethnic tensions peacefully and ensure Nigerian unity. Reacting to the Aburi agreement, an editorial in The Chicago Defender was optimistic that a compromise had been agreed to:

The fracturing of the slim consensus that had sustained the Aburi agreement provoked alarm in the African-American community, who had viewed the progress of post-colonial Nigeria as central to their own struggle for racial justice and a marker of the success of peoples of African descent gaining self-determination and equality in the post-1945 international system. ‘The American Negro’, wrote novelist James Baldwin, ‘can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white America’s image of him. This fact has everything to do with the rise of Africa in world affairs’. ^{Footnote 32} This concern about the future of post-colonial Africa sparked the search for some way to prevent the slide towards civil war. Simon Anekwe wrote in the New York Amsterdam News that Nigerian Ambassador to the UN Chief, S.O. Adebo, after acknowledging that the current situation was ‘rather desperate’, had noted that ‘the Federal Military Government would seriously evaluate any external private or governmental initiative calculated to help resolve the crisis’. ^{Footnote 33} An editorial in the New York Amsterdam News on 25 March urgently called for some type of third party to bring both sides together, particularly following Lt. Col Ojukwu’s declaration that if the Aburi agreement had not been implemented by 31 March, he would unilaterally implement them in the Eastern Region, a clear move toward secession from the federation. The article stated emphatically that:

Anticipating the concerns that some Nigerian officials may have entertained about a third-party entity interfering in the sovereignty of the Nigerian state, the author of the article hoped that:

Theodore E. Brown to Africa

Perceiving an imminent crisis, Theodore Brown’s March 1967 letter to his fellow ANLCA members noted that ‘the situation presents a unique but extremely vital opportunity for Negro American leaders to aid in a trouble situation’. ^{Footnote 36} Brown recounted that the cable sent by the Call Committee to the five military governors on 21 March was:

By invoking ‘Howard and Lincoln’, Brown was alluding to the transnational connections, made through education and travel, that bound African Americans to the future of Nigeria in a ‘global race revolution’. ^{Footnote 38} In September 1967, Brown noted that the initial cable was driven not only by the concerns of the ANLCA but also by outside influences. He wrote that ‘we [senior African American civil rights leaders] were under mounting pressure not only from Nigerian students and other Nigerians in the United States but also from many American groups who felt that 22 million American Negroes could perform a unique role for Nigeria and the world as a peaceful force in finding a solution to the Nigerian problem’. ^{Footnote 39}

The response of both the Nigerian Federal government and Eastern Region officials, to the offer of mediation by the ANLCA, was encouraging for the committee members. Less than a week after the official cable was despatched to all parties involved in the dispute, Brown received positive replies from S.O. Adabo, the Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the UN, and from Aggrey K. Oji, the Eastern Nigeria Liaison Officer based in New York.⁴¹ Oji expressed his and the Eastern Region’s appreciation in ‘your interest in the problems of our country and share with you the hope that these problems will be solved quickly and peacefully so that all the peoples of Nigeria can develop and prosper’. ^{Footnote 40} Three weeks later, the ANLCA received a lengthy correspondence from two community leaders in Old Calabar and Ogoja in the Eastern Region expressing their thanks for the decision of the Conference. The letter stated that:

While not as effusive as the leaders from the Eastern Region, a cable from Lt Col Gowon on 26 April, sent through the Nigerian ambassador to the United States Ade Martins, declared that:

In a memorandum to King, Randolph, Wilkins and Young, Brown described the responses as ‘thus far, all of it is favourable [sic]’. ^{Footnote 43}

The Black press was aware of the historical significance of the ANLCA mediation efforts.

The New York Amsterdam News called the offer of mediation:

A further article in the Amsterdam News, three days before the Republic of Biafra was declared independent on 30 May, reflected on the importance of the mission:

The article also noted that the offer of mediation had been positively received in Nigerian government newspapers, with one paper running a subheading, ‘we believe that you will do your duty for Nigeria, Africa, your race and the world’. ^{Footnote 45} In a 17 May memorandum in which Nigeria was the number one issue, Brown remarked that ‘this offer on the part of the Conference met with virtually unanimous favourable world-wide reaction. Two principal daily Nigerian newspapers carried front page editorials thanking American Negroes for this effort’. ^{Footnote 46}

In a letter to the Call Committee prior to his departure for Nigeria in June 1967, Brown reiterated this point: ‘[i]t is difficult to tell you the tremendously favourable and frankly unanimous reaction that I’ve had expressed from segments to your efforts in this critical situation. This favourable reaction has also been expressed by high officials in our State Department. The fact that our effort, as private citizens, is concerned solely with humanitarian objectives gives us a unique position’. ^{Footnote 47} While it is problematic to believe that a single cable could dramatically affect the complex situation on the ground in West Africa, it was clearly much more than an empty gesture. What was needed, in the aftermath of the cable, were concrete diplomatic efforts, which built on the goodwill being expressed by both sides in Nigeria for the humanitarian objective of bringing both sides together around the negotiation table.

The ‘unique position’ of the ANLCA was something that Theodore Brown wished to use as diplomatic leverage as he flew to West Africa in June 1967 on his inaugural mission to Nigeria at the request of his colleagues in the Conference. As Brown noted in his lengthy report to the ANLCA in September 1967, ‘[b]oth in Nigeria and Ghana [where Brown also travelled to meet Biafran officials] there was often expressed the unique non-governmental role of the Americans. One distinct advantage that the Negro leaders had was the ability to confer with both sides without getting involved in the issue of recognition of who was or was not a sovereign state’. ^{Footnote 48} Between June and November, Brown made three significant trips to Africa directly related to addressing the crisis in Nigeria. During his initial visit in June, his talks with [newly promoted] Brigadier General Gowon were highly publicised in the press in Lagos, as well as on television and radio. Brown wrote that ‘Nigerians were enthusiastic about the interest and efforts of millions of Americans acting independently of their government. Nigerians of every region were grateful for the offer of the American Negro leaders’. ^{Footnote 49} From Lagos, Brown travelled to Accra, the capital of Ghana, to discuss the situation with General Ankrah, who had been instrumental as a mediator during the infamous Aburi talks. This was also the first time that Brown engaged with officials from the so-called Republic of Biafra, whom he described as ‘pretty determined’. ^{Footnote 50}

Brown returned to the United States at the end of June and briefed his colleagues about the situation in Nigeria. According to his recollections, with no moves towards the use of force by either side, the ANLCA ‘deemed it advisable that the Executive Director returns to Africa especially for the purpose of meeting with officials from the Eastern Region’. ^{Footnote 51} As Brown returned to Africa to test the diplomatic waters with officials from Biafra, particularly Lt. Col Ojukwu, the tensions that had been growing for over a year since the second coup finally exploded into war. Following Biafra’s declaration of independence on 30 May, Gowon had ordered a general mobilization of all Federal forces and instituted an air, land and sea blockade of the Eastern Region. After a month of ‘phoney war’, in early July, following a brief skirmish on the border between Benue Plateau State and the Eastern Central state, Nigerian forces commenced their ‘police action’ with a two-front advance into Biafran territory to quickly snuff out the so-called Republic and capture its leadership. The outbreak of fighting did not derail Brown’s mission on behalf of the ANLCA leadership. Although he reported back that air of despondency gripped Lagos as hostilities got underway, Brown observed ‘there was an increased feeling, especially in Ghana and among Biafrans and many Nigerians, that the efforts of American Negroes should be continued in an attempt to hasten the cessation of hostilities’. ^{Footnote 52}

Advancing peace abroad and confronting Black Power at home

The ANLCA mediation efforts, spearheaded by the diplomacy of Theodore E. Brown, were one of the most significant undertakings made by the Conference in its history. While issues related to Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were also of deep significance, Brown stated that, ‘the conference has been sort of side tracked in the last year and a half because of the great horrors that are going on as a result of the conflict…between Nigeria and the area of Biafra. I should say that just about all of our time in the last year and a half has been engaged in that’.⁵⁶ The war in Nigeria was not just a matter that had deep implications for Africa and the Black diaspora; in the eyes of the keys members of the ANLCA, it also had important domestic implications. While provoked by the fear that the disintegration of Nigeria would lead to untold human misery and a backward step for post-colonial Africa, the mission also reflected the domestic context of the battle for Black liberation in the United States. By 1967, the moderate agenda that the ANLCA espoused in international affairs was being challenged by emergent Black Power internationalism.

The Call Committee of the Conference was a veritable who’s who of the liberal civil rights movement, which had assumed a dominant role in the Black freedom struggle since the end of the Second World War. The movement – whose leaders believed firmly in the integration of African Americans into broader American society – had achieved noteworthy legal and political victories such as the Brown vs Board of Education decision in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet, by the mid-1960s their approach was under threat by the growing militancy of the Black Power movement.

The emergence of Black Power leaders and their followers not only challenged the domestic integrationist model espoused by the leaders in the ANLCA; but also called into question their approach to international affairs. Imbued by the ideology and example of revolutionary armed struggles in the Third World, some of the individuals and groups that existed under the aegis of Black Power advocated armed resistance to challenge the racism and economic injustice in American society. In seeking to mediate the conflict in Nigeria, the ANLCA leadership hoped to show that seeking justice through peaceful means overseas was more effective than armed struggle, a lesson that was pertinent in Black America. Reflecting on the growing levels of urban unrest and racial violence in the United States, Theodore Brown drew a parallel with the civil war in Nigeria:

While the analogy drawn by Brown is somewhat crude, it is important in assessing the link between the domestic crisis and the ANLCA mission to Nigeria. For Brown, Black Power’s support for violence to overcome racism and economic injustice was counterproductive. The war in Nigeria, with its horrific death toll and destruction, was a tragedy for Nigeria, Africa and the Black diaspora. Brown and the ANLCA believed that their involvement in seeking a compromise peace that would re-establish a united Nigeria offered the best hope for the post-colonial future.

It is in this context of the growing appeal of solidarity with radical Third World regimes and revolutionary national liberation movements that the ANLCA mission to Nigeria must be viewed. Firstly, the mission should be understood as a determined effort to end the suffering of Nigerians of all regions and facilitate the peaceful reunification of the country. However, the mission also marked a more ‘activist’ phase in the organization’s existence. Rather than focusing on lobbying the US government and the State Department in order to shape policy towards Africa, Plummer has argued that ‘[T]he ANLCA interests after 1966 reflected pressures by domestic nationalist organizations and civil rights activists committed to the immediatism [sic] of “Freedom Now”’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Historian Komozi Woodard has highlighted the growing divergence between the younger generation of Black nationalist militants and the civil rights establishment, particularly in foreign affairs. Woodard contrasted the attitudes of Malcolm X with the ANLCA during the Congo Crisis (1960–1965). While Malcolm was forthright in denouncing imperialism and US policy in the Congo, ‘the buzzwords for Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa were civility and caution. In fact, the White House was attempting to intimidate and condition black leadership to accept its exclusive hegemony over foreign affairs, including colonialism and independence in Africa’. ^{Footnote 55}

This growing disillusion with what had been thought to be the ineluctable process of self-determination throughout Africa caused the ANLCA to adopt this more activist approach to the continent. In a memorandum from Theodore Brown to the call committee of the ANLCA in June 1966, Brown wrote in the context of Southern Africa that ‘Our efforts must be accelerated if we are to have a meaningful [sic] impact on the problem of racism in Africa generally, apartheid in South Africa, the Rhodesia crisis, Angola and Mozambique and the “after thought” approach of our own government in the formulation of United States-African policy’. ^{Footnote 56} Historian Steven Metz also observed that the growing militancy of Congressman Charles Diggs – a Black politician closely aligned with moderate civil rights leaders – towards Apartheid South Africa, where he favoured total political and economic isolation and support for liberation groups, reflected:

To increase their assertiveness in African affairs and undercut the radical ‘Third Worldism’ of various Black militants, the ANLCA proposed a number of policy initiatives and programs that coincided with the Nigeria peace mission. The Conference proposed the establishment of a university exchange program between the United States and Africa, as well as the development of an extensive Africa-focused adult education program for the Black community. ‘This program is to be focused among American Negroes on African culture, Negro history and world affairs. Through this program, we would seek to accomplish an intelligent and well-informed American Negro knowledge of the culture of the Negro, and the nature of the political choices available to him’. ^{Footnote 58} Besides improving educational standards in Africa, the ANLCA project – drawing on a deep reservoir of interest in the African American community in relation to Africa – sought to develop a more nuanced understanding of African affairs that aligned with the politics of the ANLCA. ‘In an effort to direct the natural ethnic expression into a constructive integrating program’, wrote Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph in a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk:

Both Randolph and Wilkins rejected the ‘mischievous’ contributions of some African-American individuals and groups promoting Pan-Africanism and Third World solidarity as ‘contributing to…a dangerous commitment to divisiveness along color lines in the nation and in the world’. ^{Footnote 60}

That this large-scale program was being suggested at the same time as the ANLCA leadership were attempting to mediate the civil war in Nigeria is reflective of how both initiatives were driven by the need of the Conference to avoid being outflanked in African affairs by more militant organizations and voices in the African-American community. While the Conference’s offer to help mediate the conflict was provoked by shocking accounts of violence and political disintegration reported in the mainstream and African-American press, the mission can best be viewed as a way for integrationist civil rights leaders to reassert themselves both at home and abroad. The Nigerian peace mission and the education outreach also allowed the ANLCA to remain on good terms with the Johnson Administration, although King’s relationship with Johnson had become increasingly strained due to his criticism of the Vietnam War. As noted by Theodore Brown, the ANLCA was unofficially supported by the State Department and the White House in seeking a peaceful settlement in Nigeria and was in communication with Secretary of State Rusk regarding its education proposal. ^{Footnote 61}

The importance of the connection between the Johnson Administration and the ANLCA was multifaceted. Firstly, for many of the senior leaders in the ANLCA, the Johnson Administration was still viewed as a vital ally in pushing forward a progressive domestic civil rights agenda; it was therefore essential to remain on good terms for the foreseeable future. Secondly, for the Johnson Administration, the activities of the ANLCA in relation to Africa allowed it to boost its prestige among the African-American community and potentially undermine the standing of more militant Black views. By taking concrete action on African affairs – mediation in Nigeria, educational outreach and lobbying the Johnson Administration to put more economic and political pressure on colonial and white supremacist regimes in Southern Africa – the moderate leaders of the ANLCA were presenting themselves as more effective than other groups and individuals in the Black community.

The peace mission confronts diplomatic realities

By October 1967, following Brown’s two consecutive trips to Africa, the diplomatic contours of the ANLCA peace mission were clearly visible. The leadership of the Conference sought to leverage the appeal the African-American mediators had with both sides to bring them to the negotiating table. The ANLCA hoped to do this by working alongside other African leaders who had expressed alarm about the conflict. During his visits to Africa, Theodore Brown had not only been able to engage with parties from both sides in the civil war, but also with senior African statesmen such as General Joseph Ankrah in Ghana, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and President William Tubman of Liberia. These discussions, as well as discussions that members of the ANLCA had with envoys from both Nigeria and Biafra (for example, A. Philip Randolph met with Biafran envoy Sir Louis Mbanefo, a preeminent jurist and former member of the International Court of Justice to discuss the involvement of the ANLCA), helped define the scope of the mission. ^{Footnote 62} In a detailed memorandum to Randolph, King, Wilkins and Young, Brown outlined the next stage of the ANLCA’s efforts. While Brown did not call for the leaders to travel to Nigeria, he felt that the continuing lobbying and campaigning of the ANLCA could yield significant results.

Brown believed the best course of action was for him to return to Africa to ‘solicit help and seek advice, ways and means from other African leaders and solicit also their determined help in getting a conference underway between leaders of the two factions’. Brown also believed that major interest groups in the United States, such as churches, labour unions, businesses and humanitarian groups, needed to be courted by the ANLCA ‘in order to develop interest and world pressure for a quick cessation of hostilities and a restoration of a peaceful and tranquil Nigerian society’. To accomplish these joint goals Brown proposed that the ANLCA raise $15,000 ($114,767 in 2019). However, Brown called for the money to be raised rapidly via business and corporate interests in the United States ‘with investments in Africa and particularly in Nigeria….[that] share our concern in this endeavour’. ^{Footnote 63}

Even as Theodore Brown and the leadership of the ANLCA outlined the scope of their diplomatic efforts and sought to aid African leaders and states in finding a peaceful solution, the military situation grew increasingly intractable and bloody, particularly following the Nigerian offensive that captured the Biafran capital of Enugu in October. This development prompted the ANLCA to ponder travelling directly to the warzone to act as mediators. ‘The civil war’, noted an editorial in The Chicago Defender:

A Call and Post editorial noted, sadly, that even a swift military victory by FMG forces without a long-term political reconciliation would mean that ‘enmities are likely to be deepened – and an even greater tragedy could befall this anguished land….What is needed now is compassion, wisdom – and above all, mutual tolerance’. ^{Footnote 65} A World Council of Churches appeal published in the New Pittsburgh Courier beseeched all combatants to pursue policies ‘which will begin to dispel fear and bitterness and open the way to a future to which all can consent’. ^{Footnote 66} In an interview published in the New York Amsterdam News, the Biafran ‘diplomat’ and former student at Lincoln University in the 1940s, Kingsley Mbadiwe, informed African American readers that ‘[t]he men who sit in Lagos today, are waging a war of extermination and genocide against those of us who contributed the most towards the building of one Nigeria’. Faced with these horrific circumstances, Mbadiwe called on ‘the American people with their great concern for humanity to use their great world prestige to motivate those organisations, the OAU and UN, to take such action to prevent further genocide and bring about a peaceful settlement’. ^{Footnote 67} In a cable sent to Lt. General Gowon on 30 October, the Conference leadership outlined their growing concerns. ‘As the war goes on in Nigeria’, stated the cable, ‘Americans of African descent become increasingly alarmed at the mounting bloodshed and misery. We offer again our hand in friendship in any effort to bring the bloodshed to an immediate end…. We hope that the six heads [of state] of the Organisation of African Unity will be able to undertake their mission as soon as possible’. This appeal for diplomacy and moderation in dealing with the civil war was combined with a unique offer from the ANLCA leader: ‘the possibility of making an emergency trip to Africa if such a move will help to halt the fighting in Nigeria’. ^{Footnote 68}

The potential mission to Nigeria received widespread circulation in the Black press. For many commentators in the African-American press, the mission was a significant event in highlighting the importance of Pan-Africanism to Black Americans and the significant role African Americans could play in relation to the Black diaspora. ^{Footnote 69} ‘Indicative of the American Negroes’ deep concern about the civil war in Nigeria’, stated an article in The Crisis, ‘four of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders revealed that they have been considering the possibility of making an emergency trip to Africa if such a move would help halt the fighting in Nigeria’. ‘For the NAACP’, continued the article, ‘this involvement in African affairs is but an extension of a tradition dating back to the early years of the century and of the Association when Du Bois…called and the NAACP financed a Pan-African Congress which met in Paris in February 1919’. ^{Footnote 70} By invoking the legacy of the 1919 Congress, The Crisis was linking activities of the ANLCA to the reformist Black internationalism that was espoused by Du Bois and other delegates in Paris. Rather than seeking complete liberation from European colonial rule, the Conference called on the Allied powers to improve colonial conditions as a pathway towards self-determination. Like Du Bois in Paris, the ANLCA hoped to work within existing international institutions and powers to improve the well-being of all sides in the civil war. ^{Footnote 71} In the New York Amsterdam News, Simon Anekwe described the potential mission as ‘historical in its impact on Nigeria and Biafra, the rest of Africa and on Afro-Americans themselves…. School children would read of it in history books and tales of black men from across the seas who rescued their fatherland from the sword and flaming torch would be told like a great sea sage’. According to Anekwe:

Even as the Black press endorsed the efforts of the ANLCA leadership, the mission faced daunting diplomatic and domestic challenges that would circumscribe its scope and effectiveness. In his oral history, Brown made it clear that the mission saw the OAU as a critical element in securing a peaceful settlement. ‘[W]e placed a great deal of hope in the OAU efforts’, stated Brown:

While the ANLCA sought to work alongside the OAU, as a non-state actor the mission had to operate within the diplomatic parameters set by the Pan-African organization. This meant that the ANLCA adopted similar talking points and objectives to the OAU, a situation that placed it at odds with the Biafran leadership.

In September 1967, as fighting raged between Nigerian and Biafran forces, the heads of state of the OAU gathered in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa. This was the first gathering of the OAU since the outbreak of hostilities, and the civil war resonated deeply with many of the leaders who gathered. For many of the young post-colonial African nation-states secession posed an existential danger. While there was sympathy from some African heads of state for the situation the Biafrans found themselves in, there was unanimous agreement that secession posed a serious threat to the development of the continent and had the potential of turning the region into a Cold War battlefield. ^{Footnote 73} Territorial integrity and non-intervention, core ideas in the OAU Charter, defined the debates around the civil war in Kinshasa.

The resolution that emerged from the OAU meeting would define the policy of the organization for the duration of the civil war. Besides condemning secession and upholding the principles of sovereignty within colonial borders and non-intervention, the OAU established a ‘consultative mission’ of six African heads of state to assure General Gowon of the OAU’s desire for ‘the territorial integrity, unity and peace of Nigeria’. ^{Footnote 74} According to the New York Times, the Kinshasa resolution adopted a two-track approach: the need to avoid a prolonged and bloody war that may irreparably undermine the viability of Nigeria, and the need to convince the Biafrans to abandon secession. ‘Biafra must give up the secession and the Ibos must agree to help rebuild Nigerian unity’, declared the editorial in the Times:

Two of the leading historians of the international dimensions of the civil war, Lasse Heerten and John J. Stremlau, acknowledge that this OAU initiative had a decisive impact on the diplomacy surrounding the civil war and its eventual outcome. The Kinshasa resolution remained the key component of OAU diplomacy throughout the conflict. ^{Footnote 76}

For the ANLCA mission, the position of the OAU placed constraints on the arbiter role the civil rights leaders hoped to perform. While the ANLCA leadership was happy to meet with Biafran envoys in the United States, like the OAU, the ANLCA favoured a peaceful settlement that led to the reincorporation of Biafra into Nigeria. In supporting Nigerian unity, the ANLCA was tapping into a long historical tradition in the Black diaspora of supporting strong and viable Black-majority nation-states as a critical component of challenging racial inequality and colonialism. ^{Footnote 77} In this context, Nigeria, the largest and most significant state in Africa, was a living – although deeply flawed – example of Black self-determination. With Southern Africa not yet liberated from colonial rule and superpower interventions roiling the continent, the ANLCA remained committed to Nigerian national unity. In his lengthy memorandum in September 1967, Theodore Brown reported that ‘it is reasonable to believe that both sides are willing to come to a conference table if the proper means and setting could be found to respect the sovereignty of Nigeria as defined by General Gowon’. ^{Footnote 78} In a January 1968 article in The Crisis outlining the intention of the civil rights leaders to travel to Nigeria, Roy Wilkins denied a Radio Biafra interpretation of the ANLCA appeal that stated that ‘leaders of 20,000,000 Americans of African descent had sent a message expressing alarm because of “Nigeria’s aggression against Biafra”’. The Crisis article noted that ‘Mr Wilkins pointed out that this message had carefully refrained from taking sides in the conflict and did not mention Biafra’.⁸⁴

Kingsley Mbadiwe, acting as an envoy for the Republic of Biafra in the United States, according to his biographer, expressed his frustration at African American civil rights leaders who while rightly wanting ‘the Nigeria-Biafra conflict resolved,’ were of ‘little practical help’. ^{Footnote 79} It can be deduced that Mbadiwe’s frustration was not a reflection of a lack of interest by Black leaders, but of a wariness to support a ceasefire that would leave Nigeria and Biafra as two distinct political entities without plans for Biafra’s reintegration – a situation at odds with the objectives of the OAU. Although the ANLCA leadership was genuine in their desire to see the war stop and the bloodshed end, for the Biafran leader ship this was an option they were unwilling to countenance. With the military situation in the warzone in flux, and with Biafran leaders looking to the international community – both to the Global North and the Global South – to support their independence struggle, the notion of peaceful reintegration back into Nigeria seemed unlikely. Biafran officials and large swathes of the population within the enclave remained distrustful of claims that Igbo would be welcomed back peacefully into the Nigerian Federation.

Domestic pressures also added to the challenges the ANLCA mission encountered in trying to play a constructive role to end the civil war. On 1 April 1968, the New York Times reported that Dr. King, in the final stages of organizing the Poor People’s campaign in Washington DC and about to fly to Memphis to support striking Black sanitation workers, was reconsidering his role in the ANLCA mission. Speaking to journalists King said ‘that he would probably not be able to fly to Africa the week of 14 April on a peace mission to try and end the civil war in Nigeria. He said he might send his friend and associate, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy instead’. ^{Footnote 80} Three days later King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis.

Even though the peace mission collapsed following the death of King, the remaining ANLCA leaders remained engaged with the conflict until the end of hostilities in January 1970. They called for increased humanitarian aid to support victims of the war and supported a diplomatic settlement to the conflict either through US, OAU, or United Nations mediation. ^{Footnote 81} Even as they called for expanded humanitarian aid and a peaceful settlement, they remained steadfast in their support for Nigerian sovereignty, a view shared by many in the Black community including Congressman Charles Diggs, Senator Edward Brooke and major newspapers, such as the Afro-American. ^{Footnote 82} This position was attacked by Black Power activists including the former national director of CORE Floyd McKissick, the educator Mary Harden Umolu and Harlem-based militant Charles Kenyatta. Through the Joint Afro Committee on Biafra (JACB), established in February 1969 to build support in the Black community for Biafran independence, they attacked the position enunciated by the ANLCA during the peace mission as a betrayal of a Black republic that epitomised self-determination, economic self-sufficiency and a direct challenge to white supremacy. ^{Footnote 83} However, the broader African American community remained wedded to the position of the ANLCA, supporting Nigerian unity, until hostilities ended with the surrender of the Republic of Biafra.

In the papers of the ANLCA, the mission to Nigeria disappears from the archival records following the announcement that the Call Committee would be travelling to the warzone. Due to this, it is difficult to deduce the factor or factors that led to its collapse. Drawing on the timeline of events, it seems likely that the death of Dr. King and the growing racial unrest in the United States, combined with the growing realization of both the Nigerians and the Biafrans that only a military solution could decide the conflict, sapped the energy behind a peaceful settlement. However, the mission did set a precedent that shaped how African Americans engaged in the civil war. That being the importance of seeking to alleviate as much suffering in the warzone as possible through either humanitarian aid or supporting a peaceful diplomatic settlement, but at the same time viewing Nigerian unity as critical to not only Nigeria’s future, but also the future of Africa and the broader Black diaspora.