Winning our Freedoms Together is a first-rate transnational history of Black freedom struggles in South Africa and the United States between 1945 and 1960. The book tells the story of how Black activists in both countries took advantage of the exalted language of the Cold War, used especially by the United States to depict itself as the champion of individual liberty and democracy around the world, to press for the freedom of Blacks in apartheid South Africa and the segregationist United States. This strategy was no easy feat because, as Nicholas Grant shows, taking advantage of this Cold War rhetoric meant that Black American activists had to first expose the hollowness of the United States’ claims that it stood for liberty.
To realize their goals, these activists operated within the gap ‘between the high-minded language of the Cold War and the continued oppression of the black population of both countries’ (5). More importantly, activists in both countries had to contend with the fact that anticommunism was bound up with white supremacy. This entanglement meant challenging the ways in which white supremacists in both countries used anticommunism to justify rank racism and stifle Black protest. The stakes could not have been higher, given how quick the governments of South Africa and the United States denounced any form of legitimate protest as communist. Apartheid South Africa, for one, assiduously used anticommunism to put down any challenge to the political order. For example, in 1950 the National Party introduced the Suppression of Communism Act, a piece of legislation so draconian that any opposition to apartheid could be labelled communist. As Grant puts it:
The South African government was also acutely aware of the ways in which anticommunist and white supremacist ideologies spoke to one another. Indeed, in their strident opposition to communism, the National Party invoked a global language that it believed could be used to secure the continued existence of white supremacy in an era of anticolonialism and growing calls for black self-determination (125).
South Africa used its foreign policy to invoke this global language, thereby making the country key to the development of the racial politics of the Cold War, a fact that, as Grant correctly points out, is often ignored in studies of this era. Grant says ‘anticommunism represented a powerful global ideology that was used to legitimize the hounding of black activists by the state in a number of geographical locations’ (6). Whereas the South African and United States governments used anticommunism to delegitimize any questioning of the status quo (meaning the racial order), Black activists, especially in the United States, drew on the purported commitment of the United States to freedom in order to shame America and legitimize their demands for political equality.
One important intervention that Grant makes is to challenge the idea that the advent of anticommunism after the end of the Second World War resulted in the ‘domestication’ of African American struggles against colonialism, and that anticommunism furthermore collapsed the politics of the African diaspora in the United States (6). It is certainly true that anticommunism led to the repression of Black leftist politics in the United States and of anti-apartheid politics more generally in South Africa. But this change did not necessarily produce an abandonment of transnational politics and campaigns. Activists such as South Africa's Z. K. Matthews and America's Paul Robeson still found ways to connect their respective struggles. As Grant explains, another reason why anticommunism in the United States endured is because ‘anti-apartheid activism in the United States did not begin and end with the black left during the early Cold War’ (8). Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Committee on Africa, and the National Council of Negro Women formed a liberal coalition dedicated to the end of apartheid (8). This coalition survived in part by distancing itself from the Black left (especially the radical sections of it) and pursuing an anticolonial agenda that forced government agencies and international organizations to reassess their relations with apartheid South Africa. This agenda proved difficult to ignore because it was premised on notions of respectability and on the presentation of the members of these liberal organizations as loyal Americans. So while the United States government hounded Robeson and made it difficult for him to operate internationally, it also found itself having to respond to Black liberal groups that could not be tarred with the same brush used on Robeson.
Another signal contribution of Grant's book to our understanding of Black freedom struggles during the Cold War is his remarkable ability to tell a truly transnational story. Winning our Freedoms Together is about what Black activists in both South Africa and the United States taught one another and learned from one another. It is about how Black activists in two countries sought to win their freedoms together. In Grant's telling, the United States is not an exemplar, but rather a country with its own history and struggles, some of which could be best illuminated through comparison with other struggles and other histories. Grant also highlights a key feature of the Black freedom struggles in both South Africa and the United States. As he states, ‘the right to travel was central to ideas of black freedom in both countries’ (90). For Black activists, freedom meant more than just political equality. It also meant the right to travel and to do so without hindrance. As Robeson explained in a passage that Grant cites: ‘From the days of chattel slavery until today, the concept of travel has been inseparably linked in the minds of our people with the concept of freedom’ (85). This understanding of freedom as mobility brings into sharp relief the tension between Black internationalism and white supremacy. Black activists understood that for them to forge transnational solidarities in order to win their freedoms together, they had to be able to move. Governments understood this principle and practice, too, and that is why they imposed all sorts of restrictions on Black mobility — from the United States government's seizure of Robeson's passport, to pass laws in South Africa, to the apartheid state's refusal to give countless South Africans passports with which they could leave the country.
This is an important book and it will add immeasurably to our understanding of the Cold War, of the transnational history of the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles, and of the twentieth century.
