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Student Showcase – Equal in the Eyes of God: Civil Rights Activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland

Alexis Speer
Nimitz High School
Senior Division
Individual Website

Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Lewis–these are all familiar names in the history of America’s Civil Rights Movement. But what about Joan Trumpauer Mulholland? A white woman raised in the Deep South, Mulholland became active in non-violent campaigns against racial segregation. In addition to participating in numerous sit-ins, Mulholland also rode with the iconic Freedom Riders registering African-Americans to vote across the South, for which she was incarcerated in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary at the age of 19.

Alexis Speer’s website, “Equal in the Eyes of God: Civil Rights Activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland” tells the remarkable story of this remarkable woman. Her site explores Mulholland’s important contributions to the Civil Rights Movement and even includes an interview with the activist herself:

Mulholland participating in a sit-in in Northern Virginia. ("An Ordinary Hero," Dir. Loki Mulholland. Taylor Street Films, 2013) — Mulholland participating in a sit-in in Northern Virginia. (“An Ordinary Hero,” Dir. Loki Mulholland. Taylor Street Films, 2013)

Q: What inspired you or motivated you to become active in the Civil Rights Movement?

A: I think my church did. We had to memorize Bible verses of how to treat each other, like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Love thy neighbor as thy self.” When I got to high school, we had to memorize the Declaration of Independence, which says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The problem was that we didn’t practice what we were being taught. We had to do it. This is like saying “practice what you preach.” I felt that was the honest thing to do.

Q: Why did you feel it was your responsibility to help gain equal rights for all Americans?

A: I could see that we weren’t doing what we said we believed we should do. I felt I should of done my part to make it better for everyone, to be honest.

Fred Blackwell's photograph of the sit-in at the Woolworth's in Jackson, Mississippi. The woman with the back of her head facing the camera is Joan Mulholland — Fred Blackwell’s photograph of the sit-in at the Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi. The woman with the back of her head facing the camera is Joan Mulholland

Q: How was your involvement in several nonviolent protests perceived by the public? What was the main argument against your involvement?

A: Well, for one we were breaking the law. Some people felt that according to religion God didn’t mean for us to mix, like cats and dogs don’t mix. People felt that the races should be kept separate, like how animals are kept separate. Also, people of the South, and other parts of the country, had grown up with society, the religions, and the law stating the races to be kept separate… With all that said, we were in fact breaking the law. People just felt that we weren’t meant to be that way, with people mixed together.

Mulholland's mugshot after her arrest. (Etheridge, Eric. Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. Atlas & Co., 2008) — Mulholland’s mugshot after her arrest. (Etheridge, Eric. Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. Atlas & Co., 2008)

Q: What was your experience like during your imprisonment at Parchman? Why were the Freedom Riders being transferred to Parchman?

A: Well, I think the idea was to intimidate us because Parchman was absolutely notorious. It was an awful, awful place. So, they were trying to frighten us so that no more Freedom Riders were trying to come. Another thing was that they had begun to run out of room in Jackson, the jail was starting to overflow. In the white women’s cell, there were 17 of us and we had less than 3 square feet of room space each, if you count under the bunk. It was pretty crowded… At Parchman the conditions were actually better, we had more room, better food, and it was a lot cleaner. But, you were really cut off from other people besides the lawyer that would come up once a week… So, you were completely isolated and at the mercy of the jailor. People have been tortured and killed before. The rabbi of Jackson came up every week… and prayed with us. He would tell us what was going on in the world and let our parent’s know that he had seen us and that we were okay.

More great work from Texas students:

The life of Douglas MacArthur, right down to his corn cob pipe

A project that captures the Orwellian reign of Joseph Stalin

And a website on the global influence of one man’s non-violent philosophy

Student Showcase – The Montgomery Bus Boycott

William Louis
Burkburnett Middle School
Junior Division
Individual Website

In 1955, a collection of citizens in Montgomery, Alabama decided to stand up against the injustice of Jim Crow. Edgar D. Nixon, Martin Luther King and many other activists boycotted the city’s bus system to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. After 381 days, the bus lines nearly went bankrupt. Ultimately, the city of Montgomery relented and reversed its policy of segregation on its city buses, galvanizing the Civil Rights movement across America.

William Louis, a student at Burkburnett Middle School, contributed to this year’s Texas History Day with a website on this seminal movement, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” But this was not just American history for William–it was also family history:

Commuters walking to work instead of riding the buses during the Montgomery bus boycott, 1956 (Don Cravens/Time Life/Getty Images)

As I journeyed through my family history, I discovered that a lot of good things have happened to us. However, we suffered a lot of injustices also. We suffered slavery and discrimination but, also experienced victory and defied the odds of racial barriers. At age six I did a presentation on slavery and how slaves came to America. This was the first time my mom went into detail about slavery, discrimination, and segregation. The more I learned about my family the more I learned about inequality. Since then, I have looked deeper into my family history, researched, read and studied pictures of slave ships as well as the welts on the backs of slaves. Now, at 11, I am just beginning to realize what others went through so I could be where I am right now.

Rosa Parks’ mug shot after being arrested on December 1, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus (Wikipedia)

One of the people who helped me understand what African Americans went through was my Grandpa. He told me about having to sit in the back of the bus in Fayetteville, NC, when he was six years old. He told me how he sat at the front of the bus before his cousin snatched him up and took him to the back of the bus, where “the coloreds” belonged.

President Barack Obama sitting in the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks was arrested. Parks was sitting in the same aisle but on the opposite side. (The White House)

This year’s National History Day is focused the theme Rights and Responsibilities. In America these rights include inalienable rights which are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, blacks were denied these rights. As a result, many courageous people like Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Claudette Clovin, and Martin Luther King took responsibility for the rights of blacks and others who were discriminated against.

More remarkable work from Texas middle and high school students:

A digital history of the trauma of Vietnam

And an account of America’s closest brush with destruction

iTunes Remembers Black History: The New Archive (No. 5)

By Charley S. Binkow

February is Black History month. It is a time for remembrance and reflection for all Americans, but for Historians it is also a rich period for study and research. iTunes U, the academic branch of Apple’s iTunes store, is featuring a vast collection of first-hand oral histories, interviews, and lectures on the extensive history of African Americans.

There are over two dozen podcasts and each one offers a unique perspective on black history: “The Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project” explores the world of African American Jazz, The Gilder Lehrman Institute offers a diverse lecture series on the post Civil War age, and Stanford’s “Modern Freedom Struggle” collects videos on political thought during the Civil Rights movement. The most powerful, collection is Duke University’s “Behind the Veil,” which compiles 100 interviews with African Americans who experienced firsthand the world of segregation in places like Birmingham, New Orleans, Memphis, Albany (GA), and Muhlenberg County. These interviews are as personal and interesting as they are diverse. All the podcasts are free on iTunes and are well worth perusing.

The collection is of value for everyone, from professional historians to amateur history buffs. On top of the primary sources, subscribers can hear engaging and thought provoking lectures from renowned scholars like Eric Foner and James O. Horton. iTunes, is also offering customers a wide selection of outside reading options relating to the topic of Black History, with titles such as The Color Purple, Beloved, Fredrick Douglass’s My Escape from Slavery and Howard Zinn’s On Race.

Overall, the collection does a great job of honoring, remembering, and respecting the struggle of African Americans. The podcasts will keep listeners engaged for days and the interviews give historians hours of first-hand accounts.

If you enjoy these iTunes U collections, be sure to check out our own podcast, 15 Minute History

And explore the latest finds in the NEW ARCHIVE:

Maps and primary documents that change before your very eyes

Harry Houdini’s weird and wild scrapbook collection

Photo Credits:

Screenshot of the iTunes U podcasts and books being featured for Black History History Month

1867 engraving of African American freedmen in New Orleans voting for the first time (Image courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collection)

Participants in the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

1863 in 1963

by Laurie Green

The time has come, Mr. President, to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.

While 2013 marks the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, the most famous event of the Civil Rights Movement, made so by the continual remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the five decades since the March, many people have forgotten or fail to realize the tremendous meaning that the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation bore for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

A shared historical memory of the unfinished nature of freedom granted by the Emancipation made these activists refer to their struggle as a Black Freedom Movement, even a Black Revolution. A century after the abolition of slavery, they were still fighting for an end to segregation and the laws that barred voting rights. At the same time, however, they also pressed for economic justice, and for dignity and respect –- in a sense recuperating the meanings of freedom that had made Emancipation signify more than the release from bondage in 1863.

During the mid-twentieth century, opponents of Jim Crow society referred directly to the legacy of slavery with language like “master-slave” and “plantation mentality” to imbue their own sense of freedom with the sense of ending long-standing, internalized beliefs about race. The Memphis sanitation workers, striking in 1968, for example, created the slogan “I AM a Man!” as a way of claiming economic justice and human dignity at the same time. Freedom was not only a negative – abolition, whether as a historical memory of the eradication of slavery or the current struggle to uproot segregation – but an indignant insistence upon human self-development.

The legendary 1963 March on Washington encompassed but was not limited to desegregation; in fact, its origins lay in the intertwined labor and civil rights movements that had powerfully emerged – not for the first time, but in a new way – on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. In July 1941, working-class blacks led by A. Philip Randolph and others mounted a movement to march on Washington unless President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order banning discrimination in the defense industry and the armed forces. FDR did not end segregation in the military, but at the eleventh hour he ordered a ban on racial inequality in defense jobs. And yet the order only addressed wartime circumstances; the Fair Employment Practices Committee he established lasted only until the end of the war.

Picking up on this theme two decades later, African American labor activists including members of the newly formed Negro American Labor Council united with Dr. King to call for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – a name that is commonly forgotten in commemorations of the famous 1963 event. By the time the march occurred in August, President John F. Kennedy had finally proposed civil rights legislation but organizers sought to pressure him into expanding his proposal into one that would address economic justice as well.

Randolph’s address to the massive crowd on August 28, 1963 articulated this perspective. He supported the desegregation of public facilities, but declared, “[T]hose accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them.” His speech went beyond any single demand. “We are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation,” Randolph proclaimed. “We are the advanced guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.” Randolph explicitly linked that moral revolution to the history of slavery: African Americans would play a vanguard role “because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property.”

Even before the March on Washington, civil rights activists were forging links between the Emancipation Proclamation, the historical memory of slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement. In June 1961, one and a half years before the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, King and others began pressuring Kennedy to commemorate the upcoming centennial with a second Emancipation Proclamation. “Just as Abraham Lincoln had the vision to see almost 100 years ago that this nation could not exist half-free,” King asserted at a news conference, “the present administration must have the insight to see that today the nation cannot exist half-segregated and half-free.”

On May 17, 1962, the anniversary of the historic Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, King submitted his appeal to Kennedy: “An Appeal To The Honorable John F. Kennedy, President of The United States for NATIONAL REDEDICATION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLMATION AND FOR AN EXECUTIVE ORDER PROHIBITING SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

The document referred directly to the links between past and present:

The wells-springs of equality lie deep within our past. We believe the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation is a peculiarly appropriate time for all our citizens to rededicate themselves to those early precepts and principles of equality before the law.

Eloquently, the appeal declared:

The time has come, Mr. President, to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.

In the end, although Kennedy had shown initial interest in the second Emancipation Proclamation proposed by King, the President balked and the centenary passed without his seizing the moment to issue what would have been a historic, groundbreaking statement – although one sure to provoke the wrath of southern Democrats. Six months later, after violent police attacks on black youth demonstrating for desegregation in Birmingham were condemned around the world, Kennedy would call for civil rights legislation.

This is the familiar story narrated in our textbooks. The full significance of the Emancipation Proclamation to activists in the Black Freedom Movement one hundred years later has been left out of the story. Steeped in the historical memory of Emancipation and the long Black Freedom Movement, African American activists and their allies were striving to conclude a revolution they perceived as unfinished since 1863.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation is not Abolition”

Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”

Daina Ramey Berry, “Unmixed Blessin'”? A Historian’s Thoughts on Django Unchained“

Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln

This article draws on research in:
William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7:3 (2010): 33-52.
David W. Blight and Allison Scharfstein, “King’s Forgotten Manifesto,” New York Times, 16 May 2012.

Photo Credits:
Images of the March on Washington and A. Philip Randolph via Wikimedia Commons

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Abridged Edition by Raymond Arsenault (2011)

by Matt Tribbe

Fifty years ago, in the spring and summer of 1961, a brave group of activists dared to commit one of the most dangerous acts imaginable at the time: they blatantly obeyed the laws of the United States. Knowing full well that a majority of white Southerners did not accept federal desegregation orders, and that the Kennedy administration was reluctant to enforce them, hundreds of civil rights activists nonetheless embarked on Southern-bound buses in order to test a recent Supreme Court decision forbidding segregation at interstate bus terminals. This was not necessarily civil disobedience, disobeying unjust laws for moral and political ends. Rather, as Raymond Arsenault notes of these “Freedom Rides,” it was a “disarmingly simple act.” The Freedom Riders would just behave as if Supreme Court rulings were, in fact, the law of the land, and then respond nonviolently to the inevitable bloodied heads, broken bones, firebombings, and intimidating prison stints that greeted their attempts to sit in interracial pairs on buses and integrate restaurants, waiting rooms, and even shoe-shine stands at terminals in the Southern states. Though few anticipated the full ferocity of the organized white resistance in the Deep South, the Riders hoped that such disturbing scenes of brutality against nonviolent activists who were simply expressing their constitutional rights would shock the nation out of its complacency on Southern segregation.

Arsenault offers an engaging chronicle of the Freedom Rides in this new, abridged edition of his definitive 2006 account. He places the Freedom Rides in their larger historical trajectory, revealing their antecedent in an earlier attempt to desegregate interstate buses in 1947 and examining various civil rights strategies and initiatives over the 1950s that contributed to the decision to launch the campaign. But this book is about a specific moment in time—the summer of 1961—and Arsenault uses his gripping narrative to explore many broader issues confronting the civil rights movement and the nation as a whole in that particular year. We see in all their complexity, for example, the often-strained relationships and clashes over strategy between various civil rights organizations. Most established groups like the NAACP were critical of these provocative actions, yet it was that organization’s unenforced court victories that made the Freedom Rides both possible and necessary. Another major theme that Arsenault follows over the year is the Kennedy Administration’s consternation at the Rides. Wary of the embarrassment they might cause the United States at this pivotal moment in the Cold War, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and shortly before Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Attorney General Robert Kennedy constantly urged the Riders to accept a “cooling-off period” so that the administration could deal with Southern segregation in a more deliberate manner. But as the Riders well knew, “cooling off” meant returning to the unacceptable status quo. Indeed, to the Kennedys’ great chagrin, they were perfectly willing to cause a national crisis in order to force the administration to finally take meaningful action against segregation.

As the emphasis in the book’s title suggests, however, what comes across most vividly in Freedom Riders is the dogged determination of the four-hundred-plus activists who volunteered to continue the Rides over the summer, even after it was clear that violence and incarceration in Southern jails were unavoidable. Arsenault ably recreates all of the savage beatings and unenviable dilemmas faced by these men and women who risked their well-being, their freedom, and even their lives in order to force America to live up to its principles.

Readers wishing to learn more about this often-overlooked campaign of the civil rights movement and the very diverse group of people who pulled it off; about the movement’s decisive shift toward the strategy of non-violent direct action; about the massive headaches this endeavor caused the Kennedy Administration; about the horrors that faced anyone who challenged Deep South racial mores in the early 1960s; and, perhaps most important, want this story told with both nuance and flair, will enjoy Freedom Riders.

The fiftieth anniversary of the freedom rides this year has brought out a number of moving books, films, and other website materials:

PBS “American Experience,” film, Freedom Riders

The website for the PBS “American Experience” film, Freedom Riders, includes historical material, maps, biographies, teaching guides, and more.

James Farmer, one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Raymond Arsenault interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air”

Group photograph: Freedom Riders at the home of Dr. Richard Harris after the church siege in Birmingham, AL. Included are Lucretia Collins (center), James Farmer (far right) and John Lewis (ground, right).
Credit: Johnson Publishing Company
From American Experience, Freedom Riders (fair use)

Photograph of James Peck seated on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Alabama following attack on a Freedom riders bus. By Joseph M. Chapman Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Tiffany Gill on Beauty Shop Politics

By Tiffany Gill

Bernice Robinson, a forty-one year old Charleston beautician, was surprised when she was asked to become the first teacher for the Highlander Folk School’s Citizen Education program in the South Carolina Sea Islands, for she had neither experience as a teacher nor a college education. This did not present a problem for Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander School. His main concern was that the sea islanders would have a teacher they could trust and who would respect them. In fact, for Horton, Robinson’s profession was an asset. In his autobiography, he explained the strategic importance of using beauticians as leaders in civil rights initiatives by declaring, “we needed to build around black people who could stand up against white opposition, so black beauticians were very important.”

This example illuminates some of the ways that beauty shops offered economic independence for the African American women who owned and operated them and provided a site for social and political activity. The black beauty industry has often been vilified for subjugating women and denounced for peddling products that denied an authentic “blackness,” but it should be seen instead as providing one of the most important opportunities for black women to agitate for social change both within their communities and in the larger political arena.

Myles Horton’s insight concerning the strategic importance of beauticians to African American political struggles was not simply a peculiarity of the Highlander Folk School’s Citizen Education Program. Other leaders of the modern Civil Rights movement also acknowledged the importance of beauticians. From Martin Luther King to Ella Baker, civil rights leaders openly acknowledged the centrality of beauticians in political struggles. However, it was not only in during the modern Civil Rights Movement that black beauticians were seen as key political activists. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, beauticians were the driving force behind war bond efforts during World War II and they were at the forefront of the push for black internationalism in the 1950s. Even earlier, some of the most active women in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and other black nationalist groups in the 1930s, were, ironically, beauticians. Finally, many of those most identified as reformers during the progressive era were black beauticians. In other words, beauticians are all over the historical record. Not only were they involved in these and other national and grassroots campaigns, but they were usually represented in large numbers, serving as leaders, mobilizers, and major financial contributors.

While the presence of beauticians in these major political movements may be surprising on the surface, their extensive activism makes sense when viewed in light of their status within the African American community. As entrepreneurs with a high level of economic autonomy, they had the freedom to engage in some of the most volatile political movements of the twentieth century. During the entire twentieth century, the black beauty industry was one of the only industries where all aspects were primarily in the control of black women. They served as the manufacturers, producers, and promoters of beauty products. These women built an economic base independent and beyond the reproach of those antagonistic to racial uplift and civil rights work.

Furthermore, black beauticians had access to a physical space—the beauty salon. As Robin Kelley has argued, Jim Crow ordinances forced places like “churches, bars, social clubs, barber shops, beauty salons, even alleys, [to] remain ‘black’ space.” These spaces, Kelley continues, “gave African Americans a place to hide, a place to plan.” Of all of the sites he mentions, the beauty shop is the only space that was not solely a “black space” but was simultaneously a “woman’s space” owned by black women and a place where they gathered almost exclusively. Whether a large salon in a four-story brownstone or a small establishment in a woman’s kitchen or patio, the beauty salon was one of the most important—albeit unique—institutions within the black community. Examining beauty shops and the women who owned and operated them gives unique insights into black women’s resistance strategies and political styles throughout the era of segregation.

Great Books on African American Beauty Culture

Toyin Falola on Africa and the United States

By Toyin Falola

Often wrongly considered to be on the periphery of the history of the United States, Africa has played an important role politically, economically, and culturally from before American independence until the present day. The importance of slavery to early U.S. history was paramount, with lasting effects into the twentieth century and the contributions of African-Americans to life in the United States has often been celebrated, but Africa’s relevancy for the United States has been most appreciated and discussed in terms of the African roots of a broad spectrum of American culture. Following decolonization in Africa, the newly independent nations took on a new relevancy and significance for the United States, one that should be re-examined for the twenty-first century.

The entire history of the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa. Slavery was practiced in America even prior to independence from Great Britain and was an integral part of its economy, particularly in the South. Agriculture depended on the labor of slaves sent from the West African coast, and was one of the key reasons the Southern states fought in the Civil War. When the fight against slavery as a moral issue gained momentum, slave owners in the South feared it would be outlawed on the national level. And it was outlawed at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, despite the Thirteenth Amendment, and the citizenship and voting rights that came with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, racial discrimination was still a critical issue in American social life. Jim Crow laws in the South kept both public and private life in the southern United States segregated until the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement was fostered in part by international developments. Following the Second World War, the Cold War and its numerous manifestations were the primary concern of the United States government. With the Civil Rights Movement, however, foreign and domestic policy concerns were directly connected. Contemporaneous with the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia. As nations became independent from their former colonial powers, most often Great Britain and France, they faced a bipolar political situation in which they had to decide whether they wanted democratic or communist governance. The United States, in an attempt to ensure democracy for these sometimes geopolitically strategic nations, offered itself up as an ally to African nations. In such a situation, treatment of African Americans was an especially ugly scar on the face of the U.S., and America’s support for newly independent African nations proved to be an important impetus in accelerating Civil Rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Decolonization in Africa affected both United States domestic policy towards Civil Rights legislation, as well as foreign policy toward Africa. Previously, American foreign policy toward Africa did not exist, and any concerns over Africa were instead directed towards its European colonizers. The combination of the Cold War and decolonization quickly made the African continent relevant to the U.S. in a new way. The overextension of the United States’ foreign policy during this period, including the rebuilding of post-War Europe, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, meant that many African leaders of newly independent nations felt they were not given the audience that they deserved from the United States government. Yet it is clear that the U.S. involved itself where it felt Cold War concerns were most relevant, as when it supported Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire.

The United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War and its policy towards Africa in the 1990s did as well. For the last decade of the twentieth century the main agenda for the United States seemed to be to ignore African nations, even in the face of severe crisis, such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet with the end of the twentieth century also came the beginning of a huge international public health battle against HIV/AIDS. Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, has been at the forefront of this struggle, one that quickly linked U.S. interests in Africa with both positive and negative effects. Many countries, such as Uganda, have seen AIDS deaths drop significantly because of American help, particularly during the administration of President George W. Bush. However, issues surrounding aid dependency, the cultural relevancy of some aid programs, and the often times controversial role of American pharmaceutical companies in Africa have complicated this relationship.

On September 11, 2001, Africa’s relevancy to the United States changed once again with the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists. While originally the focus of the U.S. was on the Islamic countries of the Middle East, political instability in Africa and a high percentage of Muslims in many African nations, has brought the American War on Terror to countries such as Somalia and against extremists in countries like Nigeria. It has become clear to policymakers that the political and economic stability of Africa is in fact relevant to the United States. However, the increasingly global nature of every aspect of life ensures that policies will have to broaden beyond a focus on public health and terrorism. Stability in Africa would not only help to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans, but also open opportunities for American companies to invest and create new networks in the global economy. Africa’s relevancy for the United States has changed significantly over the past 300 years; however, the relationship between the U.S. and Africa is crucial to understanding American history, and will continue to be an important element in the twenty-first century.

The United States and West Africa, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola

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