Rethinking Radicalism: African Americans and the Liberation Struggles in Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea, 1945–1949

In 1949, scholar W. E. B. Du Bois complained bitterly that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was useless in the fight to free Africa from colonialism because the association was just a “bourgeois set-up, afraid to do anything that is not respectable.”1 Indeed, historians’ understanding of one of the most significant transformations in the twentieth century, decolonization, often echoes Du Bois’s assessment that only “radicals” had the mettle to take on this battle for the right to self-determination.2