Book Review: The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination – Robeson Taj Frazier

Ford, G. (2015). The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier, Asian Review of Books, 5 March.

My enemy’s enemies are my friends” was the bridge that connected America’s black radicals and China’s revolution as they both fought global capitalism. The East is Black spans the quarter-century between the communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 and US radicals’ final disillusionment when Beijing chose to side in Angola with US Imperialism and apartheid South Africa by throwing its support behind the FNLA rather than the Soviet-backed MPLA in the aftermath of Portugal’s 1974 revolution.

Across these decades, Robeson Taj Frazier highlights a changing cast of half-a-dozen or so black fellow travelers with China. The first was the eminent Pan-African scholar and activist WEB Du Bois, who came to China and saw the future and its works when he was already in his nineties. Yet there are none so blind as those who don’t see, as he entirely missed the tragic consequences of the “Great Leap Forward”.

Second to show was William Worthy, the foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American, the US’s largest circulation black newspaper. He had toured China in early 1957 in the face of the US’s Subversive Activities Control Act that banned dangerous leftists like singer Paul Robeson, novelist Howard Fast and New York Congressman Leo Isacson from traveling.

At the beginning of that decade, one of Worthy’s first assignments had been to cover the Korean War. Officially desegregated after Truman’s 1948 Executive Order, the reality of the US Army was at best all-black units with white officers. Throughout the Korean War these units were accused of poor combat performance epitomized by the court-martial of 60 infantrymen—and the conviction of 32—from the 24th Infantry Regiment. Worthy was interested in the parallel claims of misconduct by US POWs—a considerable number of which were black—held in Chinese-run prison camps in North Korea. In 1955, he traveled the US interviewing “colored” former POWs who freely admitted the Chinese played the race card to exploit divisions amongst the prisoners. It wasn’t difficult with some white POWs colluding in the process organizing white-supremacist sects within the camps, with one group identifying themselves as the Ku Klux Klan. In the end it proved a grey rather than black and white result with the US Military Authorities investigating 565 of the total of 4428 (13%) POWs for collaboration.

In China for six weeks, Worthy got to interview Premier Zhou Enlai and an American missionary in prison, spend time with Corporal William C White—one of three black soldiers out of 21 Americans who’d chosen to remain behind in China at the end of the Korean War—who was studying law at the People’s University in Beijing as well as document the work of street committees dealing with economic affairs, charity and public health. He was more skeptical than Du Bois, concluding that government manipulation and coercion meant people only said what they thought it was safe to say. That didn’t help him when he got home. His passport was confiscated and he didn’t get it back—not that that entirely stopped him traveling abroad—until 1968.

In the meantime, in 1961, Robert and Mabel Williams fled the US. Robert, the local organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Mabel were accused of kidnapping a white couple and threatened with lynching. Initially, they ended up in arms of Cuba’s revolutionaries from where they hosted an international radio show “Radio Free Dixie” where the hottest jazz, blues and rock and roll was interspersed with the case against racial oppression and international news from a leftist perspective. Then Williams wrote to Mao, who responded by declaring China’s support for the US black liberation movement illustrated by the Party with a series of posters “Resolutely support the just struggle of black Americans”. They traveled to China in late 1963 and 1964, but at the cost of alienating their Havana hosts as Sino-Soviet tensions rose. By 1966, they had decamped for China with Robert broadcasting on “Hanoi Hannah”, Radio Hanoi’s English language station, calls for black troops in Vietnam to desert. They stayed until 1969.

Vicki Garvin ended up in China after spending time with Shirley Graham Du Bois—WEB Du Bois’s widow—in Ghana. As the Nkrumah regime edged to its miserable end, Garvin took up the Chinese Ambassador’s invitation to teach English in Shanghai at the Foreign Language Institute. She arrived as the Soviets were leaving. To underpin her teaching she utilised Mao’s writings, in particular “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” which she used to explain why revolutionary rejections of racial capitalism did not go unchallenged in the black community. Rather, there were two lines: reform and revolution. She started to enlarge her political footprint with forays into women’s struggles in both the Chinese and African American context but before she could get too far, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution brought education to a halt. She volunteered to be sent down to the countryside for labor education and learnt to question Mao’s cult of the personality. She returned to the US in 1970 just after the Williams.

Garvin was ignored by the authorities, but Williams was brought in by the State Department and—in the first sign that the Nixon was contemplating changing course—cross-examined about the prospects for the normalization of US-China relations. The US Left was skeptical and some accused Williams of doing a squalid deal with the Administration. Actually the problem wasn’t his, but theirs.

Back in 1963, at the same time as Mao launched his campaign in support of the African American struggle, Mao was questioned by an African guerrilla leader who wanted to know whether after being deserted by the Soviets the same might happen with Beijing. As he put it, “Will the red star over Tiananmen Square in China go out?” Less than a decade later, Nixon’s visit turned out the light.

The East is Black has a good book in there somewhere, but it’s obscured by the academic apparatus. Two hundred and nineteen pages warrant 82 pages of notes with “global hierarchies of power and multiaxial relations of inequality and domination” to boot. In the end we discover that for a quarter-century, black radicals and Chinese revolutionaries had looked at each other and had seen only themselves.

It was a casual affair. As far as Frazier tells us there were neither military training camps for US black militants nor any serious long term results. In China the only lasting impact, according to the eminent historian John Hope Franklin after a visit to China in 1979, was an amazing Chinese familiarity with “Cold War African American radical history”. While in the US there still are a scattering of black adults of a certain age answering to the name of “Mao”. All scant reward for the effort.