America Compared: Freedom in the United States and Africa

Hailou Wolde-Giorghis

Hailou Wolde-Giorghis was an Ethiopian student who visited the United States at the invitation of the State Department in the early 1960s.

“Negroes are dirty,” say the whites, but in nearly all restaurants I saw Negro waiters and cooks. “They’re lazy”: I noticed that it is the Negro who does the hardest manual work. They are said to be uncultivated and are therefore denied access to culture. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The haughty American nation makes the Negro shine its shoes, and then demonstrates his physical and mental inferiority by the fact that he is a shoe-cleaner.” …

What is known as integration in the South is the ability of a Negro to enter a shop and buy a record, or the fact that, of ten thousand students enrolled in a university, two of them are Negroes. “A miracle!” they cry. Real integration, however, does not exist, not even in the North, and by real integration I mean interracial communication, complete equality in the strict sense of the word. Still another example drawn from the South: the manager of a television studio told me in frigid terms that he would not hire Negroes; there would be a scandal and all his sponsors would protest.

Source: Hailou Wolde-Giorghis, “My Encounters with Racism in the United States,” in Views of America, ed. Alan F. Westin et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 228–231.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Here, the American civil rights leader celebrates the independence of the African nation of Ghana in 1957.

And it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it that … [Ghana] is now free and is free without rising up with arms and ammunition. It is free through nonviolent means. Because of that the British Empire will not have the bitterness for Ghana that she has for China, so to speak. Because of that when the British Empire leaves Ghana she leaves with a different attitude than she would have left with if she had been driven out by armies. We’ve got to revolt in such a way that after revolt is over we can live with people as their brothers and sisters.

Source: Martin Luther King Jr., “The Birth of a New Nation,” Liberation 28 (April 1957).

Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah was the first president of the independent nation of Ghana. In the 1930s and 1940s, Nkrumah studied in the United States, earning degrees at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The “wind of change” has become a raging hurricane, sweeping away the old colonialist Africa. The year 1960 was Africa’s year. In that year alone, seventeen African States emerged as proud and independent sovereign nations. Now the ultimate freedom of the whole of Africa can no more be in doubt.

For centuries, Europeans dominated the African continent. The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white. …

All this makes a sad story, but now we must be prepared to bury the past with its unpleasant memories and look to the future. All we ask of the former colonial powers is their goodwill and cooperation to remedy past mistakes and injustices and to grant independence to the colonies in Africa.

Source: Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1961), ix.

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