On a Sunday in the summer of 1959, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Senator John F. Kennedy rose to address the banquet of the annual meeting of the American Society for African Culture. Kennedy, who had recently been appointed chairman of the Subcommittee on African Affairs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spent much of his speech highlighting the potential of U.S. development aid to contribute to economic growth on the African continent. At several moments, however, Kennedy cast his prosaic policy concerns in grand, world-historical terms. The decolonization of Africa, he suggested, was the culmination of a process inaugurated by the American Revolution of the eighteenth century. Quoting Thomas Paine’s view of liberty radiating outward from the thirteen colonies—“From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished”—Kennedy insisted that “that very flame is today lighting what was once called ‘the Dark Continent.’”
As a senator, Kennedy had distinguished himself among national politicians as an advocate for anticolonial causes, often condemning the U.S. posture of overarching support for British and French policies in their colonies. He did so by appealing to the idea of a postcolonial United States. In a 1956 speech criticizing the Eisenhower administration’s approach to the decolonizing world, he argued that the “home of the Declaration of Independence” had “appeared in the eyes of millions of key uncommitted people to have abandoned our proud traditions of self-determination and independence.” That criticism reached its zenith nine months later, when, in a Senate floor speech supporting Algerian independence, Kennedy decried the Eisenhower administration’s “retreat from the principles of independence and anti-colonialism.” It was no surprise, he said in another speech (with questionable veracity), that whereas “every African nationalist twenty or twenty-five or thirty years ago quoted Thomas Jefferson,” they now “quote Marx.”
Kennedy’s anticolonialism, however tepid, was unusual among his peers. But his invocation of the American Revolution reflected a widely held view among American elites: that the United States was the “first new nation,” the first national community to emerge from colonial rule to gain independent statehood. This idea, articulated by social scientists as well as policymakers and politicians, was an important element of modernization theory and the period in American foreign policy, particularly under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it helped to define. Such language helped American politicians and intellectuals assert that the United States was both old and new at once. As a result, they could define colonialism—which had emerged by the late 1950s as one of the most contested terms in international politics—on their own terms.
Even before 1960, when seventeen countries in Africa gained independence in a single year, American diplomats had identified the lexicon of empire as an arena in which their foreign policy goals were at stake. In 1959, State Department official Francis T. Williamson admitted that decolonization presented a “semantic” problem for the United States, the remedy for which was new language that might “avoid . . . the emotionalism and partisanship surrounding the word ‘anti-colonial.’” While some figures joined Williamson in his outright objection to the terms, the more common move was to try to win the battle over their definition: embracing the words, but defining them as narrowly as possible. For the proponents of this strategy, mostly liberal intellectuals and state policymakers, “colonialism” was to be defined as a strictly political system that had the unfortunate, but largely unintended, effects of producing racial and cultural hierarchies.
Clearing the path was Rupert Emerson, the foremost expert on decolonization among U.S. political scientists. “It is idle to think that the well-established category of colonies . . . can be merged with the other comparable evils of mankind,” he wrote in his 1960 book, From Empire to Nation. Instead, colonialism should be defined narrowly: as “the establishment and maintenance for an extended time of rule over an alien people which is separate from and subordinate to the ruling power.” Postcolonial rulers and citizens were more likely to be seduced by the dangerous elements of nationalism, Emerson argued, when they identified their former rulers with ideologies of racial superiority and practices of racial discrimination, and they were more likely to overreach in their criticisms of capitalism and “the West” when they identified both as part of a global system of white supremacy. A definition of “colonialism” that united these factors was to be avoided.
But try as they might, American liberals would not have the last word. At the same time as they sought to delimit the scope of what colonialism meant—as they continue to do today—other thinkers and activists around the world sought to broaden it. In 1960, newly independent states in Africa and Asia passed a declaration in the UN General Assembly condemning “colonialism in all its manifestations”—a phrase that, as the rest of the resolution made clear, implicated the relations of dependency between the decolonizing world and the West in the global economy.
With the definition of colonialism up for grabs, the question arose: could the term apply within the United States itself? For an influential cohort of African American thinkers in the early 1960s, the answer was yes. The country was not, as Williamson, Emerson, and Kennedy had it, the first nation to escape the clutches of colonialism, but rather one of the last still needing to be decolonized. Colonialism was not just a matter of political sovereignty over a faraway land; African Americans constituted an “internal colony” because they were subject to regimes of cultural domination, spatial segregation, and racialized economic inequality within their own country. It was a defiant definition—precisely the kind the State Department–approved framing hoped to tamp down.
Cold War liberal though he was, Kennedy wasn’t completely afraid to draw links between domestic racial inequality and European imperialism when he thought it could serve him. During his 1960 presidential campaign, he regularly brought up his experience in African affairs and his sympathy for African anticolonial movements in his attempts to win the support of African American voters. When dealing with foreign actors, though, Kennedy disavowed any connection between the history of European colonial rule and the U.S. racial order, wary of highlighting any similarities between the Third World’s despised colonial masters and his own country. Even in his famous Algeria speech in 1957, he reserved his strongest expressions of concern for the idea that “Western imperialism” was viewed as a more significant problem than “Soviet imperialism” in the eyes of much of the world.
As president, Kennedy pursued a policy of engagement with newly independent nations that were nonaligned in the Cold War. This approach marked a shift away from the posture of deference to European powers in their colonial conflicts that had predominated in the Eisenhower administration. Other elements of Kennedy’s policy of engagement, however, were deeply implicated in the ongoing global debates surrounding the definition of colonialism. Kennedy’s expansion of foreign aid packages to the Third World moved well beyond what was first authorized under Truman’s Point Four program and included significant commitments for police assistance designed to quell rebellious activity—raising new accusations of American neocolonialism.
Kennedy’s foreign policy also relied on presidential diplomacy. During his tenure, Kennedy met personally with many heads of state from the postcolonial world, and in some cases, successfully built amicable relationships with them. As more African nations won their independence, their diplomats began to visit D.C. in increasing numbers, bringing their anticolonial ideologies with them. Once there, their daily lives were constrained by the Jim Crow order, especially the starkly racialized regime of housing segregation within the city. It was these encounters, historian Andrew Friedman explains, that made decolonization a “social force” on the “landscape” of the American capital. Naturally, the notion that deep commonalities connected the colonial order Kennedy seemed at pains to reject and the racial order of the United States posed a problem for the president’s Cold War strategy. His efforts abroad to win the allegiance of newly independent African states were threatened by the idea that a variety of colonialism persisted at home.
G. Mennen Williams, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, noted this problem after making an unprecedented three trips to the African continent in the first year of the administration. Williams had been chosen for his position in part because of his support for civil rights and his popularity among Black voters in his home state of Michigan. Once inside the administration, he sought to make Africa a more central concern of U.S. foreign policy. Domestically, he hoped to convince African Americans that they must separate the issues of colonialism and racism in order to see the threat of Soviet imperialism clearly. “Colonialism, for many Africans, doesn’t mean domination of one people by another, but the domination of Black men by white men,” he claimed in a speech at the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity in Chicago. But “such definitions,” he argued, “distort and obscure our whole fight for freedom and our struggle against communism.”
Williams’s appeal, later published in Negro Digest, urged African Americans to view colonialism in a narrowly political light in an effort to secure their loyalty to American foreign policy in the Cold War. As this call came in the middle of a speech calling for “racial peace” at home, however, his entreaty betrayed a deeper anxiety about the separability of domestic and foreign spheres of racial governance. Indeed, Williams delivered his speech at a moment when African Americans were rethinking the nature and meaning of colonialism themselves.
Between the late 1950s and the middle of the 1960s, more and more Black Americans began envisioning the relationship between decolonization and the Black freedom struggle in a new way. Before then, the relationship was primarily seen as one of inspiration. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in these terms in a sermon delivered after his return from the independence ceremonies in Ghana in 1957. The anticolonial movement there, in his estimation, served as an example from which Black Americans might draw strategic lessons and philosophical reinforcement in their parallel, but conceptually distinct, struggle for freedom. By the middle of the 1960s, however, an increasing number of Black intellectuals—including, if only on occasion, King himself—began to describe American racism as a kind of colonialism.
For the Pan-Africanist scholar and activist John Henrik Clarke, the moment of transition came in February 1961, when African Americans turned out to protest at the New York UN headquarters after the CIA-backed assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba. It marked the point, Clarke wrote, when “the plight of the Africans still fighting to throw off the yoke of colonialism and the plight of the Afro-Americans, still waiting for a rich, strong and boastful nation to redeem the promise of freedom and citizenship, became one and the same.” Both groups, in his mind, faced the dual challenge of insisting upon the value and equal stature of Afro-diasporic cultures after centuries of Euro-American cultural hegemony while simultaneously adjusting these cultures to the industrialized world. Africans were “looking back and reevaluating the worth of old African ways of life, while concurrently looking forward to the building of modern and industrialized African states,” a dualism that was “basically the same” for African Americans. The “new Afro-American nationalists” in organizations such as the Nation of Islam and the New Alajo Party in Harlem “feel that the Afro-American constitutes what is tantamount to an exploited colony within a sovereign nation.” Now, decolonization offered more than just an inspiring example: it was a new framework for understanding American society.
This new terminology had several crucial effects. First, it provided a new way for Black thinkers and activists to call into question the self-image of the United States as a liberal democracy, by associating the country not with the vanguard of newly independent nation-states but with the recently discredited form of rule those states had thrown off. Second, it portrayed the struggles of African Americans in the United States and those of colonized peoples in Africa and Asia as part of the same global movement, offering civil rights and Black Power groups who tried to build connections across borders a language of transnational solidarity not reliant on the racial essentialism of older notions of a “dark world.” Third, it presented a novel social theory of the origins and operation of racial hierarchy in the United States.
Internal or domestic colonialism emerged as a keyword in discussions of American racial hierarchy in the early 1960s largely through the writings of Harold Cruse. Drafted into the army at age twenty-five in 1941, he served in North Africa and Italy during World War II. According to Cruse’s autobiographical reflections, a personal experience serving in North Africa initially illuminated the global dimensions of racial formation. After he landed in Oran, Algeria, two Algerian women stopped Cruse and a friend on the street and asked if they were Arabs. Cruse told them that they were not Arabs, but rather Americans. The women “insisted that we were Arab but didn’t know it because our fathers had been stolen from Africa many years ago.” This incident, in Cruse’s recollection, opened his eyes to his “ingrained provincialism about America.” Whether exaggerated or not, this anecdote provoked him to reconsider the national identity of African Americans in light of the global history of colonialism and the slave trade.
After the war, Cruse, a budding writer, became involved with the Communist Party in New York. In addition to writing plays, stories, and essays, he earned his living writing for the Daily Worker for several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For reasons both political and personal, which remain not entirely well explained, Cruse broke from the Communist Party in 1952, and for much of the decade, political concerns were marginal in his writing. But after the frustrations of several commercially unsuccessful playwriting efforts, he shifted his focus to writing essays of political and social criticism. His elaboration of domestic colonialism as a framework for understanding the American racial order developed out of this turn. It also emerged from a period of intensifying international engagement between 1957 and 1960. It was then that Cruse became affiliated with the American Society of African Culture, which was established in 1957 as the U.S. arm of the Society for African Culture in Paris, contributing an essay entitled “An Afro-American’s Cultural Views” for Présence Africaine, the Society’s official journal. Here, he articulated an early version of an argument that would pervade his writing throughout the 1960s: that African Americans needed to develop a cultural front to place alongside their political struggle, and that the integrationist outlooks of civil rights leaders were preventing such a development.
Cruse’s argument relied on an explicit comparison between African Americans and nations struggling against formal colonialism. Although “when one thinks of the liberation of oppressed peoples one assumes a rebirth and a flowering of that people’s native ‘culture,’” he wrote, in the American case, “there has been no cultural upsurge commensurate with our stepped up struggle for political and social equality.” The reaction of certain Black leaders to anticolonial struggles indicated, to Cruse, their failure to understand the problems Black Americans faced. The response of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Egyptian revolution and the Suez Crisis exemplified the problem, as King associated the “new order of freedom and justice” that emerged from the end of British domination with a “promised land of cultural integration.” To Cruse, the emphasis on “cultural integration” misrepresented the nature of anticolonial revolt. “It is we Afro-Americans who are out of step with the rest of the colonial world,” he declared.
The image of the United States as the first new nation featured prominently in Cruse’s work as a foil for his developing understanding of African Americans as subjects of a regime of domestic colonialism. In the midst of decolonization, he wrote in another essay, the revolutionary traditions of the West had lost their force: “the Americanism of 1776 becomes an expression of a frightening reactionary military might in 1960,” while “the symbol of French liberty of 1798 [sic] becomes the barrier to national independence in the hills of Algeria.” Far from serving as an inspiration to the decolonizing world, the American Revolution and the early history of the United States were symbols of the exhaustion of the West’s revolutionary traditions.
Cruse also refined his understanding of American racial hierarchy as parallel to the colonial system. While Cruse claimed that the United States was “never a ‘colonial’ power . . . in the strictest sense of the word” (ignoring both the nation’s history as a settler empire and its territorial holdings in the Caribbean and the Pacific) he suggested that “the nature of economic, cultural and political exploitation common to the Negro experience in the U.S. differs from pure colonialism only in that the Negro maintains a formal kind of halfway citizenship within the nation’s geographical boundaries.” Cruse went further in his 1962 essay, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” which he published in the fledgling New Left journal Studies on the Left. There, Cruse contended that decolonization demanded a complete realignment in the way that African Americans should conceive of their status within the United States. Rejecting the frameworks of analysis promoted by both the Marxist left and the civil rights leadership, Cruse argued that “the Negro” was not simply an exploited worker or a second-class citizen of American democracy but rather a “subject of domestic colonialism.” The connected histories of the slave trade and European colonial expansion meant that “from the beginning, the American Negro has existed as a colonial being.” Even after Emancipation, African Americans only attained “semi-dependent” status, not recognized as “an integral part of the American nation.”
Although he characterized his own views as antithetical to the analyses offered by the Marxist left, Cruse’s formulation was clearly influenced by the endorsement of “self-determination in the Black belt” by the Communist Party of his youth. Detached from any particular territory and looking beyond questions of political sovereignty and alien rule, Cruse’s conception of domestic colonialism depicted colonial status as one of legal subordination and, more importantly for him, of cultural degradation and racialized forms of economic exploitation. At the same time that Kennedy administration officials such as Williams were invested in narrowing the term’s meaning in order to gain African American support for the United States’ Cold War efforts, Cruse was seeking to widen it.
Both Cruse’s particular writings and the broader intellectual milieu of which they were a part turned the idea of internal colonialism into a touchstone of Black politics in the years to come. The San Francisco-based Afro-American Association, a study group that included future Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, read and debated Cruse’s work. Max Stanford (later Muhammad Ahmad) of the Revolutionary Action Movement cited it as a significant influence on his politics. And Malcolm X was so taken with the article that he began to carry Studies on the Left in the bookstore of his Harlem mosque. “Internal colonialism” became a keyword of the rising Black Power movement, as the idea of the “first new nation” had been for New Frontier liberalism.
Some sixty years later, if the language panics sparked by the wave of protests against Israel’s brutal genocide in Gaza are any judge, the language of decolonization again poses a semantic problem for American liberals. Across the mainstream media, commentators have fixated on the application of the category of “settler colonialism” to the Israeli state as, variously, an example of academic jargon (or “wokeness”) run amok, a reductive and moralizing binary, or even a slippery slope leading to mass violence. At their core, all are, in their own way, “verbal contortions,” as Isabella Hammad rightly notes, that help such commentators to “avoid engaging with the gravity of Israel’s assault on Gaza.”
The work of Cruse and other adopters of the internal colony thesis in the 1960s should give us a hint as to why the definition of colonialism—what it is and what it isn’t, what it can and cannot apply to—remains such a flashpoint. Are these struggles over meaning still worth fighting? So long as regimes of racialized expropriation and exploitation still operate across multiple scales, ensnaring localities and nations alike in a web of indebtedness, undemocratic rule, and violence, definitions will matter. And what anticolonial activists and their opponents both know, in their own way, is this: confronting these conditions requires a vocabulary that makes the connections between the international and the domestic clear.
This essay is adapted with permission from The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Decolonization by Sam Klug, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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