Bourgeois Radicals
The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960

Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow at home.

Carol Anderson (Author)

9780521763783, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 December 2014

386 pages, 24 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

'Anderson's Bourgeois Radicals is the most intensive and meticulously documented study to date of the NAACP's efforts to uproot European colonialism during and after World War II. She makes excellent use of the Library of Congress's NAACP Papers, scores of governmental and individual archival collections from across the United States and Great Britain, and a dizzying array of secondary sources. … several of her chapters are models of international history on important regions that deserve to be better known by scholars and students.' Robert Shaffer, The Journal of African American History

Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. For NAACP's leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a 'third way' to democracy for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.

1. Rising wind
2. 'The white man's burden has not been very heavy': the NAACP's anticolonial struggle against South Africa, 1946–51
3. 'An even larger issue than 'containing communism'': the NAACP and the Italian colonies
4. So weak, so seventeenth century: Indonesia and the domestic jurisdiction of Dutch colonialism
5. Regime change
Conclusion: beyond the single story.

Subject Areas: Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK], General & world history [HBG]