Friday, October 17, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie On The Raging Horror Story Of What Is Really Happening in this Country At This Very Moment And Exactly Who Is Doing It And Why.

Trump Knows He is Going to Hell



Wajahat Ali

October 13, 2025

VIDEO:
 
 
Donald Trump, The Cult of Personality, and the GOP’s Reckoning: The Contradictions of a Failing, Authoritarian Presidency. 

In today’s episode of Democracy-Ish, Danielle and I bring the receipts that reveal a weakened, desperate Trump Administration is doubling down on cruelty and willing to sacrifice children to promote their pro-death, authoritarian agenda. We also discuss the growing fissures within the MAGA movement and give our thoughts on Trump’s alleged “peace deal.”


https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/tr...
 
 

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Trump administration officials seriously discussing invoking Insurrection Act, sources say--THE CRIMINAL MADNESS CONTINUES--FIGHT BACK!

"WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE..." 

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) 
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
1817-1895

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” 
--Frederick Douglass, August 3, 1857
 
Trump administration officials seriously discussing invoking Insurrection Act, sources say

A decision isn't expected to be imminent, one source said, but debate within the administration has shifted recently to more deeply exploring how and when the act might be invoked.


President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on Monday.Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images


by Courtney Kube, Katherine Doyle, Carol E. Lee and Garrett Haake
October 8, 2025
NBC News

WASHINGTON — White House officials have held increasingly serious discussions in recent days about President Donald Trump’s invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 19th century law that gives the president the power to deploy active-duty troops inside the United States for law enforcement purposes, five people with knowledge of the talks told NBC News.

Trump has sought to deploy National Guard troops in several major cities — including Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon — saying they are needed to reduce crime and protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from protesters. Critics have said the Trump administration is exaggerating issues in those cities.

A decision to invoke the act is not expected to be imminent, a senior administration official said. Were it to happen, it would be a notable escalation. The guard is currently deployed in limited support roles since active-duty members of the military are forbidden from conducting civilian law enforcement actions, such as conducting searches and making arrests. But the Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy troops inside the United States for that purpose.

Trump’s plans to deploy the National Guard have occasionally hit legal hurdles. A federal judge in Oregon on Sunday blocked him from sending guard members from any state to Portland. The next day, Trump said publicly that he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.”

“If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. As of now, he said, it has not been needed.

Talk inside the White House about invoking the act has ebbed and flowed since Trump took office again in January, said the five people, who include the senior administration official, two people familiar with the discussions and two people close to the White House.

But the debate inside the administration has shifted recently, from whether it makes sense to invoke the act to more deeply exploring how and when it might be invoked, both people close to the White House said.

Administration officials have drafted legal defenses and various options for invoking the act, two of the people said.

But the current, broad consensus among Trump’s aides has been to exhaust all other options before taking that step, the senior administration official and one of the people close to the White House said.

The person close to the White House described the process as working its way up “an escalatory ladder.”

Asked about discussions regarding invoking the Insurrection Act, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “The Trump administration is committed to restoring law and order in American cities that are plagued by violence due to Democrat mismanagement. And President Trump will not stand by while violent rioters attack federal law enforcement officers. The administration will work to protect federal assets and officers while making American cities safe again.”

The act gives the president broad discretion regarding its invocation. It can be invoked at the request of a state or when the president determines that conditions like “unlawful obstructions,” “rebellion” or “insurrection” have made it difficult to enforce the law. During the Civil Rights era, three presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — used the act to protect activists or enforce court orders mandating desegregation. It was last used, at the request of California’s governor, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

The governors of Oregon and Illinois both oppose sending troops to their states. There are no riots, and authorities there are not defying court orders.

The White House expects that any potential invocation of the act would be met with swift legal challenges and ultimately land at the Supreme Court.


Last month, a federal judge ruled that the White House’s deployment of active-duty troops to Los Angeles in June was illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that prevents the military from being used as police. After that decision, administration officials revived discussions and internal legal analyses around invoking the Insurrection Act, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions and one person close to the White House.

But Trump was cautioned that doing so under current circumstances might not hold up in the Supreme Court, which would break his series of victories there, these people said, and the idea was tabled for a time.

A White House official declined to discuss specific deliberations but said Trump’s legal team is focused on charting a legal pathway that can withstand judicial scrutiny.

“Ultimately it’s the president’s vision and the president’s policies that he got elected to implement that the attorneys are just working hard to defend,” the White House official said. “We’re working hard to look at the law and say, ‘How do we achieve the president’s vision?’”

Trump considered invoking the act in his first term during the protests after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020. He declined despite the urging of some allies and later regretted that decision, according to the senior administration official. He is viewing his current decision through that lens, the senior administration official said.

One of Trump’s deputy chiefs of staff, Stephen Miller, has been a leading and longtime proponent of invoking the Insurrection Act. Miller has been at the center of discussions about the issue since Trump took office, said the five sources and another person familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have discussed invoking the act if local law enforcement authorities cannot or will not protect ICE and federal law enforcement agents, one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But one concern that some officials have raised is that invoking the act could eventually lead to pitting active-duty U.S. troops against other Americans, this person said.

Trump has stepped up his use of the word “insurrection” to describe developments in Portland and Chicago in recent days. On Monday he said the pushback against ICE agents’ attempts to carry out immigration enforcement operations in both cities is “criminal insurrection.”

Trump and Miller have described the protesters against ICE operations in Chicago and Portland as participating in organized violence against the federal government.

“They’re saying they’re going to carry out insurrection against the federal government by using force, obstructive force, to keep ICE officers from going out and conducting arrests,” Miller told reporters Monday. “This is an all-out campaign of insurrection against the sovereignty of the United States because the Democrat Party and those who are committing violence in this country do not believe in legitimacy of the sovereign territory of the United States.”


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:


Courtney Kube

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.


Katherine Doyle

Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.


Carol E. Lee

Carol E. Lee is the Washington managing editor.


Garrett Haake

Garrett Haake is NBC News' senior White House correspondent.

Julia Ainsley, Tara Prindiville, Jonathan Allen, Gordon Lubold and Sydney Carruth contributed.






FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Major Public Intellectual, Author, Legal Scholar, Attorney, Social Critic, Historian, Editor, and Activist Brando Simeo Starkey On The Real Dialectical, Theoretical, and Practical Links Between the Political Economy Of Racial Capitalism and the Doctrine and Practice Of White Supremacy in the United States And the Inextricable Role It Plays In the Actual Lives and Thus Social, Economic and Cultural Status and Political Reality of White Americans of Every Class Group in the Nation, and Finally How and Why It Has Been and Remains A Foundational Historical, Structural, Institutional, and Systemic Force In The Contemporary Rise and Expansion of Fascism in the U.S. Today

 
How Trump and White Supremacy Are Killing American Democracy—And Why White Americans Are Helping It Happen
 
The Role of Caste Preservationism, Oligarchs, and Racial Division in Undermining Democracy—And What Must Be Done to Stop It

by Brando Simeo Starkey
March 10, 2025
Braveverse


Trump’s America is proving that white supremacy isn’t just oppressive—it’s self-destructive. Here’s how racial caste politics empowers billionaires, weakens democracy, and hurts the very people who uphold it.


The Role of Caste Preservationism in Trump’s Policies

White supremacy bedevils American democracy, like a congenital disease set to finally exterminate its host unless White Americans can prize country above race.

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement endeavored to further entrench Whiteness as the hegemonic, organizing force in electoral politics. The machinations succeeded, and Trump recaptured the White House, defeating sitting Vice President Kamala Harris.

Like before, Trump ran as what I call in my upcoming book, Their Accomplices Wore Robes, a caste preservationist—a person who, in the race context, sets as an objective the eternal primacy of the White population. His campaign operated from the understanding that he would strengthen the country’s White-on-top racial caste system. He quickly translated into policy the right-wing’s ambition of advancing caste preservationism, the quintessentially American project of maintaining a racial hierarchy in a nation that professes to extend freedom and liberty to all.

During his first days at the helm, Trump signed executive orders that targeted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and revoked a 1965 executive order issued by President Lyndon Johnson that required non-discrimination from federal contractors. These presidential actions expand the unfair advantages awarded to White people.

Another executive order attempts to terminate birthright citizenship. This wildly unconstitutional ploy, aimed particularly at recent immigrants of color, reminds them that many real Americans consider them forever unworthy of citizenship rights regardless of birthplace. By torpedoing DEI programs, dismantling non-discrimination protections, and attacking birthright citizenship, Trump’s administration not only reinforces racial hierarchy but also undermines the foundational democratic ideal of legal equality.

Trump heads a movement that rejects efforts to welcome long subjugated racial groups—the lower castes—into the national family. The administration warns Black and Brown communities especially to no longer expect equal protection of the laws and informs like-minded caste preservationists that the federal government will refrain from intervening on behalf of their victims. Only those born with Whiteness, in Trump’s America, can ever be true members of We the People who deserve governmental representation.

Two truths concerning White supremacy, in just a short time into Trump’s presidency, have grown impossible to ignore. First, that it fuels destructive voting patterns that empower oligarchs and erode democracy. Second, that it drives support for policies that sabotage the American economy and democracy, even in areas seemingly unrelated to race.

The American people must appreciate and act on these truths by forging a sustainable, majority multiracial coalition if they desire to emerge with any chance, after Trump, at reconstructing political systems and institutions.
 
How White Supremacy Fuels Destructive Voting Patterns

Even before the Civil War, many among the White masses, faithful to White supremacy, had already devolved into what the country’s founders dreaded: voters easily manipulated by the ultra-wealthy and thus turning into patsies who defeat the central conceit of democracy. And that enduring mindset empowers oligarchs who are destroying the nation. Destroying its institutions. Its way of life. Men like Elon Musk are crushing into rubble what could take generations to clean up and repair.

During the colonial era and the early years after the Revolutionary War, the fear that non-landowning White men would act as the easily manipulated dupes of their “masters,” or what we now would call bosses, convinced colonies and then states to restrict voting rights to landowners, with the holding of acreage equating to financial independence.

Many early leaders envisioned America as a new land that would best old England. The hereditary elite ruled England, catering to nobility and the landed gentry, while neglecting the needs of the masses. Although in America, the small farmer with land commanded a high level of regard, early generations doubted that the “servant” class, viewed as dependent, could ward off the pressure of their economic betters. Under the doomsday scenario, America would deteriorate into England. Become a place where elites ruled, albeit through proxies who pulled the lever against their own interests.

Many White people now vote for what they consider as good for White people. Yet, they mistake the interests of the rich as “White interests.” Thus, the rich control our democracy. In an ideal world, individuals vote to secure their own financial, medical, and bodily safety. They vote for their own wellbeing, and that of their fellow citizens. They behave, in other words, rationally. This steers the country in a direction most beneficial to popular majorities. Instead, millions vote against “the others,” against out-group members, against Black and Brown people, turning potential allies into persecuted enemies. This allows capital to prosper from division amongst labor.

The White working class, like many balloters, visited the polls in 2024 griping about inflation. About the price of goods, services, and living expenses. Trump discussed those concerns, offering no real solutions. True—he offered tariffs. But tariffs increase prices. He forged tremendous headway blaming the others though. He blamed, for example, rising housing costs on undocumented persons. Through such remarks, along with the political right’s prolific manipulation of bigotry, like hurling “DEI” as a racial slur, caste preservationists prompted White voters to consider their vote along racial lines.

Nonetheless, soon after regaining the White House keys, Trump swung the door open to oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk. Through the newly created Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk is the face of the administration’s evisceration of the federal government. Musk handed nearly $300 million dollars to elect Trump, and Trump repaid his debt, allowing Musk, putatively, to cut wasteful government spending. In actuality, though, Musk is corrupting government. Worsening the lives of everyday Americans. But enriching himself.

Musk has fired thousands of federal employees, including 6,000 veterans. He has demeaned countless others, asking them to justify their continued employment and feeding their written responses to an artificial intelligence system to evaluate the necessity of their positions. Fired employees have received letters impugning their work, even when their performance reviews were stellar.

He has slashed cancer and Alzheimer’s research. Because of layoffs, federal parks are closing to the public. Even social security payments seem infirm given that Musk called the program a “Ponzi scheme,” and sources inform that thousands, maybe even half the Social Security Administration 60,000 person workforce faces layoffs.

Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX businesses, however, have received $18 billion in federal funding since 2015. Eight million dollars a day. The world’s richest man engorging on billions in taxpayer dollars. Not wasteful though. That spigot keeps running. Meanwhile, Musk is furthering his own business interests by firing regulators investigating his companies as business leaders pay Trump as much as $5 million to dine with him.

White supremacy has prevented many from understanding that they routinely sacrifice their own health, comfort, and prosperity and that of their fellow citizens to advantage billionaires. They have become the very dupes a fledgling nation, desperate to evade the pitfalls that inspired many to cross the seas and bear muskets for independence, deemed unworthy of the ballot.
 
The Economic and Social Costs of Racial Hierarchy

White supremacy, furthermore, engenders support for ideas and policies that debilitate society even in areas having little connection to race. The taint of White supremacy, simply put, bleeds everywhere.

This observation builds on what sociologist Joe Feagin terms the “White racial frame” which describes how White people see and understand the world and everyday occurrences. White people, Feagin observes, generally view America through a lens. American culture has indoctrinated them into assuming they represent the intellectual and cultural vanguard. Trained them into viewing their dominant status—their privilege—as proper. Taught them to conclude that racial inequalities cannot be traced back to their race’s past or present transgressions. Those who most perceive the world through the White racial frame interpret events to defend the status quo and a White-on-top racial hierarchy.

Operating out of the White racial frame buys trust with much of White America. This trust grows not from expertise, not from logic, but from cultural and racial solidarity.

The politicians, political commentators, anyone really, who most strongly operate out of this frame receive instant and often unshakeable credibility, giving legitimacy to viewpoints even on subjects unconnected to race. The sort of folk who, for example, criticize movements for racial justice in policing also, for instance, often call climate change a hoax, or attack the safety of vaccines. The credibility the speaker earns through the embrace of White supremacy helps sway listeners into accepting the speaker’s other positions. White supremacy, therefore, colors all policy conversations.

Trump voters, who expressed dissatisfaction with the economy and the price of goods, supported a candidate promising to introduce tariffs, which would further raise prices. His alignment with White supremacy signaled general trustworthiness, signaled that he too played for their team. But now, his economic policies are producing predictable effects, higher prices, increased unemployment, more financial insecurity, inflicting real damage that injures the economy.

Similarly, prominent caste preservationists like President Trump or Tucker Carlson have lauded tyrants like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Viktor Orbán. This, in turn, has swayed millions of their followers to align with fascists.

America now condones a commander-in-chief opening his arms to strongmen but stiff-arming a democratically elected leader like Ukraine’s Volodymyr and inciting trade wars with Mexico and Canada. By praising authoritarian leaders, Trump signals a rejection of democratic values and an embrace of fascism, crippling America’s standing, however undeserved, as a global champion of freedom and human rights. Now trusted allies won’t even share intelligence with America.

We will forever be the country that elected a man who embraced tyrannical leaders, undermining our future safety in a myriad of unpredictable ways.
 
Building a Multiracial Coalition for Democracy

America’s redemption requires a great abandonment of White supremacy.

Instances of White people choosing interracial coalitions over White solidarity fills America’s present and history. Black and White southerners joined together in 1870s and 1880s Virginia under the Readjuster Partybanner. Then again, they did in 1890s North Carolina through center-left fusion politics. In both states, they ousted avowedly White supremacist, conservative state governments, during an era far more racist than now.

Whiteness can be organized around something other than White supremacy as Linda Martín Alcoff, philosophy professor at Hunter College, maintains in her book The Future of Whiteness. She rejects “white exceptionalism,” or “the idea that whiteness is so distinct as a form of social identity and so problematically tied to its supremacist illusions that it cannot be redeemed.” We mustn’t idle as impending doom draws close. Fatalism can produce no victories. And it errs on analytical, historical, and moral grounds.

What would trigger a reimagining of Whiteness today, however, proves difficult, yet what potential strategies deserve a chance presents an easier question. White voters who have enlisted with Trump liked what they heard, at least more than what they heard from his opponents. The Democratic Party, then, should rework how it addresses White voters, particularly the much-discussed White working-class. The Republican Party, the political headquarters of caste preservationism, wielding both dog whistles and direct appeals to communicate with White voters about race, depicting issues within a dishonest us-versus-them narrative. The time has arrived, perhaps, for Democrats to also talk about race with these voters. But Democrats should tell them the truth in hopes that they finally direct their ire at those truly deserving blame. The billionaires. The oligarchs.

In his farewell speech, former president Barack Obama attempted something approaching this. “[W]e’re not where we need to be,” he said referring to matters of race. “And all of us have more work to do. If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves. If we’re unwilling to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we will diminish the prospects of our own children.”

America needs an interracial majority coalition. And the Trump opposition might be able to help build this by instructing White Americans, explicitly, about the price White supremacy extracts from them and everyone else. That teaches them how they and the nation can flourish by pursuing a democracy that advantages everyone, one that jettisons its racial caste system.

Storytelling provides the best way to teach, the best way to change a mind. Trump has been telling White people a story that they are believing, even though it ends with the rich and powerful as the actual winners. Ends with them as the losers. Ends in economic ruin. Ends with a tattered democracy.

White supremacy has turned millions into foot soldiers for billionaires. Someone seeking the presidency should tell White people this story. Time has come to tell them the truth.


If you found this essay insightful, subscribe to my newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, forward it to a friend. Thanks!

The Braveverse
 
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY is a writer and scholar. He is the author an important new book 
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025)
. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the New York Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and wrote for several years for ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape). Born and raised in Cincinnati, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons. He launched a newsletter, The Braveverse, about law, politics, and freedom from caste, at the TheBraveverse.com in January 2025
  

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Great Sherrilyn Ifill, Extraordinary Legal scholar, Legendary Attorney, Groundbreaking and Pioneering Teacher and Activist, Formidable Public Intellectual, and Inspiring Leader Gives A Typically Brilliant And Compelling Speech at the 'Mecca Of African American Higher Education', Howard University in the Name Of Our Always Glorious Collective Struggle For True Liberation and Self Determination In All Aspects of Our Lives In A Direct National Response To A Raging Fascist Movement (and Federal Government) in the U.S. Today

Sherrilyn Ifill Delivers Keynote Address at Howard University's 2025 Opening Convocation Ceremony—VIDEO +
 
 
 
September 29, 2025

VIDEO: 
 

Howard University leaders opened the academic year September 19 with its 158th Opening Convocation ceremony that acknowledged the weight of changing times. Convocation keynote speaker Sherrilyn Ifill, a Howard School of Law professor, cited the “heaviness in the land” but urged students to see the moment as time for democratic renewal. You can watch Ifill's full remarks.

Monday, October 13, 2025

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Doubleday, 2025



[Publication date: June 3, 2025]

A magisterial new history of the role of the Supreme Court as an ally in implementing and preserving a racial caste system in America

Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court—even more than the presidency or Congress—aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

The Reconstruction Amendments—which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights—converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation’s founding conceit—that all men are created equal—real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness.

Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters—petitioners, attorneys, justices—to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today’s federal courts lurch rightward. In this groundbreaking grand history, Brando Simeo Starkey reveals a troubling and dark aspect of American history.


REVIEWS:


"A searing indictment of judicially condoned—and even enshrined—racism in American law. . . . A powerfully argued study of a legal system that favors those who 'persevere in undermining Black freedom.'"—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


"Vividly narrated and astute, this is a damning reassessment of the judicial branch’s civil rights legacy." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)


"Precisely outlines, within the historical context of the United States, how the Supreme Court has repeatedly and specifically denied or significantly delayed full rights of citizenship to Black people. . . . Starkey masterfully uses a unique blend of storytelling and legal documentation to share his declarations." —Library Journal (starred review)


"Brando Simeo Starkey delivers a devastating cross-examination of the Supreme Court of the United States. . . . Starkey demolishes the myth of color-blind jurisprudence and lays bare SCOTUS’s central role in preserving caste-based inequalities in American life." —Alta Journal

“Their Accomplices Wore Robes is a stark, measured indictment of power dressed in principle. Brando Simeo Starkey lays bare the quiet, deliberate mechanisms by which the Supreme Court has upheld a racial caste system—not as an aberration but as a feature of its design. This is not a book about what we wish to believe about justice; it is a book about what justice, in practice, has too often been. Starkey writes with clarity and precision, refusing easy conclusions or consolations. The result is an indictment of a judicial system that must be fundamentally reformed or abolished if we're to have real democracy.” —Donovan X. Ramsey, author of When Crack Was King, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the National Book Award


“Starkey’s book is a passionate, deeply researched, humanistic story of how African Americans have evoked the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments as a bulwark against a racial caste system from the Jim Crow era to the present, and how their efforts have often been met with faulty reasoning, disavowals of reality, and obfuscation by a Supreme Court that has repeatedly shut its doors to their claims. Elegantly composed in a personal style that makes its stories come alive, this book is a book written to inspire reflection, disagreement, and argument – the kinds of things that are sorely needed in our own complex times.” —Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Harvard University



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY is a writer and scholar. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the New York Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and wrote for several years for ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape). Born and raised in Cincinnati, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons. He launched a newsletter, The Braveverse, about law, politics, and freedom from caste, at the TheBraveverse.com in January 2025

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Leg: The Trinity Conception

West Virginia’s second capitol, in downtown Charleston, an Italianate building with Romanesque flourishes, provided coal country architecture fit for Milan. Within its three stories, in February 1873, the Democrat-dominated legislature debated a bill that would help sculpt a post-slavery racial caste system.

Separating from Virginia, a split nearly a century in the making, West Virginia became the thirty-fifth state in June 1863, remaining loyal to the Union. The Republican Party had controlled West Virginia politics since its genesis. Ahead of the 1870 elections, a contingent of West Virginia Democrats asked Delaware Democratic senator Willard Saulsbury how the party could attract Black voters, less than 5 percent of the state’s voting population. Saulsbury cautioned that the time remaining until the election seemed “too short to pull the wool over their eyes.” He advocated they scream “White man’s party” instead because enough “ignorant white men” populated the state “who would [normally] vote the Republican ticket that we can get to vote ours.” It worked, and in January 1872, West Virginia held a convention to write a new constitution. Inside a small, run-down Charleston church, seventy-eight delegates, sixty-six of them Democrats, huddled. The most conservative Democrats favored a constitution that restricted Black rights. One Democratic delegate, George Orrick Davenport, a volunteer Union soldier, joined his party’s larger contingent, moderates who opposed a constitution that undergirded a racial caste system.


A year later, that strain of anti-Black animus endured and inspired discussion about a White-male-only jury law. The bill appeared destined for history’s dustbin—its opponents denounced it as violative of the state constitution. Davenport, also a member of the legislature’s lower house, expressed that the constitution he had helped write prohibited such racial exclusion. “If the [state] Constitution don’t protect citizens from class legislation,” Davenport contended during open debate, “he was sorry that he had been a member of the Convention that framed it and was furthermore sorry that he had voted for it.”


Even though he “was as much opposed to [Black jurors] as anybody,” the former Army lieutenant believed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which Congress, in May 1870, reenacted under the Fourteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause, “provides there shall be no distinction on this question.” Davenport “didn’t want to force negroes on juries but thought that under the laws of the United States, they had rights there, and we had no right to debar them.” Many White folk shared similar misgivings. In July 1865, Ohio Republican congressman James Garfield confessed privately that he harbored “a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way. . . . But colonization has proved a hopeless failure everywhere.” And thus men like Davenport held their nose and downed their gruel.


After a long day of debating the bill, Davenport, a slender-faced White man with full dark hair and a mustache, sat in a barber’s chair. As Black men waited on him, he remarked, “Well, if you niggers know how much I have done for you today, you would wait on me for nothing.” Caste preservationists, though, resuscitated the bill. The Charleston Courier advised readers that “it was hardly consistent to provide for securing intelligent jurors . . . and then flood the jury boxes with ignorance by admitting negroes indiscriminately.”

On February 19, 1873, rancorous debate erupted in the capitol. Representative John J. Thompson commanded the floor and offered his worldview to his colleagues, elbowing them toward the realm of racial subordination.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I want it understood that I am opposed to nigger jurors. I will never consent to make them the equal of the white man. I have many reasons for my position; the most important of which is because a nigger is a nigger. . . . For my part, sir, I would rather have no juries at all than to force white men to sit with them.”

Representative W. H. Reynolds, in opposition, urged his colleagues to accompany him to the enlightened world. “The doctrine that all men are created equally free has been lifelong with me. I have always believed it and have always maintained it. It is but simply justice, and I propose to stand by it to the last.”

These worldviews routed West Virginia toward rival destinations—White-over-Black racial dominance or coequal governance. On March 12, 1873, the legislature limited jury service to “all white male persons, who are twenty-one years of age, and not over sixty, and who are citizens of this state.” Caste preservationism triumphed.

Because of the state’s poverty, White West Virginians especially cherished the racial caste system. Many poor White people constructed their identity on their supposed superiority over “the nigger.” Laws like this one diverted their attention away from a bitter truth—a common oppressor, White men who hoarded a nation’s wealth, subjugated the “nigger” and the poor White man alike. White Supremacy, evil but ingenious, convinced the poor White man to fixate on cultivating anti-Black hate rather than love for economic self-interest. Henry Wise, pre–Civil War Virginia governor, explained that convincing poor White people of their equality with their economic betters hinged on the caste system. “Break down slavery,” he insisted, “and you would with the same blow destroy the great democratic principle of equality among men.”

Since West Virginia never seceded, its Reconstruction proceeded as it did in Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, loyal border states. Beyond the ending-slavery requirement, minimal federal intervention encumbered those states. That hands-off approach, and a small Black population, enabled the Democratic Party’s quick assent in West Virginia. Just four of the eleven southern states, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, had returned to Democratic hands when West Virginia passed its jury discrimination law. Meanwhile, the Republican-led southern states, particularly ones with large Black populations, like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, elected Black men to statehouses that enacted some fairly egalitarian laws.

But White southerners were salivating to reclaim the crown. The Supreme Court upholding West Virginia’s jury law would suggest that caste preservationists could install legislation that expunged Black people from other facets of civic life too. The Civil War and Reconstruction had destroyed the slave system. Caste preservationists needed an answer: “Can we implement laws that explicitly deny black people rights in order to water a new fountain of oppression?”

During the state’s constitutional convention in 1872, Black citizens had petitioned for a provision that would specifically enable Black jury service. The convention’s chairman waved them off. The new constitution, he vowed, would prohibit race distinctions. After the passage of the jury discrimination law, at least two options presented themselves to its foes who believed it violated The Trinity. Sue the state, arguing that the Constitution barred it, or wait until a Black criminal defendant raised the issue at trial, a scenario requiring a crime.

Stand alongside me, on April 17, 1872, in the upstairs back room of a two-level wooden frame house in Wheeling, West Virginia. The Ohio River severs this city in two. Taylor Strauder, his wife, Annie, and her nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Fannie Green, live in the more populous area, which cradles the river’s coastline, with the Appalachian Mountains looming in the eastern sky. Spot the bed, lounge, and rocking chair in front of the fireplace. Notice, on the hearth, that tool normally stored downstairs to chop wood. A hatchet.

Strauder is leaving their home this night after Annie asked him to buy yeast. He enters the nearby Miller’s Saloon instead. In the back room, the biracial carpenter sees a Black man named Elijah Pullins.

“You damned son of a bitch, you better go home,” Pullins taunts, among dominoes-playing patrons. “I suspect there is someone in bed with your wife now.”

Strauder, formerly enslaved in Augusta County, Virginia, doesn’t respond. Such cuckold quips often flew in his direction, especially from Pullins.

When Strauder returns home, he opens the front door and swears he sees a White man fleeing through the back door. He confronts Annie, but she denies the accusation, inciting a fight. The two wedded in June 1871, and trouble defined their relationship. He would insist she cheated on him. She had him arrested for threatening her life once, but they reconciled. They always reconciled. This latest tempest stretches into the wee hours of the morning but relents enough for them to sleep on that bed.

The next morning, Annie wakes up and sits in the rocking chair. Strauder, preparing for work, plops on the lounge, awakening Fannie, asleep under the covers. The couple refresh their quarreling.

He asks Annie, “Where are my shoes?”

“I suppose they are where you put them last night.”

Nearby, Lucinda Thomas prepares her two small children for Annie, her older sister, to babysit this rainy morning. Lucinda reaches her sister’s home at about thirty past six, enters the door, steps in a few paces, and a macabre scene freezes her. Annie seated in a rocking chair. Her head collapsed into her chest and resting on her right arm. A stream of blood rushing down her temple, over her eyes, running off the cliff of her nose, diving onto the floor, and splashing into an expanding crimson pond. About three feet away rests the hatchet with coagulated blood gluing Annie’s hair to its hammer side.

Lucinda hurries to the house of the local justice of the peace, Robert Gillespie, who tells her to alert Officer Robert Junkins at his home while he scurries to the crime scene.

Let’s mix with the crowd gathering outside the Strauder home. See those twelve White men entering? The ones who look like regular citizens? They will serve on the coroner’s jury, which determines cause of death. Gillespie directed the police to summon them. Despite The Trinity, the officers selected only White men. Black men account for 40 percent of the county’s male population.

Many have crusaded for the principle that America must bestow to all the same justice. Equal justice. We cherish this principle for various reasons. For one, a matter concerning an individual’s rights implicates the rights of an entire group. West Virginia cannot deny Strauder his rights because of his Blackness without infringing the rights of the entire race. For the law to afford Strauder equality, he must have it always, not merely when society sees fit to provide him that. Those twelve White men who serve on this coroner’s jury—West Virginia continually replicates this spectacle. But this murder occurred before the state will pass its jury discrimination law. In absence of that law, the police chose to summon only White men.

“Taylor Strauder killed my mother with a hatchet,” Fannie testifies inside the home, her mother’s corpse still on the floor. Gillespie issues an arrest warrant, describing Strauder as a “very light mulatto about thirty-two years of age; about five feet ten inches in stature and stoutly built” with a “rather spare face, with high cheek bones, [who] wore when last seen here a scattering beard on his chin.”

On April 25, some Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police officers caught the first Wheeling-bound train with Strauder in tow. The officers had arrested him in their city shingling a house the day before. When the streetcar stopped opposite Gillespie’s office, the guards removed Strauder from it, allowing an angry mob to punch him with sticks and blast him with insults. Wheeling policemen forged a path through the crowd, and Gillespie ushered Strauder and the guards into his office. Gillespie asked Strauder about his readiness for a probable cause hearing. He replied he could participate the next day.


The guards returned Strauder outside. Cries of “shoot him” and “hang him” flew from the swelling mob. The police formed two lines and, with Strauder placed in between, marched to the jail. Hundreds of onlookers tailed the contingent, berating Strauder the entire way. He passed under the rounded archway of the Ohio County jail and entered his new home, a cell.

The Black members of the mob wanted the justice system to punish the man who had slaughtered one of their own. The system, to produce that outcome, foreshadowed that it would deny Strauder his rights because of his race, a wrong states freely committed when believing courts will pardon them. Black folk would grow accustomed to this posture, seeking protection from a system that deprives them of their rights.

The next morning Strauder sat for his probable cause hearing, held in the jail. Upon learning of Strauder’s lack of legal representation, George Davenport entered the jail. Davenport, the state legislator who would the following year oppose the exclusion of Black men from juries, conferred privately with Strauder, christening a bond that would span more years than either could have predicted. Fortune shone on the moneyless Strauder that day when Davenport, a skilled attorney of seven years, agreed to represent him pro bono.

Fortune shone on Davenport too. Strauder’s defense presented him, a well-respected member of the state bar, his last best opportunity to leave his mark on the profession. Thirty-one years old, Davenport wouldn’t see forty. With no wife or children, he threw himself into lawyering and legislating. A loyal Democrat who called his party “incorruptible,” Davenport, smart and honorable, exhibited a “natural kindheartedness and a freedom from malice and wickedness singularly attractive to those who knew him best,” a friend remarked. Davenport battled alcoholism—during a legislative session in 1873, the Speaker for the West Virginia House of Delegates had the sergeant-at-arms arrest some legislators, including Davenport, for missing votes. Davenport blamed whiskey for his absence. Four years later, he headed a Christian temperance society. One time Davenport, principled, chastised a judge he felt inadequate and threatened to imperil his career. The judge held him in contempt and sentenced him to five days in jail. On another occasion, Davenport scolded an opposing counsel during open court for untruthfulness. That counsel punched Davenport, who returned the blow.

After Fannie and other witnesses testified, the hearing ended—the state proved probable cause. On May 20, 1872, an all-White grand jury indicted Strauder for murder. Davenport twice asked for continuances, stalling the case a year. Not until May 8, 1873, two months after the state legislature passed its jury discrimination law, did Strauder hear a verdict.

“We the jury find the prisoner guilty of murder in the first degree,” said the foreman. Strauder “sank to his seat, overcome, his legs refusing to longer sustain him,” a reporter observed. Two months later, Judge Thayer Melvin sentenced him to be hanged. The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, however, reversed his conviction on an arcane technicality, granting Strauder another trial.

Davenport and his thirty-one-year-old mentee Blackburn Barrett Dovener, who assisted him, studied The Trinity with an eye toward invalidating the jury discrimination law. Within the law office of Davenport & Dovener at 174 Fourth Street, they focused on the Fourteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth referred to slavery. The Fifteenth to voting. But the Fourteenth spoke to equality. Two clauses from the amendment’s first section must have grabbed them.

First, the Privileges and Immunities Clause: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” The “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” refer to the rights Americans possess because of their national citizenship, presenting the opportunity to raise at least two arguments: a narrow one beneficial to Black criminal defendants and a broader one beneficial to the entire Black population. First, they could have argued that Strauder’s American citizenship included a privilege, or a right, to a trial with an impartially selected jury panel. Or, second, that the clause granted an immunity from a state treating a citizen as a member of a degraded caste—an individual’s immunity from castework—a right which the jury discrimination law had violated. But an obstacle stymied those arguments—in April 1873, nearly a year after Annie’s murder, the Supreme Court neutered the Privileges and Immunities Clause in the Slaughter-House Cases.

In 1869, the biracial Louisiana legislature passed “an act to protect the health of the City of New Orleans” in response to the squalor, stench, and unsanitary conditions the butchering industry unleashed upon the city. Plying their trade near schools and hospitals, butchers discarded decaying animal carcasses on unpaved roads, in the Mississippi River, wherever, and leaders partly blamed cholera and yellow fever, diseases responsible for thousands of deaths, on such practices. The law forced butchers to relinquish their fly-swarmed shops and pay to operate from the monopoly Crescent City Slaughter-House, located across the river. Some butchers, White men, sued, arguing that the law violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights.


John Archibald Campbell, a former Supreme Court associate justice who had resigned and then served as the Confederacy’s assistant war secretary, represented the hundreds of butchers who sued the state. He argued that the slaughterhouse law violated parts of The Trinity, including, specifically, the Privileges and Immunities Clause, because it denied the butchers’ right to practice their occupation, what Campbell called a privilege of American citizenship. Campbell spearheaded multiple lawsuits to invalidate laws that Louisiana’s Republican-majority legislature enacted. Previously, the legislature passed laws like one forbidding school segregation and another making race discrimination in public accommodations a crime. Such enactments enraged caste preservationists and set them against anything the legislature passed. Campbell chased a transparent objective—harness The Trinity on behalf of White “victims” to undo works of a legislature elected in a majority-Black state.

Writing the Supreme Court’s five–four majority opinion, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, Republican-appointed, ruled against Campbell but awarded caste preservationists an unexpected bounty. The rights implicated in the Privileges and Immunities Clause, Miller wrote, defining them narrowly, included “the prohibition against ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts.” Miller’s argument defied logic—the original Constitution already protected these rights.


Justice Joseph P. Bradley, one of four justices who disagreed with the majority, wrote a dissent that explained the Privileges and Immunities Clause’s true meaning. Bradley honored Congress’s choice to fundamentally alter American democracy, a choice endorsed by the people who voted overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in the 1866 midterm election, where the Fourteenth Amendment rose above all other campaign issues. Bradley observed that people had state citizenship and federal citizenship. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, state citizenship, the primary form of citizenship, provided citizens protection of their civil rights. Federal citizenship was secondary. The Fourteenth Amendment inverted that, making the federal government the leading guarantor of civil rights.

“If a man be denied full equality before the law, he is denied one of the essential rights of citizenship as a citizen of the United States,” Bradley wrote. The privileges and immunities of the citizens—“the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property”—were fundamental rights. They encompassed the rights in the Declaration of Independence, the right to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” which “belong to the citizens of every free government.” Bradley further explained that the rights included in the Bill of Rights, like the right to free speech and peaceable assembly, and against unreasonable searches and seizures, were among those fundamental rights now protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against state intrusion. Simply put, American citizenship had always given the populace a civil rights bucket. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, though, the Constitution contained no express grant of power that allowed the federal government to protect that bucket from state intrusions. The Fourteenth Amendment cured that congenital defect.

“The amendment,” Bradley wrote, “was an attempt to give voice to the strong National yearning for that time and that condition of things, in which American citizenship should be a sure guaranty of safety, and in which every citizen of the United States might stand erect on every portion of its soil, in the full enjoyment of every right and privilege belonging to a freeman, without fear of violence or molestation.”

Seeking to counteract Campbell’s gambit to stymie Louisiana’s biracial legislature, Miller narrowly interpreted the Privileges and Immunities Clause, revoking its utility for the cause of Black freedom. Contending that the West Virginia law violated “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” would, therefore, slam Davenport and Dovener into a roadblock.

The duo ultimately reached for the Equal Protection Clause: “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Court most fully untangled that clause in Miller’s Slaughter-House Cases opinion. “The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes resided,” he wrote, “which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied by this clause, and by it such laws are forbidden.” When West Virginia limited jury service to White men, did it not discriminate with gross injustice and hardship against Black folk as a class? One would think. But if the Supreme Court could impoverish one clause, it could another.

Other West Virginia attorneys, in summer 1874, were exploring the same uncharted and unwelcoming seas on behalf of a Black client. Let’s trek eastward, one hundred miles from Strauder’s cell, to Martinsburg, West Virginia.

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
by Howard W. French
Liveright, 2025



[Publication date: August 26, 2025]
 
Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Foreign Policy

“Howard French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” ―David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

From the acclaimed author of Born in Blackness comes an extraordinary account of Africa’s liberation from colonial oppression, a work that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of modern history.

The Second Emancipation, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild’s contention that French is a “modern-day Copernicus.” The title―referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom―positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.

That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” Determined to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story,” The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French’s consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah’s early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu―including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him “one of the greatest political leaders of our century”―and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.

Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana’s first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah’s radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.

In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

16 pages of illustrations; 3 maps


REVIEWS:


"[An] epic narrative…This is a sprawling book, and the better for it. Mr. French has delivered a panoramic, sympathetic, yet analytical portrait of a global black movement, deepened by his own family connections with West Africa…As the fastest-growing part of the world in population, Africa will matter more and more. And Mr. French is an expert guide to its nuances."
― Robert Kaplan, Wall Street Journal


"French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, Born in Blackness, showed how the making of the modern world wasn’t just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. The Second Emancipation is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era... The Second Emancipation ably treads the line on Nkrumah’s complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism."
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times


"The Second Emancipation, as political and intellectual history, is profound and excellent."
― Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe


"Nkrumah’s odyssey is the subject of Howard W. French’s riveting new book …Nkrumah paralleled Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in his reach and influence. That little is known about him outside of Africa and African diasporic communities is a reflection of the continued marginalization of the continent in the Western imagination... Against the backdrop of the US imposition of travel restrictions on disproportionately African countries, including Ghana, and an enduring proxy conflict in Sudan, French’s book reads as history told in the present tense, at once enthralling and devastating. The Africa of Nkrumah’s dreamworld―stable, prosperous, in charge of its own destiny―is still struggling to be born."
― Vivien Chang, Los Angeles Review of Books

"In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, this book offers a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history."
― Arab News, "What We Are Reading Today"


"In this magisterial account, journalist French (Born in Blackness) revisits the history of the Pan-Africanist movement through the life of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first head of state of the first colonized African nation to gain independence . . . Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the 20th century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement."
― Publishers Weekly, starred review


"A fluent exploration of an important if often overlooked political leader whose ideas still bear consideration."
― Kirkus Reviews


"French adeptly places the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, the first liberated African colony, in the context of wider anti-colonial movements in Asia and the Middle East, as well as Nkrumah's influence on racial justice in the U.S…Despite assassination threats, ethnic rivalries, and failure to achieve his greatest goal of a pan African Federation, Nkrumah’s influence on African and African American liberation remains unparalleled."

― Lesley Williams, Booklist


"It would be as impossible to overstate the importance of Nkrumah as it would be to overstate the brilliance of this study. For too many, Africa as a whole remains an enigma. Howard W. French’s masterwork clarifies the continent, both its history and the backstory to its current conflicts, with remarkable precision."

― Greg Grandin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth


"A brilliant examination. . . . Howard W. French illuminates a period of time when people believed that standards of justice and equality could prevail for African people on the continent and in the diaspora, especially in the United States during the civil rights movement."

― Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello


"An original, provocative, and important work of history. . . . With meticulous research and crisp writing, Howard W. French helps us see and understand the modern world anew. An extraordinary achievement."

― Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life


"Kwame Nkrumah founded a country and became the leading African statesman of the twentieth century. French tells Nkrumah’s story wonderfully well, in all its greatness and complexity."

― Odd Arne Westad, Yale University, and author of The Cold War: A World History


"In prose both lyrical and personal, Howard W. French reveals how civil rights and decolonization were bound together by Garvey’s ghost, Du Boisian internationalism, a long dream of Black power, and a vision of pan-Africanism based less on returning home than on rejecting the world order and the color line that belts it. A tour de force."

― Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


"In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa’s aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head."
― David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
 
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.