Between the end of the nineteenth century and the eve of World War II, Africans displaced by colonial rule aggrandized the attainments of American blacks, creating an African american myth that played an important role in their religious, political and social life. This myth, while existing in direct contradiction to the intense discrimination faced by black people in the United States, provided Africans with an inspirational model upon which to improve their lives. Africans on African-Americans traces the development of the African American myth and the way in which the Liberal Movement in South Africa looked to America for a formula for racial harmony that eluded their troubled country. While highlighting the strength of the African american myth, Gershoni also demonstrates that everywhere the myth had adherents it also had opponents, who insisted that the solution to Africa's ills lay in African culture and African peoples.
Yekutiel Gershoni is the head of African Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and author of Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the Hinterland.
"Drawing on comprehensive interviews and archival research, Andrew E. Hunt has written a highly informative account of one of the twentieth century's leading figures of American radicalism." -"The Journal of American History ", "Hunt gives us insight and understanding into a very complex and extraordinary man." -"Journal for the Study of Radicalism", "In this valuable biography, Hunt offers an outstanding description of Dellinger's political thought and activities over a sixty year period. Particularly interesting, because so little has been written about the subject, is the detailed discussion of Dellinger's antiwar activities during WWII. At the same time, Hunt is careful to portray a comprehensive view of Dellinger's career and places him in relation to the work of others in the American left." -David J. Langum, author of "William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer in America" "Meticulously researched and gracefully written, Andrew Hunt's splendid biography of David Dellinger follows the courageous revolutionary through six decades of activism while contributing new insights into the colorful history and interactions of pacifist, antiwar, and progressive organizations that shook the American establishment." -Melvin Small, Wayne State University "The story of David Dellinger's half century of leadership in the struggle for peace and social justice in the United States challenges the conventional narrative of recent American political history. Instead of the familiar history-by-decade, in which the radical thirties are followed by the conservative forties and fifties, to be succeeded again by the radical sixties, and so on, Hunt's biography of Dellinger provides readers with a sense of important and underlying continuities in the history of American radicalism." -Maurice Isserman, author of "If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left"
