The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
Howard W. French
Liveright
The Second Emancipation begins with Kwame Nkrumah's impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. Blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States.
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.
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.