The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Dr. Martin Klimke Project website The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany This research project examines the relationship between the American civil rights movement and German attitudes toward race and racial identity, focusing in particular on how Germany was perceived by African Americans before and especially after World War II. Many African American intellectuals and artists, such as Ira Aldridge, W.E.B. DuBois, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson, visited Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their impressions of the country, combined with those of African American soldiers stationed in postwar occupied Germany, reflect not only their personal contacts with individuals and political networks (including international religious organizations and trade unions) but also more theoretical analyses of German history and especially the Nazi era, which civil rights activists invoked as a point of comparison when denouncing racial injustice in the US. In addition to exploring how African American perceptions of Germany influenced the development of the American civil rights movement, the project examines how the reception and recontextualization of that movement’s ideology, iconography, and cultural practices transformed German political culture and traditional concepts of democracy, civil society, and the public sphere. By analyzing the ways in which Germans constructed and negotiated ethnic identities and ideas of blackness from 1945 to 1989, the author hopes to illuminate both the African American struggle for civil rights and the history of the black-power movement in East and West Germany. Retracing the historical encounter between African Americans and Germans is a critical step in reevaluating the sociocultural and political relationship between these two groups. Governments on both sides frequently monitored and in some cases intervened in these interactions, which is another important aspect of the African American-German relationship that will be addressed in this study. The primary goals of this project are to understand how concepts of race, integration, and political empowerment were mutually appropriated by Germans and African Americans in the postwar period, and to outline the social and political evolution of those concepts after the pivotal years of the 1960s. To this end, the study draws on recent historiographical debates to establish a transnational perspective on the issue of racial identity and on the African American experience after 1945.