Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa

The New York Review of Books, Leonard Thompson
Fredrickson writes with great clarity about both countries, enlivening his account with fascinating vignettes of writer-activists.... His knowledge of the relevant South African literature is not far short of his mastery of the American. A typical chapter includes several substantial passages on each country--passages which flow easily into pages where he pulls the threads together in the comparisons between the two. At its best, Black Liberation is superb.


Book Description
In Black Liberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks in the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. He reveals a rich history--not merely of parallel developments, but of an intricate, transatlantic web of influences and cross-fertilization. Beginning with early moments of hope in both countries, when the promise of suffrage led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality, he moves through the rising tide of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century that blunted their hopes and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. Fredrickson brings to vivid life the decades of struggle, organizing, and debate, as blacks in the United States looked to Africa for identity and South Africans looked to America for new ideas and hope. He goes on to trace the rise of Communist influence in black movements in the two nations in the 1920s and '30s, and brings the story up through the present, exploring the divergence between African-American identity politics and the nonracialism that has triumphed in South Africa. In a career spanning thirty years, George Fredrickson has won recognition as the leading scholar of the struggle over racial domination in the United States and South Africa. In Black Liberation, he provides the essential companion volume to his award-winning White Supremacy, telling the story of how blacks fought back on both sides of the Atlantic.


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Unlike musicologists, psychologists, and many other scholars, historians usually concentrate on a specific period and place, and feel that they can never learn enough about them. Those who spend much of their lives comparing the histories of different societies are relatively rare and, of them, George Fredrickson is certainly one of the most distinguished....In "Black Liberation" and in "White Supremacy," his 1981 study of the history of white racial ideologies in America and South Africa, Fredrickson went beyond "a comparative perspective" -- i.e., the occasional use of comparative examples -- and attempted a more rigorous method, "cross-national comparative history." "White Supremacy" is a comparative history of the ideologies white Americans and South Africans used to support their racial prejudices and policies...."Black Liberation" takes up the story by comparing the ideological responses of black Americans and black South Africans to the theories and practices of white supremacy. -- Leonard Thompson, The New York Review of Books


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