Frontiers of Black Freedom

About the Book

In the West Coast of the 1930s, Black communities strove to fully realize their citizenship rights as Americans. Yet the region’s stark inequalities and overlapping diasporas provoked them toward more worldly politics. Owen Walsh examines the US West Coast as a key base, from where Black Americans enriched the Pacific world and created interracial solidarities.

Walsh follows Langston Hughes, Loren Miller, Juanita Harrison, and other figures as they sought freedom from Jim Crow via powerful alliances across racial and national boundaries. Through global travel and local activism, Black intellectuals connected with Mexican, Asian, and Indigenous populations, in ways that stimulated interracial community and radical imagination. Walsh uses Black Americans’ written and visual archives to trace their public and intimate encounters during a decade of crisis. This history illuminates the opportunities and the challenges of forging anti-racist solidarity beyond the nation-state.

Wide-ranging and revealing, Frontiers of Black Freedom highlights the West Coast’s place in global Black politics during the mid-twentieth century.

* Publication supported by a grant from the Winton U. Solberg US History Subvention Fund.