The Second Emancipation is a brilliant examination of the end of formal European colonialism in Africa. Told through the life of the great architect of Ghanaian independence, Kwame Nkrumah, Howard W. French illuminates a period of time when people believed that standards of justice and equality could prevail for African people on the continent and in the diaspora, especially in the United States during the civil rights movement, despite the centuries-old ascendance of the ideology of global white supremacy. It is a timely story for our own currently difficult racial moment.--Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello
The Second Emancipation is an epic history of the struggle to free Africa from the grip of colonial rule and Black America from the grip of Jim Crow, deftly told through the life and times of Kwame Nkrumah. In prose both lyrical and personal, Howard W. French reveals how civil rights and decolonization were bound together by Garvey's ghost, Du Boisian internationalism, a long dream of Black power, and a vision of pan-Africanism based less on returning home than on rejecting the world order and the color line that belts it. A tour de force.--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Second Emancipation is an original, provocative, and important work of history, one that places Kwame Nkrumah among the most influential and fascinating global figures of the twentieth century. With meticulous research and crisp writing, Howard W. French helps us see and understand the modern world anew. An extraordinary achievement.--Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life
Howard W. French's The Second Emancipation rightly places Kwame Nkrumah and African decolonization at the center of twentieth-century history. It would be as impossible to overstate the importance of Nkrumah as it would be to overstate the brilliance of this study. For too many, Africa as a whole remains an enigma. French's masterwork clarifies the continent, both its history and the backstory to its current conflicts, with remarkable precision. French's book is particularly good at illuminating the ways in which the civil rights movement in the United States and the African freedom movements influenced and inspired each other. An indispensable work.--Greg Grandin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth
In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa's aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.--David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Kwame Nkrumah founded a country and became the leading African statesman of the twentieth century. Howard W. French tells Nkrumah's story wonderfully well, in all its greatness and complexity.--Odd Arne Westad, Yale University, and author of The Cold War: A World History