

Such was the case 50 years ago next month, when two prominent Americans met each other for the first time, in West Africa. Richard Nixon, then vice president, and Martin Luther King Jr., the campaigner for civil rights for African Americans, were in Accra, Ghana, to celebrate the decolonization of the first black African nation. Ghana's independence from rule by Britain, on March 6, 1957, was the first of a wave of African national birthdays; in 1960 alone, 17 former African colonies became independent members of the United Nations.

Coming first, Ghana's independence had a special meaning for Americans still mired in the hypocrisies and inequities spawned by a system of racial discrimination and white supremacy that, in 1957, showed few signs of moderating, much less collapsing. Fifty years ago, government-enforced segregation, called Jim Crow, prevailed across the South, and in the "liberal" Northeast and West, blacks were denied opportunities and often harassed, mistreated and abused by government and private actors alike.

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Everywhere in America, aggrieved blacks found virtually no relief through the courts or political action. Even the organized protests in Alabama, led by King and others, raised only faint hopes for an end to relentless discrimination.

The release of Africans from the bondage of European colonialism energized black Americans. Ghana's independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, drew the obvious parallels between the still-unattained goal of black liberation in Africa and the awful imbalance between races in the United States. Nkrumah had attended university in Pennsylvania and knew well the suffering of American blacks and their unfulfilled hopes for racial tolerance. Seeing a chance to boost the nascent civil-rights movement, Nkrumah invited African American leaders, including King, to attend Ghana's independence celebrations. Nixon led the official U.S. delegation and was eager to express solidarity with Africans, whom he and President Dwight Eisenhower feared might be unduly attracted to communism and the Soviet Union, then America's archrival in world affairs and a staunch supporter of decolonization.

For King, who began to weep when he saw Ghana's Black Star replace the Union Jack as the flag of the nation, the spectacle of Nixon passing himself off as a friend of African freedom offered an opening for dialogue. As Jonathan Rosenber recalls in his new book, "How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the African American Civil Rights Movement," when Nixon and King crossed paths in Ghana, King said, "I want you to come visit us in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom Ghana is celebrating." Nixon shook King's hand but promised nothing.

King attended a private lunch with Nkrumah, recounted in "African Americans in Ghana," written by University of Michigan historian Kevin Gaines. Nkrumah told King he "would never be able to accept the American ideology of freedom until America settles its own internal racial strife." Nkrumah's confidence and candor, Gaines writes, bolstered King's hope that "somehow the universe itself is on the side of freedom and justice."

At public celebrations in Accra, a picturesque city on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, other African American leaders called the U.S. government to task for failing to intervene on behalf of blacks persecuted by white supremacists. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph told the thousands of Ghanaians gathered at the city's Old Polo Grounds that black Americans -- "your brothers and sisters in color" -- were "fired" by Africa's independence crusade.

Back at home, black newspapers trumpeted Ghana's milestone. The Pittsburgh Courier, perhaps the most influential African American newspaper, published a 32-page "salute to Ghana." In a front-page editorial, the Courier observed, "When we, American Negroes, shake hands with Ghana today, we say not only 'Welcome!' but also, 'Your opportunity to prove yourself is our opportunity to prove ourselves.' "

Today, as we are assaulted by a steady diet of negative news about disease, hunger, mistreatment of children, wars and genocide in many parts of Africa, and the relentless costs of battling HIV/AIDS -- recalling the hope and confidence inspired 50 years ago by new African nations requires a leap of the imagination. In the late 1950s, most white Americans still associated Africa with Tarzan movies and pseudoscientific reports on cannibalism and nudity.

Yet suddenly Africans seemed to have conquered the race problem, while America appeared on the verge of being consumed by it. As historian James Campbell writes in "Middle Passages," his valuable study published last year on the interplay between Africa and African Americans since 1785, "In terms of political stature, Africans had indeed leaped ahead of African Americans."

In the days and weeks after returning home from Ghana, King invoked Ghana's experience as seminal, emphasizing how, through nonviolent protest and "continual agitation, continual resistance," Britain's politicians had been convinced to accept Ghanaian independence. Other African Americans also were energized.

When later in 1957, a minister in Ghana's government was denied service -- because of his black skin -- at a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Maryland, the rebuff became a global embarrassment for the United States. With the Soviet Union broadcasting news of the incident around the world, Eisenhower invited the Ghanaian for a private breakfast and essentially an apology. As Campbell writes, "The incident was the perfect illustration of the potential synergy between African and African American freedom movements."

Indeed, soon afterward, Eisenhower intervened in Little Rock, Ark., sending federal troops to the city after state and local officials refused to carry out a court order calling for black children to desegregate an all-white school. Eisenhower's action was a milestone in the civil rights movement, setting the precedent that federal intervention was necessary to end quickly the worst abuses against blacks, anywhere in the nation.

From the vantage point of American history, the role of African independence in the civil rights movement is easily forgotten.

In the end, black Americans fought and won their own freedoms, and the credit goes fully to them, and all who struggled with them in this country. Moreover, in the ensuing decades, the promise of African independence gave way to the harsh realities of the continent's economic dependence, its continuing vulnerability to meddling by outside powers, its fragile ethnic relations, and the failure of African elites to chart a course based on fairness and effectiveness.

Today, it is Africans who look to America for hope -- not the other way around -- and the catalytic effect of African independence on the escape of Americans, white and black, from the prison of legalized segregation is a fading memory.

Yet by recalling the synergy between liberation movements abroad and at home, Americans are reminded anew of their enduring debt to Africa -- and how distant peoples, anywhere on the planet, can endow our American lives with new meanings and give us new strength to creatively address our own urgent problems.
