Lions in Africa
Lincoln University Alumni in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, 1951-1966
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3622750 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sharika D Crawford (0000-0003-0422-3781, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 381-410 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1548-1867 • E-ISSN: 2153-5086 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/736204 |
| OpenAlex | W4414173461 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
In this article, I examine the experiences of three Black American expats and former Lincoln University in Pennsylvania classmates of Kwame Nkrumah: Robert E. Lee, Robert T. Freeman Jr., and Franklin H. Williams. I argue how pivotal Lincoln was as a testing ground for cross-cultural interactions with Black American and African students, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, during the rise of anticolonial nationalism. Then, I trace how these men relocated and lived in newly independent Ghana. Although they shared similar interactions with their fellow African classmates to ignite transnational Black solidarity, they contributed to institution building in Ghana in different ways. Moreover, their experiences complicate past analyses of the Black Americans in mid-twentieth-century Ghana as solely political radicals or apolitical ideologues. Finally, I pay close attention to on-the-ground dynamics between Black American expats and Ghanaians, drawing on personal letters, college yearbooks, newspaper articles, oral histories, memoirs, published and unpublished interviews from collections at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and Research, digital collections from Lincoln, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the HistoryMakers Digital Archive
African american · Institution · Kwame · New england · Newspaper · Politics · African history and culture studies · Australian History and Society · Race, History, and American Society
The Black Expatriates
The Phelps-Stokes Fund and the Institutional Imagination of Black Internationalism, 1941–1945
Made-in-America Revolutions"? The "Black University" and the American Role in the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic
Black Scholar
African Historical Studies
Exiles, Expatriates, and Malcolm X
Kwame Nkrumah
Africa's Elevation and Changing Racial Thought at Lincoln University, 1854-1886
The Dilemma of Diasporic Africans
| Highly cited | No |
|---|