Title: Pan-Africanism | History, Achievements, & Facts | Britannica
Headings: Pan-Africanism
Pan-Africanism
History of Pan-Africanist intellectuals
The Pan-African Congress movement
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Pan-Africanism

Content: Furthermore, James and Padmore resided in the United States for significant periods of time. An exchange of ideas about Africa and peoples of African descent took place between those intellectuals and African Americans, with African Americans taking the lead. It was, in many ways, a Black Atlantic intellectual community. Senghor and Césaire, in particular, were greatly influenced by Du Bois and by several Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. In the 1930s and ’40s, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson was also a significant contributor to the continuing exchange of ideas. By the late 1940s the African American intellectual leadership of the movement had receded, with Africans now taking the lead. That was due in part to the leftist or communist sympathies of many Pan-Africanist advocates, as in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the United States was in the midst of a Red Scare, when Americans with communist affiliations or sympathies were actively persecuted and prosecuted. The most-important figure of this period was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who believed that European colonial rule of Africa could be extinguished if Africans could unite politically and economically. Nkrumah went on to lead the movement for independence in Ghana, which came to fruition in 1957. Many African Americans cheered those developments in Africa.