Conference Presentation 2021 Working Class Studies Association Conference Forging a cross-Atlantic ‘Red-Black Alliance’: W. Alphaeus Hunton and the Council on African Affairs

W. Alphaeus Hunton, a Howard University professor and leader of the National Negro Congress (NNC), joined the Council on African Affairs (CAA) as educational director in 1943. As an intellectual and organizational architect of what is now called the long civil rights movement, he brought with him a wealth of knowledge and experience. The Council on African Affairs is part of this long civil rights legacy. To Gerald Horne it was “the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism.” Penny M. Von Eschen referred to it as “vital and important.” It provided the connective tissue that brought together African Americans struggling for equality with Africans struggling for Black liberation, particularly in apartheid South Africa. From 1943 to 1955, the CAA and its publications, New Africa and later Spotlight on Africa, were Hunton’s main political outlets. Through the CAA, he engaged a larger Black radical diaspora that included Pan-Africanists, Communists, union leaders, elected officials, and other progressives. A scholar-activist, Hunton’s journalism spanned roughly 35 years. He not only served on the editorial board of the NNC’s publication, Congress View, but from July 1944 to January 1946, Hunton wrote a regular column for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. From November 1950 until summer 1955, he contributed to Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. And from 1961 until his death in 1970, he was an associate editor and contributor to Freedomways, the quarterly journal of Black liberation. Hunton also wrote numerous speeches, press releases, and pamphlets, and in 1957 published