CBH Talk | Howard French and Annette Gordon-Reed Discuss “The Second Emancipation”
Join us for a conversation between journalist and historian Howard W. French and Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed about The Second Emancipation: The Rise of Global Black Power and the Retreat of Colonialism. In this sweeping narrative, French interweaves the struggles of Africans to cast off colonial rule with the struggles of Diasporic African Americans, fighting to overcome Jim Crow oppression and give birth to the civil rights movement. At the heart of the book is the compelling figure of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and a towering champion of pan-Africanism.
In The Second Emancipation, French argues that the wave of African independence movements that began in 1957 should be understood as a global turning point—what he calls a “movement of global Blackness.” He places Africa at the center of twentieth-century history, challenging narratives that marginalize its role in shaping the modern world. He shows how Nkrumah's pan-African vision resonated far beyond Ghana, inspiring solidarity across Africa and fueling the Black liberation movements of the Americas.
As Gordon-Reed writes, The Second Emancipation is “a brilliant examination” of a pivotal yet overlooked chapter in global history, which reconsiders the legacies of decolonization, the fragile promises of independence, and the powerful currents of Black internationalism that continue to shape our world.
Participants
Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. The author of Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello, she lives in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
