Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

Publication Title

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Abstract

Gold Coast native James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey has been named at different times the father of African education and the Booker T. Washington of Africa after having moved to the United States in 1898 to pursue higher education and inspiring African nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah and Peter Koinange. This article considers how his upbringing in Cape Coast and two decades in the United States shaped the political vision he brought back to Africa in the 1920s when he toured with the Phelps Stokes Commission lecturing about educational initiatives. It explores the ways the proto- Nationalist consciousness he had developed among the Cape Coast Fante meshed with the black American political culture that dominated his daily life in the United States. He had married Rose Douglass, a politically active black American teacher whose advocacy with the women’s club movement overlapped with his own vision for cooperation and community education. A close study of the letters he wrote to Rose as he toured Africa in the 1920s highlights how much they shared a political vision emanating from upbringings that were not entirely dissimilar even though on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Having come of age more than a generation removed from the transatlantic slave trade, Rose and James were among those descendants of the centuries of slave trading who would later bond as black people seeing the generative possibilities of cooperation with each other amidst the rise of formal European colonialism and American Jim Crow.

Original Citation

Sotiropoulos, K. (2020). James and Rose Aggrey and the Black Atlantic Gestations of African Nationalism. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 53(2): 239-264. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45295285

Volume

53

Issue

2

Version

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