From the 1940s to the 1960s, anticolonial nationalists across Africa and Asia elaborated on this argument, claiming that any project of international human rights must involve a bedrock commitment to the collective right to self-determination. They frequently made the case by highlighting the racist exclusions that undermined America’s commitment to universalism. Responding to the refusal to include representatives from the colonies at the San Francisco Conference, and recognizing that self-determination would likely be excluded from the UN Charter, Nnamdi Azikiwe, a journalist and anticolonial activist who later served as Nigeria’s first president, penned an editorial in which he declared “there is no new deal for the blackman. . . . Colonialism and economic enslavement of the Negro are to be maintained. . . . We shall not be happy until the world is rescued from its half slavery and half freedom.” In case his reference to Roosevelt’s slate of public works projects, economic and financial reforms, and social welfare programs was lost on his readers, his editorial a week later reiterated that “one half of the world cannot enjoy the Four Freedoms whilst the other half are merely told of their blessings.” Linking Roosevelt’s domestic program and his war aims, Azikiwe spoke directly to the aspirations of the American Century in which the United States would play a leading global role. The Four Freedoms were the international corollary to the domestic New Deal, and in both cases, the universal commitment to freedom and equality were undermined by the boundaries of the global color line. Internationally and domestically, half-slavery and half-freedom (an echo of the “house divided” that Abraham Lincoln had warned of in 1858) not only signaled the hypocrisy of America, but also portended destabilization and conflict.
When Azikiwe addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1959 on the occasion of the organization’s fiftieth anniversary—and just a year before Nigerian independence—he celebrated the “spirit of the American Negro . . . [which had] given the United States a fair chance of reconciling the theory of democracy with its practice” and “fired the imagination of the sleeping African giant, who is now waking up and taking his rightful place in the comity of Nations.” For Azikiwe, the “spirit of 1776” was to be found among “Americans citizens of colour” who were “in the ironical position of constantly reminding certain segments of American society” of the ideals upon which the country was founded.