Views From West Africa: Ghanaian Attention to Race Relations in 1950s America.

In the 1950s, many Ghanaians identified with African Americans as they read about events involving American racial violence in Ghanaian newspapers. Yet the transnational connections appearing in those periodicals varied in depth, intensity, and sincerity depending on their political or commercial connections. This study analyzes the reactions in key Ghanaian newspapers, such as those affiliated with Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, the British-owned Daily Graphic, and the Ashanti Pioneer, to key moments in 1950s American race relations, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the events in Little Rock, and the infamous 'Orange Juice' incident involving discrimination against the Ghanaian minister of finance. By demonstrating that the Pioneer more often covered the personal angles of such events, while the tones of CPP-affiliated papers and even the Daily Graphic vacillated based on changing political needs, this study both shows the complicated nature of transnational racial identifications as they flowed west across the Atlantic and reveals the promises and limits of Ghanaian connections to members of the African diaspora during the decolonizing period in Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]