Rose and James Aggrey and the Black Atlantic Gestations of African Nationalism

Based on research at the Moorland Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University and supported by a CSU-FSI grant, this article gives an entirely new interpretation of James Kwegyir Aggrey's politics based on the large body of letters he wrote to his wife about his 1920s tours of Africa. Aggrey, a Gold Coast national, had left Africa in 1898 to study and teach in the US. He married a Virginia born black American woman and then after 20 years in the US returned to his home continent to assess education on behalf of the white paternalist philanthropic Phelps-Stokes Commission. As yet un-studied by scholars, his extensive correspondence with his wife reveals a that his theories of "cooperation" were not addressing the relationship between blacks and whites, but rather addressed cooperation among a diversity of non-white peoples on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge white supremacy.