Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. - Review - book review

Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and southern Africa by George M. Fredrickson (Oxford. 1995 $30)--The suggestion that blacks in the United States and in southerly Africa share political impulses or plane ideologies is not surprising; nevertheless, this is single of few scholarly appraisals of these similarities. The importance of the promised to attaining political equality in sometimes eerily analogous multiracial societies, the ways in which ideas about Christian communities became intertwined with political goals, and the interconnected definitions of nationalism in each land cannot be emphasized enough to a generation more conversant with rap and computer games than with political lineage. The irony of southerly African blacks' seemingly out-distancing their American cousins may be simply a trick of the general rent rhetoric, however; despite the book's title, Fredrickson's cleareyed realism may strike a certain number of as pessimistic.

Dale Edwyna Smith is an assistant professor of American history and Afro-American history at Washington University in St Louis. Her articles have appeared in Southern Review and Belles Lettres

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