Rethinking Internationalism from the Margins: African Americans at the League of Nations

This article examines African Americans' engagement with the League of Nations. Despite U.S. non-membership, Black activists quickly recognized global governance as a valuable new platform for advancing racial equality and the demands they carried from Washington to Geneva were substantially transformed in the process. The article traces the strategies activists employed to translate U.S. race relations into the framework of liberal internationalism-from minorities rights and colonial advocacy to appeals grounded in "civilized" status. Positioning these figures as geographical thinkers, it reconceptualizes liberal internationalism from the margins, showing how race reformers theorized their struggle as a spatial and scalar problem: how to achieve racial equality became inseparable from where to achieve it. The 1935 Abyssinian crisis, however, exposed the limits of this framework, revealing that the League's measure of "civilized" status was always racially tuned. The case offers both a richer account of Black internationalist thought and a cautionary tale about liberal internationalism as a vehicle for racial equality.