The Colony at Home: How Decolonization Abroad Shaped Black Politics in Postwar America

Sam Klug explores how the aftermath of WW II and the push for decolonization abroad reinvigorated the fight for civil rights among African Americans.

Posted on September 29, 2025 in Featured Review

The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization, by Sam Klug. Chicago, 2025. 280p, 9780226820514 $40.00, ISBN 9780226820521

What is the Black American relationship to the American body politic? That is the question that implicitly motivates Sam Klug’s fine, densely packed, and crisply argued book, The Internal Colony. Slavery and Jim Crow defined the Black relationship to both whiteness and to the United States for most of the history of the country (and well before), and while those relationships are necessary elements for understanding Black self-conceptions of their relationship to the country in the second half of the twentieth century, they do not explain the full picture on their own.

In the wake of World War II, and given the rhetoric that was embodied in the Atlantic Charter, which in effect acknowledged claims for self-rule that furthered demands for decolonization in Africa and beyond, many Black Americans began to look outward in order to better understand, contextualize, and mobilize in the face of racism and racist policies in the United States. The rhetoric of the war and its aftermath belied many global realities, and for Black Americans who had acceded to the idea of the Double-V—a willingness to support the war against fascism, racism, and imperialism abroad in order to demand a victory over racism at home—those failings would seem stark.

Klug (Loyola Univ. Maryland) does not mention the Double V, but he does make clear the sense of discontentment that millions of Black Americans felt after the war and as decolonization took hold in Africa from the mid-1950s onward. As the demands for decolonization became a reality, Black American political thinkers and activists began to reconceptualize their relationship with the United States within the framework of colonial and emergent postcolonial thought. They looked abroad and recognized that so many aspects of Black life in the United States represented a colonial relationship, with Washington, DC, as the metropole. Within this framework, Black America was thereby an internal colony.

But what exactly does this mean?

While many attempted to take this thinking in a literal direction, it was best seen as a metaphor, a way to reconsider a relationship within a global and Pan-African context. Events in Africa and the Caribbean, most relevantly, had provided multiple examples, both rhetorical and in terms of concrete action, of how to address second-class citizenship, modes of oppression, and violence. But the specific lessons that individuals and organizations drew from these examples could be widely variable, their applicability to the American context was debatable, and translating thought to action within the wide range of opinions usually meant that the idea of the internal colony remained largely in the realm of the theoretical. It is this nitty-gritty tension of intellectual history where Klug shines.

The Internal Colony covers the period from World War II and its aftermath, when decolonization movements accelerated and became a reality across Africa, through the era of American Black Power, when so many movements fell apart due to forces both internal and external. That the United States went through its own Civil Rights Movement, overlapping with the high-water mark of decolonization, may have warranted a closer reading here, but that is a quibble with material this rich.

Pan-Africanism was great for assertions of solidarity. It was less useful for providing voting rights in Mississippi, opening schoolhouse doors in Alabama, or combating police brutality in Oakland.

In many ways, those who pursued the line of inquiry of the internal colony were among the most committed Pan-Africanists in the United States. But Pan-Africanism was a concept that lent itself to as many interpretations as there were interpreters. This made for rich debate and enthralling discussions, but it did not lend itself to actionable policy proposals or other outcomes. Pan-Africanism was great for assertions of solidarity. It was less useful for providing voting rights in Mississippi, opening schoolhouse doors in Alabama, or combating police brutality in Oakland. Metaphors can be wonderful for our understanding of the world. They are of limited utility in changing it.

Klug is an outstanding interlocutor of the myriad individuals and organizations that saw in the United States similarities with the colonial world. He is sympathetic to their multiplicity of worldviews, to the subtleties of their debates, to the intensity of their differences, and to the places where their views converged. His cast of characters is vast, and his ability to maneuver through the complexities of their worlds—from universities to boardrooms to myriad organizations that changed and morphed, emerged and fell apart, thrived and failed—is nothing short of remarkable. One of the underappreciated aspects of writing good history is simply gathering the facts, the who did what when, who said, wrote, and argued what, who threw a tantrum, and who seized initiatives, and Klug weaves a masterful script out of some frankly labyrinthine material.

In Klug’s telling, the origins of the “internal colonialism” discussion came from conversations about the nature of the post–World War II international order, much of which itself centered on interrogating what American policy toward Africa ought to be in a world where colonialism was increasingly seen as untenable. It was from this external view that many of the individuals and groups—the Phelps-Stokes Fund, for example—started looking inward even as they were looking outward and finding parallels between African colonialism and what they as Black Americans faced in the United States. Within this generation, intellectual powerhouses like W. E. B. DuBois, Rayford Logan, and Ralph Bunche—internationalists all—began not only to consider what African independence might look like, but to think about where the United States fit within those movements, and in particular how Black America fit. Thus, the emerging politics of international development raised inevitable questions about America’s internal development. Presciently, many of these activists also looked beyond colonialism, recognizing the threat of neocolonialism for those colonies that would gain their liberation from colonial powers. Liberation from governance in London was not mutually exclusive to dependence on London, after all.

If the first half of the book provides a Black American inquiry into what the international order might look like and how the United States and especially Black Americans might help to forge that order, the second half of the book shows Black intellectuals, policy makers, and activists beginning to recognize the similarities with the internal condition in the United States and to apply those observations to those domestic conditions and to applying pressure and pursuing policies to address them. In this section, Klug does a marvelous job of showing the wide range of thought originating from Black individuals and organizations and their white allies, ranging from the radical and progressive left to the moderate, conservative, and even reactionary right, reminding us of the remarkable diversity in Black thought that oftentimes remains hidden.

It is not surprising, then, that many of the main proponents of the idea of the internal colony came from these Black Power strongholds where ideas of the ghetto came to dominate discussions of racism and inequality.

In the backdraft of the Civil Rights Movement came the emergence of Black Power in no small part because that movement, for all of its very real accomplishments, did precious little in those areas where there had not been much done to address de jure segregation. The Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) were not magic bullets that solved all problems, but they still accomplished tremendous things in the Jim Crow South while accomplishing very little in Detroit or Milwaukee, Los Angeles or Oakland, Boston or Philadelphia. It is not surprising, then, that many of the main proponents of the idea of the internal colony came from these Black Power strongholds where ideas of the ghetto came to dominate discussions of racism and inequality. Once again, there was little by way of answers that the various participants to these discussions agreed upon, and by the mid-1970s, myriad circumstances led to the fading of internal colony dialogues.

Klug attributes the fading of these discourses to the “fragmentation of the Black Power movement” (p. 207), the “diminishing significance of decolonization to US foreign policymakers,” and “the worsening effects of deindustrialization” (p. 208). These factors, plus the reality that none of these debates, in their many guises, had made much headway in terms of actual policy, mean that these wide-ranging movements were largely lost to history until Klug’s careful, sensitive unearthing of these once vibrant, contentious, thriving debates, discussions, and conversations.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies

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Derek Charles Catsam is Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Permian Basin, where he teaches in the history department. He is also affiliated with Rhodes University in South Africa. His work focuses on race, politics, and sports in the US and southern Africa. His most recent book is Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America’s Anti-Apartheid Movement (2021).

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If you enjoyed reading this review, be sure to check out Choice’s archive of featured reviews. We publish a new one every month. A few related ones include:

	Derek Charles Catsam’s review of Love for Liberation (2021), “A Transnational History of Pan-Africanism: Robin J. Hayes Details Liberation Struggles Across the Atlantic“
	Joel Wendland-Liu’s review of Black Scare / Red Scare (2023), “Entangled Legacies of Exploitation: How Capitalism and Racism Converge in American History“
	Amy Yeboah Quarkume’s review of The Movement (2021), “The Quest for Equality Is Ongoing: Holt Reveals a More Nuanced Civil Rights Movement“

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