The hands on the clock were approaching midnight on 15 August 1947 as thousands of South Asians surged, chanting “Jai Hind”—roughly, “Long Live India.” The man who was to become the first prime minister of a nation that is slated to become the planet’s largest in the twenty-first century, Jawaharlal Nehru, was uttering the words that would resonate through the ages, referring to his nation’s “tryst with destiny.” Amid a riot of tints and shades, the nation’s new tricolor flag was unfurled on the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort in New Delhi.¹

Yet amid the huddled masses, all...

The relationship between Africans and India extends to the era of prehistory. Consider, for example, the inhabitants of India’s Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago east of Bengal. These direct descendants of the first modern humans to have inhabited Asia are apparently descended from the first modern humans to have left Africa thousands of years ago. Their physical features—“short stature, dark skin, peppercorn hair and large buttocks”—are “characteristic of African Pygmies,” according to one analyst. “They look like they belong in Africa, but here they are sitting in this island chain in the middle of the Indian Ocean,” according...

The twentieth century, as Du Bois famously suggested, was the era of the “color line,” and in the United States this hued tripwire ensnared African Americans and Indians alike. As Indians began streaming to U.S. shores, particularly to the West Coast, they began to experience a form of discrimination that became pervasive and that mirrored what U.S. Negroes had endured for centuries. In fact, the alliances that developed between Southern U.S. politicians driven by Negrophobia and those in the western United States with similar concerns about an influx of Asians created a powerful axis that came to propel U.S politics...

As South Asians began flooding into the United States in the second decade of the twentieth century, they were stunned by the virulent white supremacy they encountered. Of course, crass exploitation at the hands of those of “pure European descent” was not a new experience for many of these migrants, but in North America the phenomenon was magnified because they were now a minority in a strange and unusual land. Moreover, as bad as their treatment was, the more discerning among them recognized that there was a group that fell even beneath them on the social scale: African Americans. “When...

Bhagat Singh Thind immigrated to the United States in 1913 from the Punjab, in northwestern India. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and was discharged with the rank of sergeant. He was active in Indian groups in the United States that backed independence for his homeland. Thind then applied for citizenship in Federal District Court in Oregon and, in a well-reasoned statement accompanying his petition, he explained that he was “white” within the meaning of the naturalization statute. After all, he argued, “white” could not refer to skin color, because many dark-skinned Europeans had been ruled...

It was his “favorite book,” said the prolific Du Bois, referring to his riveting novelDark Princess.¹ The book was a fictionalized version of the V-shaped formation attacking white supremacy, with Japan at the point and India and Black America on each side. A Japanese figure apprises the African American protagonist, Matthew Towns, of the “Great Council … of the Darker Peoples” that was to “meet in London three months hence. We have given the American Negro full representation.” The other leading figure is an Indian woman, who says of her Nipponese comrade, “He is our leader, Matthew, the guide...

The brown-skinned man with closely cropped black hair and sporting the orange jersey carrying the number “19” of Syracuse University faded back into the protective pocket to throw a pass. His football team was then losing the game by ten points to its archrival, the mighty and unbeaten Cornell, and another rout seemed in store. The man tossing the pigskin was a varsity basketball player better known for his pioneering feats on the hardwood, particularly his penchant for the “no-look” pass, but on this day he carved his name indelibly into the history of the game played on turf by...

It was a typically warm day in South Asia when the delegation led by Howard Thurman approached a small bungalow over which flew the flag of the Indian National Congress. It was 21 February 1936, and Thurman’s Washington, D.C., home was enduring wintry weather, but the warmth he was about to experience seemed to be emerging from a blast furnace. For coming toward the group was a small, brown-skinned man whose visage was becoming the global face of India: Mohandas K. Gandhi. As he walked toward his visitors, his secretary turned to Thurman and commented, “‘This is the first time...

I write,” said the Indian writer Kanhaya Lal Gauba, “that the truth about American life may be made known as fearlessly and as fully as Miss Mayo has made known what she only believed to be true about India.”¹ Gauba was referring to Katherine Mayo and her infamous 1927 tome,Mother India, which painted a devastating portrait of India and, perhaps not accidentally, presented a rationale for British colonialism. For as solidarity between India and Black America was surging, challenging the very bases on which Jim Crow and the British Empire were predicated, advocates of white supremacy and the empire...

Both London and Washington had distinct disadvantages when war with Japan erupted in December 1941. London was trying to keep the lid on a restive empire in Asia that Japan was appealing to by adroitly playing on feelings rubbed raw by white supremacy. Washington contained a similarly disillusioned African American community whose favor Tokyo had been currying for decades.¹ As it turned out, neither the British Empire nor the “empire of Jim Crow” could survive this brutal encounter in the Pacific.

The problem London and Washington faced was that, for years, Japan had been seen by many in India and...

Private Herman Perry was on the run in Burma. The war with Japan had heated up, and he was among the thousands of the traditionally despised African American minority who had been dispatched to—supposedly—fight for freedom. His flight to freedom illustrated the difficulty the British Empire and the empire of Jim Crow would face while fighting a purported “Race War” in South Asia against a foe—Japan—that for decades had pursued a strategy of making special appeals to those with dark skin.

Private Perry was not happy. He was considered the “escaped murderer of Lt. Harold A....

Paul Robeson notwithstanding, Walter White of the naacp continued to command more troops. Therein hangs a tale. The conclusion of World War II was followed by the launching of another conflict—this time, targeting the former ally in Moscow and those, such as Robeson, thought to be within its orbit. Similarly, many of the Black Nationalists who had subscribed to the idea of Japan leading a V-shaped formation of peoples of color that included Black America and India had been imprisoned or otherwise isolated during the war and emerged from this titanic fracas ideologically fragmented and, certainly, less taken with...

No!”¹ “No!”² “No!”³ And “no!” again.⁴ These were the responses of John Haynes Holmes to, respectively, a request from Paul Robeson to speak out on behalf of leaders of the Communist Party USA who were on trial; a letter to protest an anti-leftist riot at Peekskill, New York; a letter from the attorneys of jailed Communist leaders who were under attack; and a letter from W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin Mays, and others concerning a civil-rights rally that did not exclude those on the left. What these adamant rejections reflected was that, at the conclusion of World War II,...

The picture that appeared in the 18 May 1954 edition of theNew York Timessaid more than a few words could say. At the podium stood Channing Tobias, chairman of the naacp’s Board of Directors. Flanked behind him were Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Ralph Bunche, and a number of other Negro leaders who had played varying roles in a moment of juridical triumph captured on film that was, in its own way, as potently meaningful as Indian independence seven years earlier: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision inBrown v. Board of Educationthat invalidated Jim Crow in the educational...