The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide

Best-selling author and journalist Howard W. French discusses his new book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, one of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025.

From the acclaimed author of Born in Blackness comes an extraordinary account of Africa’s liberation from colonial oppression, a work that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of modern history. The title refers to a brief period beginning in 1957, when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom. French situates this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head. In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.

Cosponsored by the Black Studies Department; Yale MacMillan Council on African Studies; and Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration