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

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Foreign Policy

“Howard French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” —David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The Second Emancipation, a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of post–World War II colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana’s revolutionary visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), who emerges as the most significant African leader of the twentieth century. Determined that readers fully understand Nkrumah’s legacy, bestselling author of Born in Blackness Howard W. French newly dramatizes the Nkrumah story—his humble beginnings, his momentous experience in Harlem, his American education, and his return to Ghana in the final years of British subjugation. The language soars as French evokes an entire continent in the throes of liberation and a roiling United States in the Cold War era. In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation is a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.