356 Chapter 15
ern donors, who likely had a more explicitly imperial interest in bring-
ing them to the United States. The Puerto Rican students, moreover,
appear to have been funded and sent by the United States Occupying
government in Puerto Rico. In addition, historian Andrew Zimmer-
man has recently noted the participation of Washington and Tuskegee
in the efforts of white elites to mitigate African American efforts at
total emancipation and economic autonomy. White elites in the Amer-
ican South were successful in channeling newly freed laborers into
exploitative contracts that kept them in a subordinate position, and in
mobilizing racial arguments to continue to oppress blacks, and their
strategies were repeated by German imperialists in Togo, Africa, with
the help of Tuskegee Institute representatives (Zimmerman, 2010).
The creation of a “Global South,” would also affect people in the
United States’ new island possessions, and particularly the recently
freed slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico, as North Americans came to
control the Cuba sugar industry.^2 Given this economic shift, more
research is needed to uncover whether black leaders in Cuba and
Puerto Rico looked to African-American models of education and
economic advancement, rather than sticking to their own existing
models, because they were anticipating or experiencing a changing
economic order that would be ushered in by the United States occu-
pation. I seek to hold in tension and explore both the spread of
oppressive strategies to check black advancement, and the exchange
of black people’s ideas on how to advance in the face of the increas-
ingly hardening ‘global color line’ of the twentieth century.
- See Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1974), Chapter 8, Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revo-
lution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Chapter 1, and
Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Chapter 3.