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The Review of Faith & International Affairs

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BEGINNINGS AND LEGACIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GLOBAL SERVICE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE
R. Drew Smith Available online: 20 Feb 2012

To cite this article: R. Drew Smith (2012): BEGINNINGS AND LEGACIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GLOBAL SERVICE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 10:1, 1-3 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2012.648392

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BEGINNINGS AND LEGACIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GLOBAL SERVICE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE
By R. Drew Smith n 1961, President John F. Kennedy founded the US Peace Corps, an organization that through 2011 has sent more than 200,000 Americans on twoyear volunteer assignments in 139 countries around the world. In 1958, Dr. James H. Robinson, an African American clergyman, had launched Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA), an organization committed to sending Americans to Africa for summer volunteer work camps in order to build bridges of friendship between the United States and Africa. Fifty-nine Americans and one Canadian traveled as OCA volunteers to various West African countries. Since then, more than 11,000 have traveled to 40 African nations. Beginning in 1969, some of those OCA volunteers were deployed to various Caribbean countries, and in the 1990s, a few OCA groups began traveling to Brazil as well. Peace Corps and OCA bear a special relationship to each other. OCA served as a model and progenitor for Peace Corps (according to President Kennedy),1 and Peace Corps (through its size and resources) provided a tailwind that carried many volunteer initiatives forward into a new era of global service premised upon religious and political neutrality. Although

Americans did not always transcend religious, political, or cultural self-interests,2 there was a qualitative mid-20th-century shift in this direction, and these two organizations played an important role. Both organizations recently celebrated 50th anniversaries, and this volume is partly a tribute to them for formalizing models of global service and citizen diplomacy that have signicantly advanced cross-cultural awareness and friendships across national boundaries. Although American efforts at international citizen camaraderie have not been without setbacks, especially the global fallout from conicts between the United States and Muslim-majority countries, American volunteers continue to embody much of what is best about America and they are warmly received by nations around the world. The impact voluntary global service has had upon American foreign relations, and upon the individual American citizens who serve, has been
Dr. R. Drew Smith is a James Weldon Johnson Visiting Scholar at Emory University, Scholar-in-Residence at the Leadership Center at Morehouse College, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of South Africa. He served as an Operation Crossroads Africa group leader (Lesotho 1983; Sierra Leone 1984).

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beginnings and legacies of african american global service: an introduction to the spring 2012 issue

substantial. The breadth and depth of this impact is borne out by the analysis and reections contained in this theme issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs. The foundations for American global service programs were laid in certain respects by American Protestant foreign mission activities dating back to the early 1800s, and by American Catholic activities dating to the mid-1800s.3 Though primarily evangelistic in purpose, there were signicant service components to much of this missionary work. Today, American missionary presence abroad remains strong, and some have suggested that perhaps three-quarters of contemporary American foreign missionaries are involved in service activities rather than direct evangelism.4 This volume draws attention to a cadre of progressive 20th-century African American clergy who made strategic contributions to an approach to American foreign engagement (especially in relation to developing nations) that emphasized citizen diplomacy and global service and centered on respect and fairness. The opening article examines the work of several black religious leaders concerned with repositioning US relations toward developing nations. Their advocacy included pan-Africanist solidarity and critique by Bishop Henry M. Turner and Marcus Garvey; challenges to American cultural and religious chauvinism by Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays; the championing of global service by James Robinson and by the Peace Corps initial operations director Samuel D. Proctor; and political critiques of American foreign policy by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Ambassador James Josephs article focuses on Robinsons emphasis on soft power as an essential corrective to American foreign policys over-

reliance on hard power, while Peter Paris article explains how the intensive cross-cultural immersion within Robinsons volunteer program served as a necessary moral corrective to American social privilege and self-centeredness. Articles by Jacqueline S. Mattis et al. and by Marsha S. Haney wrestle with factors within African American religious and social development that impede and facilitate African American involvement in global voluntary service, as well as African American religious and social formation more broadly. In the nal section of the volume, contemporary American faith leaders with previous volunteer experience with either OCA or Peace Corps offer personal accounts of the impact their global service had on their social consciousness, their professional and career trajectories, and their faith perspectives and involvements. The section includes reections from theologians, pastors, the senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a peace activist who is a practicing Buddhist, and a clergywoman who serves as ecumenical liaison for the largest African American denominational body. While the reection essays are not exclusively from Christians nor exclusively from African Americans, they each disclose the inuence of either James Robinson or Samuel Proctor, whose particular contributions to global service through Operation Crossroads Africa and Peace Corps, respectively, helped reorient American relations with developing nations. This Review of Faith & International Affairs theme issue is part of an ongoing inquiry into African American religion and public life undertaken by the Public Inuences of African American Churches Project, based at the Leadership Center at Morehouse College. v

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1. President Kennedy remarked in a 1962 White House speech attended by Dr. Robinson and OCA volunteers: This group [OCA] and this effort really were the progenitors of the Peace Corps and what the organization has been doing for a number of years led to the establishment of what I consider to be the most encouraging indication of the desire for service that we have seen in recent years, not only in this country but around the world. John F. Kennedy, Remarks to Student Volunteers Participating in Operation Crossroads Africa, The White House, Washington, DC, June 22, 1962. 2. On this point see, for example, Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad. 3. See, for example, Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven; Reeves-Ellington, Sklar, and Shemo, Competing Kingdoms; Hutchison, Errand to the World; and, Dries, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History. 4. Yohannan, Come Lets Reach the World, 63.

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References
Dries, Angelyn. The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Reeves-Ellington, Barbara, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie, A. Shemo. Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 18121960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Yohannan, K.P. Come Lets Reach the World. Carrollton, TX: GFA Books, 2004. Zimmerman, Jonathan. Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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