This book examines the United States’ relations with Zimbabwe from the 1950s to the late 1990s and offers a new interpretation of the US role in facilitating the settlement that brought peace and independence in Zimbabwe in 1980. By revealing the increasing importance of race relations in U.S. foreign policy from the 1960s to the 1980s, DeRoche fills the wide gap in the written history of US relations with Southern Africa. He includes extensive discussion about the influence of African Americans on US foreign policy from A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, and Whitney Young in the 1950s and 1960s to Charles Diggs, Andrew Young, Randall Robinson, and Ronald Dellums in the 1970s and 1980s. By clearly illuminating the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on foreign relations, this compelling book also details the influence US policy had on Zimbabwe and on the ending of apartheid in neighboring South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.
