In order to better charge Moscow with human rights violations, the United States had to bend with regard to the more excessive aspects of Jim Crow. It had to yield to the insistent cries on the ground here in this country.

In order to better charge Moscow with human rights violations, the United States had to bend with regard to the more excessive aspects of Jim Crow. It had to yield to the insistent cries on the ground here in this country.

Germany had come late to feast at the table of colonialism and did not feel that the division of colonial spoils at that particular moment in time reflected its true strength and its true weight in the imperialist world.

As long as colonialism was allowed to reign and fester in Africa, it was going to be a source of tension, if not war, as was evidenced by World War I itself, which, among other things, featured Germany on one side of the barricades and Britain, which had come earlier to the table of colonial plunder, on the other.

In the era of slavery, you could be a so-called Afro-Cuban one day and a so-called Black American the next day, or vice versa. I mean there was all this back and forth, and there was a lot of opposition in Black America to slavery in Cuba in particular, because slavery in Cuba lasted until the 1880s.

It is only with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement that you begin to see different examinations of not only Reconstruction but slavery itself, and there is a lesson to be drawn here about how the times influence the writing of history, something that we should never forget.

I think that even though we should always welcome allies within the four corners of the United States, we shouldn't limit our allies to the four corners of the United States. I think that would be a grave mistake.