Lily Golden — historian; civil rights advocate with roots in the USSR
Liya Oliverovna Golden, known as Lily, was born in Tashkent, in the Uzbek SSR, on 18 July 1934. Her father, Oliver Golden, was an African-American agronomist and Communist from Yazoo County, Mississippi, the son of parents who had been enslaved; her mother, Bertha Bialek, was a Jewish woman from New York, the daughter of a Hebrew-school teacher. Rejected by Bertha's family for marrying across the colour line, they had sailed to the Soviet Union in 1931 with more than a dozen Black American agricultural specialists whom Golden had recruited, with the activist Lovett Fort-Whiteman, to help develop cotton growing in Uzbekistan.
Oliver Golden became a Soviet citizen and taught at research institutes in Tashkent. When the authorities gave the American specialists the choice of renouncing their US citizenship or leaving, the Goldens stayed. He died of heart failure in 1940, when Lily was six, and Bertha, who did not want to return to America with a mixed-race daughter, raised her in the Soviet Union.
Lily Golden became a historian of Africa. According to her daughter's family history, she was the first scholar appointed to the Africa Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, founded at the suggestion of the family's friend W. E. B. Du Bois. At the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957 she met Abdullah Kassim Hanga, a leader of the independence movement in Zanzibar. They married, and their daughter, Yelena Khanga, was born in Moscow in 1962. Hanga returned to Zanzibar and was killed there in the late 1960s; sources give 1965 or 1968-69. Lily, Bertha and Yelena, three generations of women, made their home in Moscow.
She wrote on African history and culture and spoke out for the rights of Black and mixed-race people in the Soviet Union and Russia. In the 1990s, as her daughter reconnected with the family's American relatives, she too began visiting the United States and taught at Chicago State University, before returning to Moscow to help raise her grandchildren. She died on 6 December 2010, aged seventy-six. Her family's story is told in Yelena Khanga's Soul to Soul.
"Born and raised in Tashkent, later Moscow; taught at Chicago State University in the 1990s and returned to Moscow."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tashkent, Uzbek SSR (USSR)
Born in Tashkent in 1934 to Oliver Golden, an African-American agronomist who had brought a group of Black agricultural specialists to Soviet Uzbekistan in 1931, and Bertha Bialek. She spent her life as a Soviet and Russian historian of Africa.
Father Oliver Golden (1887/1892–1940), African-American agronomist from Mississippi; mother Bertha Bialek (1905–1985), Jewish, who came with him to Uzbekistan in 1931.
Tashkent, Uzbek SSR (USSR). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.