Cold War Civil Rights

Mary L. Dudziak. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

During the the early decades of the Cold War, the United States sought to win the ideological battle against the Soviet Union by stressing the positive aspects of a democratic system to those of a totalitarian Communist model. One glaring weakness for the American argument was the reality of institutional racism and legal segregation within American society and institutions such as the military. In the post-colonial era, as the majority of African nations and many Asian nations won their independence from European colonialism, the global image of the second-class status of African-Americans was increasingly seen as a liability by high-ranking foreign policy officials, congressional leaders, and several Presidents. The "world was watching" as African-Americans fought for equal rights, as Brown v. Board of Education worked its way through the Supreme Court, as Arkansas National Guardsmen prohibited black students from attending Central High School in Little Rock; and so on.

Dudziak recreates the history of America's domestic Civil Rights struggle from the vantage point of a political elite that was keenly aware of what governments, media outlets, activists, and public opinion polls were saying in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Communist bloc. This isn't an international history, but rather a domestic history that acknowledges that rigid boundaries between different conceptual approaches to American history can distort our understanding of the very subject we are trying to focus on.

The centrality of foreign opinion to Civil Rights considerations by the foreign policy establishment came to an end in the second half of the 1960's for a variety of reasons. The establishment of formal, legal equality was in line with American ideals of democratic equality; the subsequent shifting of attention to more class-based issues was outside of the accepted narrative for the pro-capitalist establishment. The growing radicalization of the movement cleaved the previous national consensus on Civil Rights. And increasingly, the Vietnam War, not the Civil Rights struggle, would define America's image overseas.