Civil Rights and Human Rights

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the African American struggle for equality and the international arena.1 Racial violence in America and de jure segregation and disfranchisement in the South, discriminatory treatment of nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries, and the need to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism as the two superpowers competed during the Cold War for the allegiance of emerging nations exerted pressure on American presidents to address domestic civil rights. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the National Negro Congress (NNC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) petitioned the United Nations (UN) on behalf of African Americans. International concerns encouraged the Truman administration to file supportive briefs in civil rights cases and establish the President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). Scholars have also noted that foreign policy concerns led the federal government to utilize public relations exercises to challenge claims about American racism. Furthermore, the domestic Red Scare that gathered force in the late 1940s and early 1950s tarred any criticism of American inequalities with the brush of Communism, and anti-Communist attacks and investigations decimated the American left. Civil rights opponents, including the FBI, redbaited, investigated, and harassed civil rights organizations, destroying the CRC and encouraging the NAACP to adopt a strict anti-Communist policy. As Mary L. Dudziak explains: The narrow boundaries of Cold Warera civil rights politics kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda.2 In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson examines the attempts of American civil rights organizations to take their grievances before the UN and the failure of their efforts. She argues that the black left was too enamored with the Communist Party, U.S.A. and placed the party's interests before those of