Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

Abstract

In 1958, an African handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and the Negro problem became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson. In what may be best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, author interprets post-war civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as government sought to polish its international image. But improving nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance - combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and triumph of law-and-order rhetoric - limited nature and extent of progress. Archival information, much of it newly available, supports author's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam. Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, author advances a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.