International Pressure and the U.S. Government's Response to Little Rock

Abstract

SEGREGATION RECEIVED MORE INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM than any other area of U.S. race relations in the post-World War II period. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations' racial reforms were a response not only to an increasingly effective civil rights movement in the U.S. South but also to international politics. Segregation hindered appeals to potential allies in competition with the Soviet bloc. So in its famous 1947 report President Truman's committee on civil rights concluded: Our position in the postwar world is so vital to the future that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects. . . . [T]he treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned peoples. . . . We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. . . . The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.1 Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, cared little about black rights per se, but he was acutely conscious of the same connection. School segregation has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere, he warned the attorney general in 1952.2 The State Department used particularly strong language in its amicus brief for the Brown case, argued in December 1952. During the past six years, the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater. The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations. . . . [T]he undeniable existence of racial discrimination gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare. . . . [T]he view is expressed that the United States is hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country. . . . Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. . . . [R]acial discrimination remains a source of embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. . . . [I]t jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.3 The president's statements also bear the imprint of international pressure. As historian Richard Dalfiume notes, just about every speech . . . [Harry Truman] made on the civil rights issue . . . always brings up this point: The rest of the world is watching us. We must put our own house in order. The Truman administration's efforts to desegregate the armed forces and commit the Democratic party to black rights in 1948 must in part be understood as serving Cold War motives.4 The Eisenhower administration moved reluctantly in its first term. But in the second term, the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, widely publicized discriminatory sentences by southern state courts, the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, and, most dramatically, southern defiance of federal school desegregation orders all generated negative international publicity.5 At the Bandung Conference of 1955, representatives from Africa and Asia denounced western racism. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, when the U.S. delegation to the United Nations pushed for sanctions against the Soviet Union, several foreign governments responded that the American government violated the civil and human rights of its own colored citizens.6 A similar response greeted U.S. efforts during the Berlin crisis of 1948-1949. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even suggested at one point that the U.S. government's refusal to take a firm stand against South Africa's apartheid policy grew out of a fear of being charged with hypocrisy.7 While the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision helped improve America's image abroad, defiance of the decision attracted world-wide attention and resulted in a new round of criticism. …