Segregationist Liberalism: The NAACP and Resistance to Civil-Defense Planning in the Early Cold War, 1951-1953

Abstract

This paper investigates how civilian defense planning during the early Cold War was configured by two enduring facts of American political development: race and geography. Before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court in 1954, public policy was fundamentally affected by racial considerations. In the South, state-level planners used race to determine how, where, and in what quantity a wide range of public goods were delivered to citizens.1 In the North, race and racism were just as much a part of the public policy calculation as in the South. Truman Administration officials viewed themselves as defenders of liberal democ racy, and with Cold War tensions at the fore of both domestic and foreign policy, U.S. officials used the model of American liberalism as an ideological and political instrument for waging Cold War. The seeming conflict between the idea of progressive liberalism and legal racism was clear to many in U.S. society, both in and out of the Truman Administration. The State Department, for instance, put pressure on the Truman Administration to improve the treatment of African-American citizens, especially in the South. This essay is concerned with one aspect of this conflict: In the areas of federal emergency planning and national security policy in general, a form of segregationist liberalism held sway among Truman Administration policy planners.2 The result was an interesting, even bizarre, planning struc ture for nuclear-age civil defense, which pitted urban and suburban sections of the country against one another for emergency services and at the same time wove pro-Brown v. Board of Education racial policy into overall civil defense disaster planning. While the majority of citizens in the United