Cold War Civil Rights Research Articles

Her Majesty's African-American Allies

It is well-established that African-Americans have sought allies abroad as a way to weaken opposition at home. Often, scholars have tackled this important topic as it manifested during the Cold War.1 Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (New York, 2000); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London, 2016). R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY, 2012); Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (New York, 2012). Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York, 2012); Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana, IL, 2013).

President Truman’s Justice Department and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Supreme Court

President Truman’s Justice Department and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Supreme Court IAN B. FAGELSON Introduction 2017 marked the seventieth anniversary ofan important landmark in the history ofthe Supreme Court. Although the Court’s deci­ sions in the Brown cases1 that destroyed the legal foundations of state-sanctioned racial discrimination were handed down during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidency, much of the groundwork was laid on President Harry S. Truman’s watch. Faced with an unhelpful Congress, Truman’s contributions to civil rights were effectively confined to the bully pulpit (as witness, his speech to the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial)2 and executive actions (such as establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and endorsing its recommendations;3 desegregat­ ing the federal government4 and the mili­ tary).5 Even before he pledged support for civil rights at the Lincoln Memorial in June 1947, he engaged with Attorney General Tom C. Clark on how to combat the rise in Southern white terrorism and committed his Justice Department to tackling lynching.6 Moreover, on December 5, 1947, the Justice Department broke with tradition by interven­ ing7 for the first time in a case between private litigants where no concrete federal interest such as the interpretation of a U.S. statute was involved.8 At issue was the enforceabil­ ity of racially restrictive housing covenants. Between 1947 and 1952, Truman’s Justice Department participated five times, via written briefs and oral arguments, in private lawsuits urging the outlawing of segregation. The cases concerned housing,9 transporta­ tion,10 public accommodations,11 higher education,12 and, most controversially, ele­ mentary and high schools in Brown itself. In each case, the Supreme Court ruled unani­ mously in favor of the position argued by the 70 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Justice Department. However, there is little direct evidence of Truman’s personal in­ volvement in the Department’s actions. Whether the Department’s actions were true instances of Truman administration policy, rather than the work of liberal civil service lawyers in which the top level of the administration merely acquiesced, has been the subject of debate, as has the question of what considerations drove the interven­ tions. This article demonstrates that the story is more complicated than many scholars have suggested. After a brief literature survey and a description of the unique status of the Solicitor General, a study of each case in its historical context reveals that the level of engagement of the President and cabinet-level officials and the considerations that motivated them were not uniform throughout the period. None­ theless, the Department’s interventions must be regarded as acts of administration policy for which the President deserves considerable credit. Literature Survey Some scholars write on the basis of unstated assumptions as to whether the Justice Department acted at Truman’s behest.13 Michael Gardner, without citing hard evidence, asserts that Truman personally caused the Justice Department to act.14 According to Richard Dalfiume, Truman “allowed” the Justice Department to inter­ vene.15 William Berman claims, without citing evidence, that Truman did not autho­ rise, or even know about, several of the briefs.16 However, again without citing evidence, he also asserts that Truman person­ ally authorised the Department’s first inter­ vention in 1947.17 Barton Bernstein views the briefs as primarily the work of Justice Department lawyers in which the administra­ tion acquiesced and says that it is unclear whether Truman was “an enthusiastic supporter or a reluctant endorser of placing the Federal government on the side of civil rights in these cases.”18 In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy,19 Mary Dudziak devotes an extended endnote to the question, concluding that the briefs should be viewed as an important part of Truman’s civil rights program and as “consciously adopted Truman administration policy.”20 The question of the extent (if any) of Truman’s personal involvement with the interventions is intertwined with controversy over Truman’s motivation for supporting civil rights. At one extreme, Richard Dalfiume and Michael Gardner see Truman’s commitment to civil rights as driven primar­ ily by moral convictions.21 At the other extreme, William...

Critical Pedagogy for Black Youth Resistance

14 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 79, NO. 1 79 No.1 York: NYU Press, 2014), 59. 9. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Southern Negro Youth Congress, #100-HQ-6548, Part I, “Undeveloped Leads,” 28– 30. 10. Johnetta Richards, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A History” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1987), 48. 11. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. Ella Baker, Interview by John Britton, June 19, 1968, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC. 13. Robert P. Moses and Charlie Cobb, Jr., “Organizing Algebra: The Need to Voice a Demand,” Social Policy 31, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 8. 14. Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 15. See Clarence Lang, “Political/Economic Restructuring and the Tasks of Radical Black Youth,” The Black Scholar 28, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998): 32–33; also see Luke Tripp, “The Political Views of Black Students During the Reagan Era,” The Black Scholar 22, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 45–51. 16. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 24 (2009): 156–65. 17. Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75, no. 3 (March 1997): 857–58. 18. Sean Ginwright, Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). 19. Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28. 20. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and C. McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR BLACK YOUTH RESISTANCE By Tyson E. J. Marsh The rich history and tradition of Black intellectual radicalism, protest, and critical praxis draws upon and informs multiple epistemological spaces while also occupying a variety of physical places and contexts, both historically and in the present. The politics of place and space are woven throughout the Black radical tradition and struggle for social justice, as white supremacist statesanctioned violence (i.e., the maintenance and reproduction of white racial and economic supremacy through violent and racist state-sanctioned laws, policies, and practices enforced through Ideological and Repressive StateApparatuses), both overt and covert, has required that Black folk take a creative and critical approach in locating and creating spaces and places to organize, strategize, and mobilize.As Lefebvre has written, “Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally¿OOHGZLWKLGHRORJLHV´2 While Black radicals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright carved out intellectual spaces for the political work of challenging white supremacy, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer engaged in critical public pedagogical work in the struggle for civil rights in more formal, physical spaces and institutions. Combining the former and latter, scholaractivists Angela Y. Davis, Kathleen Clever, and others have situated their political work within the tradition of critical public intellectualism. Marc Lamont Hill3 KDVLGHQWL¿HGFXOWXUDOFULWLFLVP policy shaping, and applied work as three critical spaces in which educational researchers engage in public intellectual work. However, in acknowledging the marriage between racism and capitalism, we must also begin to position Black youth as public intellectuals in the struggle against white supremacist state-sanctioned violence. Undertaking this work requires that we acknowledge the way in which dominant culture serves to silence Black youth while simultaneously co-creating spaces with them to critique and respond to the culture of systemic violence as it manifests itself in schooling and formal/informal sites of education. Within a top-down education reform and policy context in which Black youth are the last ones consulted, if at all, we must work with them in carving out spaces to inform...

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Riverside Speech and Cold War Civil Rights

This article examines Martin Luther King, Jr.'s controversial Riverside Speech where he denounced the Vietnam War. Although King's biographers and other scholars have written about the Riverside speech, they have not analyzed King's Riverside speech through the prism of Cold War Civil Rights. This examination of King's Riverside speech remedies this omission by explaining why King waited so long to speak out against the war, and why civil rights activists as late as 1967 were still wary about criticizing American Cold War foreign policy because of the legacy of the Red Scare. While the Cold War helped spur civil rights advances, this article demonstrates that the civil rights movement was a casualty of the Vietnam War.

Untimely Subjects: White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South

This article analyzes the role that categories of racial transgression—specifically, the reviled “white trash” of the rural South—play in the historical construction of racial innocence in America. Writing in 1963, James Baldwin diagnosed innocence as the alchemy by which white Americans turn otherwise visible racial inequality into stories of redemption, virtue, and progress. In this article, I use shifting historical constructions of white trash from the Progressive Era to the post–World War II era to unearth the relationship between transgression and innocence. Beginning in the 1940s, white trash underwent a significant transformation that smoothed the reentrenchment of racial innocence during the era of Cold War liberalism and civil rights. Once figures of suspect racial “purity,” white trash in the postwar period operated as a repository of intractable antiblack violence, mobism, and retrogression. Their movement from racial contaminant to guilty white, I argue, brings into sharp relief the class-inflected transformation of racial innocence during the critical civil rights years: the New South’s commitment to “color-blind” law-and-order and economic progress were together formative of the protection of emergent white middle-class interests in the postwar South and a new kind of racial innocence that has since settled into contemporary national discourses on race.

Book Review: The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower

The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War. Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. 360 pp. $39.95 hbk.One of the most fruitful recent developments in the study of the civil rights era in the United States has been what might be called the global turn. Beginning with Mary Dudziak's 2000 book Cold War Civil Rights, new scholarship has increasingly viewed the postwar struggle over racial equality as an international story, necessarily examined in the context of the global cold war and the emergence of new nation-states in the postcolonial era. Seen in this broad perspective, the course of the American civil rights movement was significantly affected by the propaganda war between the United States and its communist adversaries as both sides sought prestige and influence among the nonaligned states in what were then called the third world. The American problem gave a significant propaganda advantage to its enemies. How could lynching, legal segregation, and the everyday humiliation of racial minorities take place in a nation that cast itself as a model of freedom and democracy?Scholars have long noted that racial inequality, especially when it turned violent, was America's greatest embarrassment on the global stage. The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War, by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, is a far-reaching study of the role of the press as the forum in which these contentious issues played out. Lentz, a longtime journalism educator, and Gower, who teaches at the University of Alabama, have unearthed a great number of examples from foreign newspapers that clearly show how negative stories about race relations tarnished the American image, which is not entirely new.What is immensely useful with this book, however, is the authors' examination of the extensive efforts undertaken by the U.S. government to monitor, in hopes of countering, this negative international publicity. To some degree, this was reported in the American press. News magazines, for example, used to run articles on how the foreign press reported on stories about race relations. Much more evidence is drawn from the files of State Department foreign service officers and diplomats, who paid attention to the local press in their region and reported back to Washington on the way news about the United States was handled. Lentz and Gower have also unearthed records from organizations like the United States Information Agency and United States Information Service, which made more formal and systematic efforts to track and analyze press reports from overseas. This information was used to determine what kind of propaganda response, whether in the form of media messages or publicity tours by American jazz musicians, should be undertaken in response.The heart of the book is arranged in a roughly chronological manner, with chapters detailing foreign press response to incidents like the response to the Brown decision, the Emmett Till murder and subsequent trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Crisis, the Freedom Rides, and the riots in Watts, among others. …

Interracial Activism in the Los Angeles Community Service Organization: Linking the World War II and Civil Rights Eras

Through the lens of the Community Service Organization (CSO), this article explores the emergence of Los Angeles ethno-racial communities' political activism and what enabled their success in a difficult Cold War climate. The CSO's creation in 1947, when it became the first enduring civil rights organization for the largest urban Mexican-origin population in the United States, is striking since historical narratives generally assume the Cold War crushed meaningful civil rights change. The CSO complicates this declensionist narrative. Its success stemmed in part from its reliance upon interracial networks that sustained it in its early years. The CSO reveals links between different racial and ethnic communities, in three different eras—the World War II, Cold War, and civil rights eras—that made the emergence and persistence of such activism possible.

Native activism in Cold War America: the struggle for sovereignty

The heyday of American Indian activism is generally seen as bracketed by the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 and the Longest Walk in 1978; yet Native Americans had long struggled against federal policies that threatened to undermine tribal sovereignty and self-determination. This is the first book-length study of American Indian political activism during its seminal years, focusing on the movement's largely neglected early efforts before Alcatraz or Wounded Knee captured national attention. Ranging from the end of World War II to the late 1960s, Daniel Cobb uncovers the groundwork laid by earlier activists. He draws on dozens of interviews with key players to relate untold stories of both seemingly well-known events such as the American Indian Chicago Conference and little-known ones such as Native participation in the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. Along the way, he introduces readers to a host of previously neglected but critically important activists: Mel Thom, Tillie Walker, Forrest Gerard, Dr. Jim Wilson, Martha Grass, and many others. Cobb takes readers inside the early movement from D'Arcy McNickle's founding of American Indian Development, Inc. and Vine Deloria Jr.'s tenure as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians to Clyde Warrior's leadership in the National Indian Youth Council and describes how early activists forged connections between their struggle and anticolonialist movements in the developing world. He also describes how the War on Poverty's Community Action Programs transformed Indian Country by training bureaucrats and tribal leaders alike in new political skills and providing activists with the leverage they needed to advance the movement toward self-determination. This book shows how Native people who never embraced militancy-and others who did-made vital contributions as activists well before the American Indian Movement burst onto the scene. By highlighting the role of early intellectuals and activists like Sol Tax, Nancy Lurie, Robert K. Thomas, Helen Peterson, and Robert V. Dumont, Cobb situates AIM's efforts within a much broader context and reveals how Native people translated the politics of Cold War civil rights into the language of tribal sovereignty. Filled with fascinating portraits, Cobb's groundbreaking study expands our understanding of American Indian political activism and contributes significantly to scholarship on the War on Poverty, the 1960s, and postwar politics and social movements.

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

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

Mary L. Duziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

Mary L. Duziak, <i>Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy</i>

Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 254 pp. $29.95.

Mary Dudziak, <i>Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.</i> Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 254 pp. $29.95.

Foreign Policy and Civil Rights

IN COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS, MARY L. DUDZIAK PLACES THE STUDY OF THE POSTWorld War II Civil Rights Movement in the context of United States foreign relations. In doing so, Dudziak expands the scope of civil rights history and offers new insight into why the federal government saw African American civil rights as integral to its foreign policy mission. While there have been a growing number of books that explore how civil rights activists used the cold war strategically to wage civil rights struggles, Dudziak's study is the first to show how the federal government's commitment to Cold War foreign policy seasoned its support for civil rights reforms.' Although civil rights activists had long relied on international audiences for support and solidarity, Dudziak shows that the Cold War's reliance on preserving American prestige abroad made international observers' sentiments integral to foreign policy. Within this context, racial discrimination, especially when it was broadcast to international observers, became problematic to the Cold War effort itself. Moreover, African American civil rights leaders capitalized on the importance of foreign perceptions of the United States by publicizing acts of racial violence abroad. African American participation as soldiers and as workers at home allowed civil rights leaders to claim that they were an indispensable part of American society, and especially of the war effort. Moreover, World War II was

The Diplomacy of Shame

Book reviewed in this article: Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

When Interests Diverge

In her recent book Cold War Civil Rights, Professor Mary L. Dudziak,1 sets forth to explore impact of Cold War foreign affairs on U.S. civil rights reform (p. 14). Tracing the emergence, development, and decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy (p. 17), she draws together Cold War and civil rights history (pp. 14-15), two areas that are usually treated as distinct subjects of inquiry. In mixing two together, she shows that the borders of U.S. are not easily maintained.2 Perhaps it is fitting that field of American is not delimited neatly by its geographic borders, especially when those same borders have not contained reach of United States.3 She closes introductory section of her book by suggest[ing] that an international perspective does not simply 'fill in' story of American history, but changes its terms (p. 17).

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

One of the most powerful, dramatic, and visible struggles for human rights in the modern world appeared with the civil rights movement and its fight for racial equality within the United States. Confronting a brutal legacy of slavery and lynching, an oppressive context of racism and segregation, and the violence of mob attacks and policy brutality, those who engaged in this struggle did so in a country that claimed not only to believe in certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and equal opportunity for all, but also claimed to be the leader of the free world. Civil rights activists' efforts were watched carefully by the nation and by the world, and now are described and analyzed for us all with masterful skill by Mary Dudziak in Cold War Civil Rights.

Reviews of Books:Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy Mary L. Dudziak

Reviews of Books:Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy Mary L. Dudziak

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 330. $29.95 (ISBN 0-691-01661-5).

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 330. $29.95 (ISBN 0-691-01661-5).

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

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

Cold War civil rights: race and the image of American democracy

Cold War civil rights: race and the image of American democracy

Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative

At the height of the McCarthy era, when Congressional committees were exposing communist infiltration in many areas of American life, the Supreme Court was upholding loyalty oath requirements, and the executive branch was ferreting out alleged communists in government, the U.S. Attorney General filed a pro-civil rights brief in what would become one of the most celebrated civil rights cases in American history: Brown v. Board of Education. Although seemingly at odds with the restrictive approach to individual rights in other contexts, the U.S. government's participation in the desegregation cases during the McCarthy era was no anomaly. Rather, by the early 1950s, American leaders had come to believe that civil rights reform was crucial to the more central U.S. mission of fighting communism. Based in part on diplomatic research in State Department archives, this article demonstrates that Cold War motives influenced the U.S. government's involvement in Brown and other cases. Originally published in 1988 in the Stanford Law Review, this article was the first publication to use State Department records to examine the relationship between Cold War foreign relations and civil rights in the United States. Diplomatic records illustrate the growing concern among American diplomats and political leaders after World War II about the impact of race discrimination on the U.S. image around the world, and the global critique that the United States could not be an effective leader of the free world as long as the nation blatantly denied rights to its own peoples. This research confirmed the suspicions of Derrick Bell and others who argued before these records were opened that foreign affairs affected U.S. government civil rights policies, and it helped illuminate the world-wide impact of the civil rights movement. This research was expanded upon in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000), and in books and articles by other scholars. The larger body of work on race and foreign relations is an important aspect of efforts by historians to internationalize the study of American history. Thanks to the Stanford Law Review, the article is now available on SSRN so that it will be easily accessible on-line.