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

Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy is arguably the finest articulation of how international affairs influenced domestic issues. Cold War Civil Rights directly connects civil rights and the Cold War. In this book, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She contends that the Cold War facilitated key social changes, in particular desegregation. Dudziak use the 1958 case of an African American repairperson named Jimmy Wilson who was the death penalty in Alabama for stealing two dollars (Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights 3-6). Deplorable as this case and its resultant sentence was it was reversed upon intense international scrutiny and the intervention of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights 3-6). As a second case study, Dudziak looks at a segregated military defeating 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 (Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights 47-48, 61-63, 65-66 and 77). Finally, every incident of lynching affected foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a core issue from Truman to Johnson administrations (Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights 11-15, and 203-216). Archival information, much of it newly obtainable, supports Dudziak's contention that civil rights were inextricably linked to Cold War foreign policy as civil rights activists gained tremendous cultural capital and voice as the US government sought to improve its international image. Contributing to our understanding of both civil rights and the Cold War., Dudziak also moves forward a new wave of scholarship that rights American history by applying a global perspective to a local event.

If you think Las Vegas tourist ads and "listening tours" are components of public diplomacy and international relations, you need to read this book. If you think media coverage is intense now, you need to read this book. Dudziak gets into the reality and impact of media coverage forty years ago and its impact on the global information war of the time that is remarkably similar to today: "Following World War II, anything that undermined the image of American democracy was seen as threatening world peace and aiding Soviet aspiration to dominate the world... Nations were divided between a way of life 'distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression' and a way of life that "relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms." Dudziak looks at the impact of race and the civil rights movement in the United States on American public diplomacy and foreign policy. The impact of America's "color bar" on foreign relations is astonishing and Dudziak helps contextualize the movement and government responses within contemporary pressures. Indiscriminate actions against foreign and American dignitaries reinforced the accessibility of race-based norms to all and played into Soviet propaganda and provided a painful counternarrative that impacted US foreign relations. The US Ambassador, Chester Bowles, to India, speaking in 1952 at Yale University said, "A year, a month, or even a week in Asia is enough to convince any perceptive American that the colored peoples of Asia and Africa, who total two-thirds of the world's population, seldom think about the United States without considering the limitations under which our 13 million Negroes are living." As we attempted to project democracy and its emphasis on equality and freedom, in opposition to Soviet tyranny, discrimination in the US was well known beyond our borders. Dudziak presents "With Us or Against Us" examples with Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker as examples, among others. In the case of Baker, State Department officers justified censorship and hardship imposed on Baker by discounting her personal beliefs. Her "derogatory" remarks "concerning racial discrimination in the United States" were deemed to be "presenting a distorted and malicious picture of actual conditions." If we do not practice democracy, how well will our promotion of it be received? This was a real question of the time that other history books ignore and was the very question Ambassador Bowles asked. As Dudziak wrote, "Domestic difficulties were managed by US presidents with an eye toward how their actions would play overseas." Disingenuous or factually misleading statements to justify domestic policies and opinions are not the mainstay of any single generation. While not intending to be destructive to the nation, these policies

Upon first consideration one would think that the reciprocal influences of the Cold War and American civil rights activity would be self-evident. Perhaps, but Dudziak's book is full of surprises and details how galling the "American Dilemma" was to U.S. foreign policy-makers and various presidents and how each responded to the concerns of African, Asian, American, and European countries regarding the United States civil rights struggle over several decades. Why was civil rights legislation important to American foreign policy? How was Eisenhower's response to school desegregation in Little Rock influenced by foreign perceptions? How did the international attention to civil rights activity affect John Kennedy's domestic policies? Why was the State Department so concerned about Asian and African criticisms of the United States' record on civil rights? How was the Civil Rights Act of 1965 viewed by the international community? How did the views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X affect United States foreign policy efforts? Was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to an American activist also an international signal that worried a president and the State Department? These questions and many more are answered by Dudziak.Dudziak deserves recognition and commendations for clearly demonstrating that the United States civil rights movement had a global as well as a national impact on America's foreign policy efforts and placed the United States squarely between the demands of a persecuted domestic minority and the scrutiny of the nations to which it declared itself the leader of human rights, liberty, and freedom in contrast to the totalitarian regimes of communist countries. This book is well worth reading and an important addition to the growing number of books on the history of race relations that was not, and is not,taught in school. Kudos to Dudziak for an important job well done.

Mary Dudziak revisits a familiar chapter in American history--the civil rights movement--but provides readers with a completely new perspective on it. We know about the work that was being done in the streets. But now Dudziak helps us see the movement through the eyes of America's cold war policymakers. For them, civil rights was a foreign policy problem, and Dudziak helps us see how this explains many of the movements successes and (maybe more important) many of its defeats. Essential reading for everyone interested in American history, civil rights, constitutional law (yes, even Brown v. Board of Education must be seen in light of this analysis), and foreign policy.

This book is fabulous. Clear and articulate, it reads like a story and explores an aspect of the civil rights movement most authors and historians have neglected. It is meticulously researched and filled with information from sources ranging from presidential telephone conversations to news wires to official publications. The civil rights movement cannot be fully understood without reflecting upon the information contained in this book.