In 1958, an African-American 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
the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the
United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War
II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. 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 the best analysis of how international relations affected
any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a
Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key
social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained
tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its
international image. But improving the 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 the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent
of progress.
Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's
argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the 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; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High;
African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in
Europe and supporting the 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 the
Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak
advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that
corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an
international perspective to domestic affairs.
In her new preface, Dudziak discusses the way the Cold War figures into
civil rights history, and details this book's origins, as one question
about civil rights could not be answered without broadening her research
from domestic to international influences on American history.
