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

Abstract

My grandfather, a musical Welsh coal miner blacklisted throughout the 1930s for union activities, idolized Paul Robeson—great singer, champion of the oppressed, himself blacklisted in McCarthyite America, and one of the indicative characters in this superb book by Mary L. Dudziak, professor of law at the University of Southern California. According to Dudziak, the images of racial injustice broadcast by Robeson and others became a real worry to American diplomats in the early stages of the Cold War. With new nations emerging in Africa and Asia, and with the Communist world competing for their loyalty, the race problem was transported “from the streets of America to the newsstands of the world”; U.S. foreign service officials from Cardiff to Cairo reported racial injustice episodes in terms that threatened to scupper the appeal of democracy and its ability to inhibit the spread of communism. The American government responded by improving civil rights at home. Dudziak shows how the Truman administration used national security arguments in furtherance of race reform; how foreign pressures lay behind Dwight D. Eisenhower's actions in Little Rock; and how John F. Kennedy's support for the 1963 Civil Rights Act stemmed from African reactions to events in Alabama.