A good book review is a historian’s best friend. In that spirit, The Life of a Historian offers our review of…
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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The Life of a Historian:
A Book Review of Mary L. Dudziak’s
Cold War Civil Rights:
Race and the Image of American Democracy
In Cold War Civil Rights, Mary L. Dudziak situates the American civil rights movement within the broader geopolitical context of the Cold War. In doing so, Dudziak joins an emerging field that includes Brenda Gayle Plummer and Gerald Horne, whose respective works Dudziak models her own after.[1] Together, their research highlights and emphasizes the interrelationship between race, civil rights, and international relations during the World War II and Cold War eras. Dudziak, in particular, examines the civil rights movement through an international lens. She argues that “civil rights reform was in part a product of the Cold War.”[2] In other words, Dudziak contends that the geopolitical challenges of the nascent Cold War engendered the federal government’s interest and eventual involvement in the civil rights movement. For the federal government, civil rights reform was an extension of its foreign policy. Her work, therefore, “traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy” from 1946 to the mid-1960s.[3] In the process, Dudziak offers new insights and a fresh perspective on the history of the Cold War and the civil rights movement.
As the United States emerged from World War II as a world power, foreign nations not only became more observant of “the expansion of U.S. influence and power in the world,” but also more knowledgeable about race relations within American democracy.[4] According to Dudziak, international criticisms and perceptions of American race relations raised concerns among government officials and, in turn, eventually led to their involvement in civil rights reform. As the United States sought “to reshape the postwar world in its own image,” newspapers worldwide regularly published stories exposing America’s race problem.[5] For example, in November 1947, Haiti’s secretary of agriculture, Francois Georges, planned to attend a conference hosted by the National Association of Commissioners, Secretaries and Directors of Agriculture in Biloxi, Mississippi. However, upon his arrival, the hotel housing the conference’s attendees denied Georges their service “for ‘reasons of color.’”[6] Newspapers around the world quickly detailed the event. Soon after, editorials critical of Georges’ reception in America appeared in the Haitian newspapers La Nation and Le Nouvelliste as well as the Jamaican newspaper, the Kingston Daily Cleaner. In response, the United States embassy in Haiti felt compelled to issue a public apology. Foreign newspapers, however, did not limit their coverage to the experiences of visiting foreign officials. Local acts of racial violence appeared on the front pages of foreign newspapers. The lynching of African Americans was a source of continued discussion within their editorial sections. In response, United States diplomats expressed their concerns to the State Department, arguing that racial inequality at home affected the image of America abroad, thus, limiting the United States government’s persuasive power in the ideological war between democratic capitalism and communism.
International reactions not only challenged the pristine image of American freedom and democracy that government officials looked to project globally but also provided the Soviet Union with a useful propaganda theme. According to Dudziak, concurrent with this development, the geopolitical implications of the nascent Cold War now framed the international discussions among world leaders. However, it was not until the NAACP filed a petition with the United Nations in 1947, however, that President Truman and State Department officials began formally addressing civil rights as a foreign policy issue. Although, as Dudziak notes, federal officials only did so in response to the international reception of the NAACP petition. While the NAACP petition received praise from foreign newspapers, it was the concerns the petition elicited from foreign governments that proved even more troubling for United States officials. Following a private meeting with a Dutch official, Robert Coe of the American Embassy, The Hague, filed a report to the State Department detailing their conversation. According to the Dutch official, American racial attitudes and domestic race relations have proven to be an effective propaganda theme for the Soviet Union in Asian, African, and European nations. Furthermore, in light of the NAACP petition, the Dutch official described the difficulty in defending America’s mistreatment of its black citizens. However, as Dudziak points out, there was a solution. According to the Dutch official, the American government needed to “‘devote a major portion of its facilities and energies to a campaign aimed at counteracting the impression so many people have of American racial suppression.’”[7] The State Department followed this suggestion vigorously and did so as a foreign policy initiative.
Relying on archival source material from the State Department—primarily, correspondence between American and foreign diplomats and American and foreign elected officials; and publications from the United States Information Agency and the United States Information Services, most notably The Negro in American Life (c. 1950)—Dudziak illuminates the herculean efforts of the federal government to control the international conversation on American race relations. State Department officials sponsored world speaker tours of African Americans like Walter White, Jay Saunders, and Dr. Max Yergan, who promoted a more racially progressive image of American freedom and democracy. Simultaneously, the federal government actively silenced other African Americans like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and William Patterson by revoking their passports or limiting their access to a wider audience. The State Department believed their critiques of race, class, and colonialism would prove too damaging to American influence if heard on an international platform. In an ideological war against communism and the Soviet Union, the federal government actively promoted a “particular vision of racial justice” and “kept discussions of broad-based social change, or linking of race and class, off the agenda.”[8] For the United States, “class-based inequality…was a feature of capitalism, an economic system Americans were proud of.”[9] While the Cold War opened doors of opportunity for racial progress, Dudziak argues, it also closed the door on a host of other social and economic reforms.
As the State Department looked to reframe the race narrative, along with the Justice Department they also tried to influence the legal decisions of the Supreme Court via amici curiae laced with arguments about foreign policy concerns. For example, during Brown v. Board of Education State and Justice Department officials “stressed to Supreme Court the international implications of race discrimination and…the negative impact on U.S. foreign relations that a prosegregation decision might have.”[10] When the Supreme Court made its decision on Brown, the State Department issued an immediate radio broadcast through its station, Voice of America. Within hours of the decision, the world knew of America’s landmark case for civil rights reform.
According to Dudziak, international concern for American race relations peaked during the early 1960s. While the racial violence portrayed in the media coverage of Birmingham and the Freedom Rides proved problematic, the international reaction to these events seemed mild in comparison to the events of the 1950s, notably that of Little Rock. Dudziak attributes this to the effectiveness of the State Department as well as key Supreme Court civil rights decisions that included Brown v. Board of Education, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Henderson v. United States. Together, many worldwide began to accept the narrative of the racial progress that the State Department carefully crafted over the decade. For example, following the 1963 March on Washington, the Evening News in Ghana proclaimed the March on Washington as “one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of human history.”[11] Foreign newspapers worldwide, as Dudziak shows, shared this sentiment of the event. The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 further cemented this belief among the international audience.
Throughout Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak’s two key interventions stand out. Firstly, that “domestic racism and civil rights protest led to international criticism of the U.S. government. International criticism led the federal government to respond, through placating foreign critics by reframing the narrative on race in America” and by enacting or advocating for specific types of civil rights reform.[12] Secondly, without the strategic or geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, the federal government—primarily the State and Justice Department of the executive branch, would have little incentive to address civil rights nor would civil rights reform become a vital foreign policy goal. Once “Vietnam had eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue affecting U.S. prestige abroad,” that incentive vanished.[13]
By examining the civil rights movement through an international lens, Dudziak illuminates the connections between foreign and domestic affairs. As Dudziak argues, “foreign developments help drive domestic politics and policy.”[14] In this case, the combination of international criticisms of American racism and the geopolitical implications of the Cold War facilitated opportunities, albeit limited in scope, for civil rights reform. An international approach to the civil rights movement seems to diminish the agency of grassroots activists and African Americans. However, as Dudziak stresses, without their activism an international reaction does not occur nor the series of civil rights reforms between 1946 and 1965. With Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak offers a new vantage point from which to gain new perspectives of the civil rights movement.
[1] See Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).
[2] Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12.
[3] Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 17.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 12.
[6] Ibid., 40.
[7] Ibid., 46.
[8] Ibid., 13.
[9] Ibid., 252.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Ibid., 197.
[12] Ibid., 13.
[13] Ibid., 248.
[14] Ibid., 17.