44 pages • 1 hour read
Mary L. DudziakCold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Growth of Civil Rights Activism
Dudziak’s main thesis hinges on the idea that “there was a strategic reason for social change” (8) based in Cold War foreign policy. Still, she views civil rights activists as active agents of change, rather than passively reacting to the federal government’s attempts to improve the United States’ international image when it came to minority rights. Cold War Civil Rights thus also highlights the growth of grassroots civil rights activism within the United States.
In particular, Dudziak focuses on the efforts of African American activists like W. E. B. DuBois and Malcolm X to court international opinion and put pressure on the United States government through the United Nations. The activists, and the African American community as a whole, took an active role in United States politics. It was the African American community, along with activists such as NAACP, who may have helped secure the election of President Truman (24-26). It was also the demands of civil rights activists for greater equality that led to the civil rights reform victories of the 1960s (251). Dudziak also calls attention to the impact of the African American activist strategy of “nonviolent civil disobedience” (154) in both calling for national and international attention.
However, Dudziak’s presentation of civil rights activists is not that they were mostly responding to international trends. Instead, her point is that African American activists were not working within a purely American context. To be properly understood, the story of civil rights activism has to be seen from a “different standpoint” (14), specifically in the context of world history. Particularly, she argues for seeing civil rights activists as a part of the history of the Cold War and the history of decolonization more generally. One reason is that the struggle of African Americans was seen by contemporaries at the time and could be seen historically as just one part of the “‘liberation and rise’ of the colored peoples of the world” (58).
Another reason is that the Cold War influenced the course of the civil rights movement, namely in how the US government and the civil rights movement affected each other. Most notably, the government tried to control the civil rights movement through hampering the travel of activists and through promoting its own narrative. It was also reflected in how US politicians and diplomats were motivated to compromise with civil rights activists. Most of all, though, Dudziak argues that, despite the United States’ power in the second half of the 20th century, American domestic affairs were not separated from the rest of the world. She writes, “In the American Century, the United States took on a new role as a global power. World events, in that context, were part of the story of America” (253). In other words, American civil rights activism grew in response to both international and national trends, and in turn, had an impact on anti-colonial and anti-racism attitudes developing elsewhere.
The Role of the Cold War in Rights Discourse
Key to Dudziak’s overall argument is how much the Cold War overshadowed global politics in the era between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She explores the way the ideological aspect of the conflict influenced the civil rights discourse in the United States, while also making the US government more sensitive to how its racial practices damaged its self-presentation as a democratic rival to Soviet authoritarianism.
Since the Cold War was very much a war of competing ideas, the Soviet Union and the United States were both trying to appeal to governments and peoples in Africa and Asia, where nations were becoming newly independent from European colonial rule. Civil rights issues made the United States uniquely vulnerable in the eyes of “non-white” peoples in Asia and Africa, who had just won their own struggles for independence and rights through decolonization. Decolonization had thus “crystallized” (165) the importance of the United States’ diplomatic image, as the US battled to win influence in geographical regions viewed as crucial bulwarks against Soviet expansion. Ambassadors and diplomats promoted the image of the United States as a successful democracy making progress with civil rights, while simultaneously trying to conduct damage control when anti-Black violence in the United States reached international attention. Diplomats actively called for the government to intervene in racial issues, since “race discrimination undermined the nation’s prestige abroad, threatening its Cold War leadership” (39, emphasis added).
The United States’ need to win the propaganda war against the Soviet Union also shaped the US government’s actions regarding civil rights. The government’s approach was twofold. First, they tried to actively shape a narrative built upon the idea that American democracy gradually and inexorably led to racial justice and freedom. The US government was well aware that the Soviet government and media seized upon incidents of American racial discrimination and violence as a means of discrediting American democracy, thereby questioning the legitimacy of America’s political and social systems. Some US politicians even worried that, without effective action on racial issues, African Americans were at risk of becoming ever-more radicalized by both Soviet criticism and Communist ideology. Moving toward racial equality was thus regarded as crucial in both salvaging the self-image of the US, while also minimizing the threat of more radical activism taking root at home. Second, the US government monitored and restricted the activities of certain activists, such as Malcolm X, while actively facilitating trips abroad for activists they deemed to be more moderate, such as James Farmer. In this way, the US hoped to combat both the influence of Communist ideology at home and abroad, while also insisting through its own propaganda that the US remained a beacon of democracy, freedom, and equality.
The Global Influence on American Civil Rights
Dudziak asserts that, rather than the United States civil rights movement developing in an isolated manner within American politics and society, world events affected civil rights as well. Cold War Civil Rights thus places American civil rights issues within a broader global context, emphasizing how other countries influenced American civil rights and how the struggle of African Americans mirrored wider trends in decolonization and anti-racism worldwide.
The most tangible way this global connection happened was through the United Nations. From its founding in 1945, the United Nations was a potential ally for civil rights activists, who could call for international pressure on the United States by invoking the United Nations’ stance on human rights. The international community often used the United Nations as a site to call for interventions in civil rights in the United States, such as when there was a call for a peacekeeping force to go to Mississippi (215). Although the United States was a powerful force on the world stage, it did not have absolute control over the United Nations, and could not prevent criticism of its civil rights record from reaching the international community.
To the chagrin of many American presidential administrations, the international community did indeed take a keen interest in civil rights developments. Dudziak argues that the nations of the world perceived the struggle for African American rights as part of a much broader battle against colonialism and white supremacy. For example, Dudziak highlights how a consortium of African leaders were prepared to denounce the United States for the brutal treatment of protestors at Birmingham, Alabama. Only by achieving a peaceful settlement between the protestors and local authorities did Kennedy avert a foreign relations disaster in Africa (170-75). Surveys conducted by the US to gauge its image in other countries reported that foreigners often regarded American minority rights as a pressing concern. When the March on Washington took place, several other major marches were organized in countries abroad by citizens wishing to show solidarity with the fight of African Americans for equality. Such open gestures of support reminded the US government that the international community both noticed the civil rights struggle and frequently formed strong opinions of their own about it.
Similarly, Soviet and Chinese delegates abroad often publicly criticized the US for its racial discrimination, thereby questioning its democratic credentials while also presenting the Communist system as more committed to equality. Since US domestic affairs often had an effect on how other nations perceived the United States, this in turn influenced how the US government managed political affairs, especially while operating under Cold War ideological pressures. As Dudziak concludes, “Domestic difficulties were managed by U.S. presidents with an eye toward how their actions would play overseas” (250, emphasis added). In light of all these factors, then, Dudziak believes that understanding American civil rights requires looking to the global as well as national context.
