COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS

A persuasive if occasionally overstated argument that the Cold War played a crucial role in advancing civil rights in the United States.

Noting that in a seminal 1944 book Gunnar Myrdal defined the contradictions between racism and the ideology of democracy as the quintessentially American dilemma, Dudziak (Law/Univ. of Southern California) goes on to describe how this dilemma became part of the Cold War struggle. She is especially concerned with years immediately following the end of WWII, when Communism seemed a threat to democracy and virulent racism still prevailed in the South. It was also a time of anti-imperialism, a period when many colonies saw the treatment of American blacks as further evidence of white racism. In making her case, Dudziak details the increasing international attention paid in the late 1940s and ’50s to such occurrences as Governor Faubus’s resistance to integration in Little Rock; the denial of services to visiting African black dignitaries; and the 1958 sentencing to death in Alabama of black Jimmy Wilson, who stole less than two dollars. This sentence provoked international outrage and the intervention of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which resulted in clemency for Wilson. The Soviet Union used these examples to castigate the US in particular and democracy in general, with the result that presidents from Truman on began implementing legislation to end segregation. Dudziak quotes influential policymakers like Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who observed that “the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater,” but her frequent reliance on such minor sources as the Fijian and Welsh press undercuts her case.

Graceless prose and the author’s failure to put foreign criticism in context make this assessment of an important crossroads in American history less compelling than it should be.