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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780691095134
ISBN: 0691095132
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 344
Publication Date: January 28, 2002
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
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Product Description:
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.
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Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy is arguably the finest articulation of how international affairs influenced domestic issues. Cold War Civil Rights directly connects civil rights and the Cold War. In this book, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She contends that the Cold War facilitated key social changes, in particular desegregation. Dudziak use the 1958 case of an African American repairperson named Jimmy Wilson who was the death ... Read More
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If you think Las Vegas tourist ads and "listening tours" are components of public diplomacy and international relations, you need to read this book. If you think media coverage is intense now, you need to read this book. Dudziak gets into the reality and impact of media coverage forty years ago and its impact on the global information war of the time that is remarkably similar to today: "Following World War II, anything that undermined the image of American democracy was seen as threatening world ... Read More
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Upon first consideration one would think that the reciprocal influences of the Cold War and American civil rights activity would be self-evident. Perhaps, but Dudziak's book is full of surprises and details how galling the "American Dilemma" was to U.S. foreign policy-makers and various presidents and how each responded to the concerns of African, Asian, American, and European countries regarding the United States civil rights struggle over several decades. Why was civil rights legislation important ... Read More
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Mary Dudziak revisits a familiar chapter in American history--the civil rights movement--but provides readers with a completely new perspective on it.
We know about the work that was being done in the streets. But now Dudziak helps us see the movement through the eyes of America's cold war policymakers. For them, civil rights was a foreign policy problem, and Dudziak helps us see how this explains many of the movements successes and (maybe more important) many of its defeats.
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This book is fabulous. Clear and articulate, it reads like a story and explores an aspect of the civil rights movement most authors and historians have neglected. It is meticulously researched and filled with information from sources ranging from presidential telephone conversations to news wires to official publications. The civil rights movement cannot be fully understood without reflecting upon the information contained in this book.
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