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

Mary Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2010) is a nonfiction narrative history looking at the ways that the Cold War influenced the African American civil rights movement. It was based on Dudziak’s dissertation for Yale University. In it, she argues that the United States’ concern over its image as a successful, just democracy during the Cold War motivated the government to help the civil rights movement. In 2011, the book won the American Library Association’s Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It covers the era from right after World War II to the start of President Richard Nixon’s administration.

This study guide uses the revised 2011 edition by Princeton University Press.

Content Warning: This guide discusses racial violence.

Summary

Cold War Civil Rights begins after World War II with the administration of President Truman. The fact that World War II was a war fought against fascist, racist regimes like Nazi Germany bolstered the idea that racism was a “blot” (23) on the United States. At the same time, the hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led to the Cold War. Despite Truman’s own racist views, he was receptive to the idea that laws allowing segregation between white and Black people hurt the United States’ image as a leading democracy. As a result, he issued executive orders that ended segregation in the military and encouraged Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for desegregation in public life.

Next, Dudziak looks at events in the 1950s. Due to pressure from activist organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Communist propaganda that exploited racist laws and violence in the United States, President Dwight Eisenhower likewise intervened in civil rights affairs. Under the Eisenhower administration, the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education was decided, which called for the desegregation of public schools. The case was decided partially because “national security required equality” (104). The narrative that the United States would eventually triumph over racism because of its democracy had to be promoted and preserved.

Finally, Dudziak ends with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. During those administrations, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. launched more ambitious campaigns against segregation and other discriminatory laws by doing lunch counter sit-ins and riding on segregated buses. Concerns about the United States’ image and Communist propaganda from the Soviet Union and China continued to encourage US federal government involvement in civil rights affairs. Nonetheless, this also meant that “Cold War ideology limited the federal government’s view of social change” (250-51). In other words, because of the way the Cold War prized American democracy and capitalism, more ambitious reforms of the American system were never considered.

Dudziak concludes that this relationship between civil rights and the Cold War came to an end for two reasons. One was that the Vietnam War captured both international opinion and the focus of activists within the United States. The other was that, under the Nixon administration, the government’s propaganda and actions shifted toward a law-and-order narrative, rather than a progressive civil rights narrative.