HIST 4399: Race, American Power, and the Cold War

During the Cold War, the Soviets were quick to publicize any incident of racial hostility in the United States. Since violence by white Americans against minorities was the perfect foil to America's claim to be defenders of freedom, news of these occurrences was exploited to full advantage by the Russians. This study, by scholars Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, describes and analyzes the news discourse regarding U.S. racial issues from 1946 to 1965. The Opinions of Mankind not only delves into the dissemination of race-related news to foreign outlets but also explores the impact foreign perceptions of domestic racism had on the U.S. government and its handling of foreign relations during the period.

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union deplored the treatment of African Americans by the U.S. government as proof of hypocrisy in the American promises of freedom and equality. This probing history examines government attempts to manipulate international perceptions of U.S. race relations during the Cold War by sending African American athletes abroad on goodwill tours and in international competitions as cultural ambassadors and visible symbols of American values.

Jimmy Carter in Africa opens just after Henry Kissinger's failed 1975 plot in Angola, as Carter launches his presidential campaign. The Civil Rights Act was only a decade old, and issues of racial justice remained contentious. Racism at home undermined Americans' efforts to "win hearts and minds" abroad and provided potent propaganda to the Kremlin. As President Carter confronted Africa, the essence of American foreign policy--stopping Soviet expansion--slammed up against the most explosive and raw aspect of American domestic politics--racism. Drawing on candid interviews with Carter, as well as key U.S. and foreign diplomats, and on a dazzling array of international archival sources, Nancy Mitchell offers a timely reevaluation of the Carter administration and of the man himself. Jimmy Carter in Africa presents a stark portrait of how deeply Cold War politics and racial justice were intertwined.

Malloy traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an epilogue, Malloy directly links the legacy of the BPP to contemporary questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Thomas Borstelmann's account weaves together the complex threads of early Cold War tensions, African and domestic American politics, and nuclear diplomacy to show how--and why--the United States government aided and abetted the evangelically racist regime in Pretoria. In southern Africa, the United States sought to limit Soviet and left-wing influence by supporting the colonial powers (Belgium, Portugal, and of course Britain) and the fiercely anticommunist National Party. Borstelmann also notes that race relations in the segregated U.S. played a role in Washington's policies, with few white Americans greatly disturbed by the establishment of apartheid.

As World War II drew to a close and the world awakened to the horror wrought by white supremacists in Nazi Germany, African American leaders, led by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), sensed the opportunity to launch an offensive against the conditions of segregation and inequality in America. The 'prize' they sought was not civil rights, but human rights. Only the human rights lexicon, shaped by the Holocaust and articulated by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs that haunted the black community. But the onset of the Cold War and rising anti-communism allowed powerful Southerners to cast those rights as Soviet-inspired. Thus the Civil Rights Movement was launched with neither the language nor the mission it needed to truly achieve black equality.

Horne, an attorney, points out that to support black civil rights in the early years of the Cold War was to be considered "Communist." Still, he notes that the Civil Rights Congress was at the forefront of opposition to McCarthy-era anti-Red legislation such as the Smith, Walter, and McCarran Acts. Horne poignantly reminds us of the dangers of being an FBI target and that prior to the 1960s, civil rights allies were so few that even Communist help was welcomed. He portrays the CRC as being willing to work outside the system (unlike the NAACP and ACLU) for victims of racial injustice and highlights the Willie McGee, Martinsville Seven, Trenton Six, and Paul Robeson cases.

George Lewis explores the various and subtle ways that white southern segregationists used anticommunist rhetoric to undermine the civil rights movement.

During the height of the Cold War, southern segregationists exploited the mood of anxiety by linking the civil rights movement to an international communist conspiracy. This is the story of the fervent crusaders for racial equality, swept into the maelstrom of the South's siege mentality.

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived "foreignness" of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War.   While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography.

A white American woman is raped by a black Panamanian laborer in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone, and the aftermath affects labor relations in the Western hemisphere for the next two decades. And numerous nations use the African continent to exercise their colonial muscle and postwar power, only to encounter the financial and military burdens that will exhaust and alienate their own citizenry half a world away. As Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War reveals, during this dangerous era there were no longer any "isolated incidents." Like the butterfly flapping its wings and changing the weather on the other side of the globe, an instance of racial or ethnic hostility had ripple effects across a Cold War world of brinksmanship between bitter national rivals and ideological opponents.