Mary L. Dudziak,Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xii + 330 pp. $39.50 cloth; $18.95 paper.

Extract

The US government's ideological and foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War years, argues historian and legal scholar Mary Dudziak, had a paradoxical effect on the trajectory of civil rights reform. International pressures would “simultaneously constrain and enhance civil rights reform” (11). On the one hand, the anti-communism of the Cold War era silenced the more radical opponents of American race relations, capitalism, and colonialism, leading to a “narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse” (13). On the other hand, racist violence and the persistence of Jim Crow made it hard for government officials to portray the United States as a democratic, free, and open society, one that was vastly superior to the totalitarianism of the Soviet bloc. That proved to be a problem, however, as the Soviets and Americans competed for the allegiance of growing numbers of nations undergoing a process of decolonization. Civil rights activists skillfully took advantage of the opening provided by the Cold War, aggressively and sometimes successfully advancing their campaign for civil rights.