Mary L. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy begins with an international incident of U.S. race relations and its impact on anticommunism efforts. Her book is about how domestic concerns were managed and presented for international consumption. She demonstrates how Southerners used the perceived threat of communism to justify their actions as a defense of individual freedom. Dudziak argues, “During the Cold War years, when international perceptions of American democracy were thought to affect the nation’s ability to maintain its leadership role, and particularly to ensure that democracy would be appealing to newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, the diplomatic impact of race in America was especially stark” (pg. 6). Further, “Civil rights groups had to walk a fine line, making it clear that their reform efforts were meant to fill out the contours of American democracy, and not to challenge or undermine it. Organizations outside a narrowing sphere of civil rights politics found it difficult to survive the Cold War years. Under the strictures of Cold War politics, a broad, international critique of racial oppression was out of place” (pg. 11). In this way, “Cold War Civil Rights traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy by setting a U.S. history topic within the context of Cold War world history” (pg. 17).
Dudziak writes, “When nonwhite foreign dignitaries visited the United States and encountered discrimination, it led to serious diplomatic consequences. And as tension between the United States and the Soviet Union increased in the years after the war, the Soviets made effective use of U.S. failings in this area in anti-American propaganda” (pg. 27). She continues, “The best-developed presentation of the government position on race appeared in The Negro in American Life, a USIA pamphlet written in 1950 or 1951. This pamphlet revealed, rather than concealed, the nation’s past failings, and did so for the purpose of presenting American history as a story of redemption…Democracy, not totalitarian forms of government, it argued, provided a context that made reconciliation and redemption possible” (pg. 49). Describing the role of the Red Scare, Dudzia writes, “Senator [Richard B.] Russell [of Georgia] turned the Cold War argument on its head. In a political and cultural climate steeped in anticommunism, arguing that civil rights reform would be a capitulation to communists, who themselves must clearly be pursuing ulterior motives to undermine American society, proved to be a very effective strategy” (pg. 89).
Discussing integration, Dudziak writes, “It was a short step, in the consciousness of 1950s Americans, from international criticisms to Cold War implications. U.S. editorial writers and political figures regularly noted the negative impact Little Rock was thought to have on the nation’s standing in the Cold War. The Soviet Union’s extensive use of Little Rock in anti-American propaganda – often simply republishing facts disseminated by U.S. news sources – reinforced the concern that Little Rock redounded to the benefit of America’s opponents in the battle for the hearts and minds of people around the world” (pg. 121). She continues, “From the perspective of President Eisenhower, the core interests at stake in Little Rock had more to do with federal authority and foreign affairs than with racial equality” (pg. 151). Describing the impact of events on third-world nonaligned nations, Dudziak writes, “Africans were particularly tuned to U.S. racial problems. As a result, State Department officials were greatly troubled by the implications of discrimination for U.S. national security. One concern – a motivating issue since the late 1940s – was how race discrimination in the United States would affect Cold War alignments” (pg. 153). A particular embarrassment was the series of petty injustices visited upon foreign diplomats whose work in the United States took them through the South. ( )