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Book Review
| The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. By THOMAS BORSTELMANN. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. 384 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
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Thomas Borstelmann's The Cold War and the Color Line is a masterful narrative that contextualizes the U.S. civil rights movement within an international setting. It contributes—along with Mary L. Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)—to a growing literature showing how the Cold War was essential to the successes of the U.S. civil rights movement. But by recasting the years from 1945 to 1990 also as a period of global struggle by billions of nonwhites trying to regain freedoms taken away by whites, Borstelmann clarifies and underlines the vital role of race in midcentury domestic and international politics. |
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After World War II, the eyes of the world were indeed upon the United States, watching to see how legitimately it could claim to be the "leader of the free world." When Secretary of State James Byrnes criticized the Soviets in 1946 for denying free elections in the Balkans, the Soviets shot back that the same right was denied to "the Negroes of Mr. Byrnes' own state of South Carolina" (p. 75). Jim Crow—aptly called America's "Achilles' heel before the world" by Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge—undermined U.S. claims of moral leadership since it, too, was a "totalitarian state" for African Americans (p.76). Domestic racism also weakened U.S. vows of political commitment to the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Before the landmark civil rights legislation, Cold War presidents faced the embarrassment of having nonwhite foreign dignitaries rudely harassed or dismissed in a racially segregated America. The casual, everyday racism of any white person thus endangered U.S. policy objectives to win the alliance of nonwhite, decolonized nations (p.126). |
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