Book Review

Much of the richest recent scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement can be found in local studies such as Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. However, another burgeoning field that promises to reshape historical scholarship takes us in another direction, toward an international perspective on the movement. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy is the first comprehensive analysis of how Cold War foreign relations influenced U.S. civil rights policy from World War II until the mid-sixties. Seeking not to replace local and national studies of the Civil Rights Movement nor to privilege a top-down focus on government elites, Dudziak asks us to expand our horizons. The book's title, without punctuation between Cold War and Civil Rights, also challenges approaches to postwar history that assign these subjects to separate chapters, as many textbooks do.	1
By considering the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement together, Dudziak argues that race was a national security issue, central to ideological conflicts over American democracy. Her argument helps explain a seeming contradiction. Why did the federal government begin to support civil rights within a largely hostile environment? After all, southerners held considerable power in Congress and white southern voters could make or break a presidential election. Turning our focus toward the international arena, Dudziak argues that the problem of race attracted so much foreign attention in the early Cold War that it threatened to undermine U.S. claims to the superiority of democracy over communism. Organized around the civil rights conflicts that provoked the most international uproar such as Little Rock and Birmingham, the book vividly shows why race refused to disappear from any presidential agenda from Truman to Johnson.	2
One of Dudziak's strongest arguments is that the U.S. government attempted to safeguard America's image and counter Soviet propaganda by constructing a story of the nation's past that acknowledged racial discrimination but presented American democracy itself as the only viable pathway forward. Early in the Cold War, Truman officials decided that since they could not hide the U.S.'s legacy of slavery and discrimination, they would incorporate it into a story of redemption, presenting democracy as "the vehicle for national reconciliation" (49). The logic of this "narrative of race and democracy," as Dudziak calls it, required U.S. presidents to pursue civil rights reforms (77). She offers a fascinating account of the Justice Department's unprecedented amicus curiae briefs in the landmark Supreme Court desegregation decisions preceding Brown v. Board of Education. Drawing on court decisions and legal briefs, she details U.S. arguments that national security interests were at stake in these decisions.	3
Likewise, Dudziak argues, John F. Kennedy found it impossible to pursue American strategic interests abroad without promoting civil rights at home, especially when it came to Africa, where seventeen nations achieved independence between January and November 1960 (153). Keenly attuned to Cold War foreign relations but initially far less committed to civil rights, Kennedy shifted direction midstream by calling for major civil rights legislation after Bull Connors's televised fire hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham prompted international condemnation. Dudziak makes creative use of correspondence and clippings from U.S. embassies to show how closely the State Department monitored foreign opinion. The analysis of Kennedy and Africa is especially strong; in some chapters use of this otherwise rich evidence from U.S. embassies around the world left me fuzzy about which spots most worried U.S. officials.	4
Dudziak's chapter on the Johnson administration is particularly provocative. By 1965, she argues, the race and democracy narrative had largely achieved its goals, once the 1964 Civil Rights Act made the government "more immune to criticism" (235). Violence against demonstrators in Selma elicited criticism in 1965, yet the federal government was construed as "part of the solution," not the problem (236). Paradoxically, she argues, this political achievement helped push civil rights from the center of the Cold War agenda--just as urban rebellions were demanding further change. Vietnam would overtake civil rights as the key Cold War foreign relations issue.	5
Although "the Cold War imperative" enabled social change, Dudziak argues that it also constrained it (249). Because foreign affairs frequently drove the reform impulse among government elites, social change could be left to articulating abstract principles. A powerful example of this shortcoming is school desegregation; the principles of equality set forth in Brown may have elicited foreign accolades, but a decade later most southern schools had undergone only token desegregation. The Cold War imperative was also directly repressive; at the height of McCarthyism, Dudziak and other scholars show, the Truman administration advocated civil rights while curtailing activities of prominent African Americans abroad. Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Duziak provides an excellent case study of the State Department's repression of entertainer Josephine Baker. She also analyzes post-McCarthyism strategies, including attempts to neutralize Malcolm X's influence abroad. Most troubling is the Cold War's ideological impact on civil rights leaders and organizations who abandoned more trenchant critiques of American society. Dudziak concludes that even if "the Cold War helped motivate civil rights reform, it limited the field of vision to formal equality, to opening the doors of opportunity, and away from a broader critique of the American economic and political system" (252).	6
Dudziak's discussion of Cold War constraints hints at another side of the story that needs more exploration. To avoid assigning too much agency to government elites, we need to probe how movement activists responded to these controlling forces. Many mark Johnson's attempt to curtail the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's public presence during the 1964 Democratic Convention as the moment when their world view shifted dramatically to the left. For others, the 1965 Watts rebellion pushed them to embrace radical perspectives on race and class. By the mid-1960s, far from being taken in by the conservative embrace of American democracy some civil rights leaders espoused, many activists studying Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon had formed incisive critiques of American imperialism and explicitly supported liberation movements. Even at the height of McCarthyism, many African Americans sympathized with individuals harassed by the State Department and cheered African independence struggles. Reaching beyond local studies while avoiding top-down perspectives may require more nuanced readings of this dynamic relationship between Cold War constraints and their disruption.	7
This concern aside, I look forward to using Cold War Civil Rights in teaching on the postwar U.S. precisely because it challenges readers to think globally and locally about the relation between the Cold War and civil rights. It also provides food for thought on the post–Cold War era. Voting rights again grabbed headlines after the 2000 elections. What does it mean to revisit this subject in a period when there is no longer a Cold War imperative?	8
Laurie B. Green University of Texas at Austin

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