The book Cold War Civil Rights by Mary Dudziak is an important and interesting book that chronicles a critical part of American history. Dudziak traces two concurrent periods of history – the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War – and argues that those two parts of history are not isolated and independent. Rather, they must be understood in concert, as they actually weighed upon one another. While the book has a number of themes, two of the most important have to do with some of the contradictions inherent in America’s moralizing during the Cold War and also the ability of the Cold War to encourage social progress during the Civil Rights Movement.
Dudziak argues early in the book about some of the racial atrocities taking place in the United States in the post-World War II era, and she argues that these atrocities represented a major contradiction in America’s Cold War rhetoric. Especially in the American South, things were especially difficult on black people after World War II. Dudziak describes the period between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Civil Rights Movement as being a sort of forgotten terrorism, where black people were largely unprotected by the law and otherwise subjected to a number of horrors done by both individuals and state and federal governments. For instance, a black handyman in Alabama was sentenced to death for stealing just less than two dollars in 1958. A few years earlier, a group of white men murdered black teenager Emmett Till in cold blood and were not given any punishment for their crime. The author argues that these sorts of social injustices were a major source of conflict and contradiction for the United States during the Cold War.
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"Cold War Civil Rights: Themes and Analysis".
In order to understand this theme, one must understand the Cold War and the reasons that America gave for writing it. As the author notes, the Cold War was about America trying to spread its ideology. That ideology can be understood to be some mixture of democracy and capitalism – two systematic concepts that have become intertwined in such a way that it is difficult to separate them in the American lexicon. More than that, though, the Cold War in America was understood as a battle between good and evil. It was not just that democracy and capitalism were good for their own sake. Rather, those things were good because America was good, and because America was good, it had both the duty and the right to spread its ideas around the world. Communism, on the other hand, was a force that was decidedly bad. This sort of binary thinking formed the basis for the Cold War. As the author points out, while the United States was fighting a decades-long geopolitical battle with the Soviet Union and other communist forces – argument for its position based upon its moral authority – back home, it was not even treating many of its own people fairly. America was seeking to spread “freedom” abroad, but people were scarcely free in the United States, especially if those people were not white males during this particular period. This important contradiction is something that makes the Cold War appear to be somewhat misguided and silly, according to the author.
In addition, there is an important theme about how the Cold War helped to influence and drive the Civil Rights Movement. If one takes the logical conclusion put forward by the author, then one must believe that in order for there to be action, there has to be an impetus or a motivating factor. America, which had engaged in centuries of various forms of systematic oppression of black people – from slavery to voting restrictions to lynchings with no consequences to housing discrimination – did not start to take these problems seriously until America’s ability to “win” the Cold War was questioned and affected by the lack of American progress on the issue. With that in mind, the author argues centrally that one of the primary reasons why America got serious about racial justice is so that the country could establish its credibility in the world in order to push its anti-communist agenda. America recognized that it needed, more than almost anything else, a modicum of respect if it was going to be a successful player in the geopolitical scene. The book’s primary theme, then, is that the Civil Rights Movement may not have been possible if not for the geopolitical contours of the Cold War. While the Civil Rights Movement leaders deserve credit for bringing the issue to bear, it was ultimately the political conditions that led the government to provide a full-throated support for the Civil Rights Movement.
Ultimately, the author is drawing a link between two periods that happened in concert, but most people think are distinct in some meaningful way. As the author makes clear, these two periods cannot be understood in a bubble because they did not take place in that bubble. Rather, the racial atrocities of the early twentieth century provide a frame by which one must view the claims of American moralism. In the same way, one can scarcely understand the Civil Rights Movement and its influences without understanding that the Cold War, which the US wanted to win very badly, helped to encourage the American government to get on board with racial and social reform.
- Dudziak, M. L. (2011). Cold war civil rights: Race and the image of American democracy. Princeton University Press.
