In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress.
Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam.
Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.
"This book is a tour de force. Dudziak's brilliant analysis shows that the Cold War had a profound impact on the civil rights movement. Hers is the first book to make this important connection. It is a major contribution to our understanding of both the Civil Rights movement and the Cold War itself. . . . Because it is beautifully written in clear, lively prose, and draws its analysis from dramatic events and compelling stories of people involved from the top level of government to the grass roots, it will be an outstanding book for both students and the general public. I recommend it with no hesitation and with great enthusiasm." (Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era)
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6947.html Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality Bruce Nelson
Reviews Table of Contents
Divided We Stand is a study of how class and race have intersected in American society--above all, in the "making" and remaking of the American working class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing mainly on longshoremen in the ports of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and on steelworkers in many of the nation's steel towns, it examines how European immigrants became American and "white" in the crucible of the industrial workplace and the ethnic and working-class neighborhood.
As workers organized on the job, especially during the overlapping CIO and civil rights eras in the middle third of the twentieth century, trade unions became a vital arena in which "old" and "new" immigrants and black migrants forged new alliances and identities and tested the limits not only of class solidarity but of American democracy. The most volatile force in this regard was the civil rights movement. As it crested in the 1950s and '60s, "the Movement" confronted unions anew with the question, "Which side are you on?" This book demonstrates the complex ways in which labor organizations answered that question and the complex relationships between union leaders and diverse rank-and-file constituencies in addressing it.
Divided We Stand includes vivid examples of white working-class "agency" in the construction of racially discriminatory employment structures. But Nelson is less concerned with racism as such than with the concrete historical circumstances in which racialized class identities emerged and developed. This leads him to a detailed and often fascinating consideration of white, working-class ethnicity but also to a careful analysis of black workers--their conditions of work, their aspirations and identities, their struggles for equality. Making its case with passion and clarity, Divided We Stand will be a compelling and controversial book.
Bruce Nelson is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Workers on the Waterfront and of numerous essays and reviews. His next book will be an exploration of the process of "becoming Irish" in the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on the ports of New York and Liverpool.
Review: "A superbly written, intellectually exciting and pioneering book . . . Nelson weds detailed research with indepth interviews, oral histories and his own first-hand experience . . . With grace and acuity, Nelson unites his far-ranging concerns [and] successfully argues that race and ethnicity have long been central issues in the labor movement . . . This book has the potential to profoundly change how we read and think about American history."--Publishers Weekly
Endorsements: "Few books fundamentally reshape intellectual and political debates. This one deserves and promises to do so. No scholar since W.E.B. Du Bois has brought to the study of race and labor in the United States such broad sweep, human detail, and conceptual sophistication. None has given us an account which so aptly combines balanced judgments with a tone which is at once tragic and sympathetic."--David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Divided We Stand skillfully examines the complex and often contradictory history of the American labor movement through the shifting contexts of racial and class hierarchies. Superbly crafted and clearly argued, Divided We Stand explains how and why race was so central to the making of the white American working class. In this impressive study, Bruce Nelson shows how the new labor history should be written."--Manning Marable, Columbia University
More endorsements
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Permissions xvii INTRODUCTION "Something in the 'Atmosphere' of America" xix PART ONE: Longshoremen 1 CHAPTER 1 The Logic and Limits of Solidarity, 1850s-1920s 3 CHAPTER 2 New York: "They . . . Helped to Create Themselves Out of What They Found Around Them" 46 CHAPTER 3 Waterfront Unionism and "Race Solidarity": From the Crescent City to the City of Angels 89 PART TWO: Steelworkers 143 CHAPTER 4 Ethnicity and Race in Steel's Nonunion Era 145 CHAPTER 5 "Regardless of Creed, Color or Nationality": Steelworkers and Civil Rights (I) 185 CHAPTER 6 "We Are Determined to Secure Justice Now": Steelworkers and Civil Rights (II) 219 CHAPTER 7 "The Steel Was Hot, the Jobs Were Dirty, and It Was War": Class, Race, and Working-Class Agency in Youngstown 251 EPILOGUE "Other Energies, Other Dreams": Toward a New labor Movement 287 NOTES 297 INDEX 377
Cut and paste by Michael Pugliese
-----Original Message----- From: Justin Schwartz <jkschw at HOTMAIL.COM> To: SPSM-LIST at LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU <SPSM-LIST at LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> Date: Monday, February 05, 2001 7:17 AM Subject: Re: Quiet '50's
>attempt to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas's public
>>schools in, I believe, 1955.
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>1957.
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>>the growing independence and socialist thinking of Malcolm X,
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>Despite what the SWP used to say, there is no real evidence that Malcolm
was
>ever a socialist.
>
>--jks
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