I believe it was the Civil Rights movement that actually bullied the Southern segregationists. I am kind of surprised to see this role attributed to the U.S. government.
- -- Gordon
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6924.html Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
Mary L. Dudziak In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson.
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.
"Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Mary Dudziak's book makes a spectacularly illuminating contribution to a subject traditionally neglected--the linkage between race relations and foreign policy: neither African-American history nor diplomatic history will be the same again."--Gerald Horne, author of Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois
"Reinhold Niebuhr once commented that blacks cannot count on the altruism of whites for improvements in blacks' condition. Readers who think Niebuhr's remark was unfair to whites need to read this book. Mary Dudziak documents, in impressive detail, how the self-interest of elite whites instigated, shaped, and limited civil rights gains for blacks during the Cold War years. Raises serious questions about the future of racial justice in America."--Richard Delgado, Jean Lindsley Professor of Law, University of Colorado
"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
"This book reflects a growing interest among historians in the global significance of race. . . . It is accessible and will have multiple uses as an approach to civil rights history, as an examination of policy making, and as a model of how a study can be attentive to both foreign and domestic aspects of a particular issue. It is tightly argued, coherent, and polished, and it features some particularly fine writing."-- Brenda Plummer, author of Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960
Mary L. Dudziakis Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, where she teaches civil rights history and constitutional law. She has published widely on twentieth-century legal history and civil rights history.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/Newsroom/pr_coldwar_colorline.html A War at Home and A War Abroad: Fighting the Cold War and the Movement for Racial Justice and Civil Rights
THE COLD WAR AND THE COLOR LINE:
American Race Relations in the Global Arena
Thomas Borstelmann
>...The United States government faced two preeminent challenges after World War II: how to administer its
newfound responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power and how to manage the rising movement at home
for racial justice and civil rights. The American effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union
resulted in the Cold War-a half-century ideological struggle that emphasized the American commitment to
freedom. The absence of that freedom for non-white Americans therefore confronted the nation's leaders with an
embarrassing contradiction. How they went about resolving this dilemma is a central theme in modern political
history.
THE COLD WAR AND THE COLOR LINE: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Harvard University Press / January 10, 2002 / $35.00 / £ 23.95) by Thomas Borstelmann, Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of formal, global white supremacy. Racial discrimination after 1945 was not only a domestic problem, it was also an international one. Borstelmann illustrates the two conflicting issues by providing an example from 1961. A waitress at a diner in Maryland refused to serve Malick Sow, the ambassador to the U.S. of the newly independent African nation of Chad, because she thought, "He looked like just any ordinary run of the mill n-word to me." It was clear that the United States could no longer ignore the world's non-white majority, and the U.S. foreign relations could not be insulated from the nation's race relations.
Jim Crow segregation was merely one piece of a global system of white control over people of color. Just as it helped initiate the U.S. civil rights movement, World War II opened the door into what Borstelmann calls the "international civil rights movement"- the final stage of the struggle of Asians and Africans for independence from Western European colonial rule. Colonial powers including Britain and France, however, were America's closest allies against the Soviet Union. American leaders from Harry Truman to the first George Bush labored to construct a multiracial, anticommunist alliance of the First World and the emerging independent Third World. Simultaneously, they pursued gradual racial reform at home in the United States in order to preserve the domestic consensus underpinning the Cold War struggle. THE COLD WAR AND THE COLOR LINE also focuses on the two Souths-South Africa and the U.S. South as primary sites of white authority's last stand. The book also makes the connection of the civil rights movement in the United States to movements for liberation in Africa and Asia.
While connections have been previously made between America's domestic postwar racial tensions and its Cold War role as the defender of democracy, no one has pulled the story together like THE COLD WAR AND THE COLOR LINE has. Borstelmann has gone farther than anyone else in demonstrating the influence of race-thinking on the evolution of the Cold War, and the struggles of key policy makers of the period to contain the forces of racial polarization. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0209/berrett.php