America's glass house: essays on Cold War global politics and the Civil Rights Movement.

Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988

Edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer, The University of North Carolina Press, February 2003 $18.95, ISBN 0-807-85428-X

It is difficult to understand why black protest, as old as the United States itself, finally succeeded in precipitating the Civil Rights Movement in the middle of the 20th century. Window on Freedom brings us one step closer to solving that mystery by drawing together a collection of 10 academic essays on the effects of foreign affairs on the struggle for black political participation. Each piece attempts to explain the role of one of several actors: the U.S. State Department, newly independent nations of color, Southern segregationists, the Civil Rights establishment and the media. Together, they explain how the actors attempted to use the foreign policy situation created by race and racism to their advantage.

Brenda Gayle Plummer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and author of Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, June 1996), continues her study of the connection between African Americans' political situation and foreign policy. As editor of this volume, Plummer says, "The [volume's] approach contrasts with the belief that power struggles among states nearly always fully explain the origins of foreign policy, and that policy makers stand apart from and above the prejudices and temptations of ordinary mortals."

Race unified leaders--from Kwame Nkrumah to Roy Wilkins, George Wallace to Ian Smith--in ways national borders could not. And because the intrusion of race and foreign affairs is presented as a fairly new historical endeavor--one that might still require justification--this idea, as well as the struggle to motivate leaders to act outside of these confines, becomes the reason for this volume.

Plummer opens the book by relating the story of Bayard Rustin's early speech at London's Trafalgar Square and how he, in that speech, "link[ed] the struggle against weapons of mass destruction with the struggle of blacks for their basic rights in America." Rustins work on three continents further demonstrates how futile it is to look at the movement in a vacuum. The volume's most useful essays, submitted by Carol Anderson and Mary L. Dudziak, link the familiar battles of the Civil Rights Movement to events in Accra and Moscow.

Two themes link the actors, and, in turn, the essays: the Gold War and the independence movements that swept the developing world. Gerald Home, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor, explains in "Pace From Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of White Supremacy" that the State Department supported the "civilizing" influence of settler regimes in Southern Africa and drew links to those attempting to keep order in the American South. During the Cold War, the State Department was forced to give up overt support of such policies. It did so as black-led governments emphasized race as an issue in the United Nations and other world forums, and as Pravda harped on injustices in the home of the free, and as America ironically saw her superpower status threatened by 40 million powerless within her borders.

This change in policy did not come without setbacks. The Cold War caused much confusion among the new Negroes. Carol Anderson, professor of African American and Diplomatic History at the University of Missouri, Columbia, comments on the divisions created in post-war black leadership: "Few scholars have come to terms with the rancor that the ideological conflicts of the early postwar years engendered among blacks, and the significance of these fratricidal tensions for the character of future black insurgency."

Anderson's informative and accessible essay, "Bleached Souls and Red Negroes: The NAACP and Black Communists in the Early Cold War, 1948-1952," details the purging of Communists from the civil rights organization and the NAACP's attempt to present itself as a patriotic institution. "When the United States made it clear that it could not reconcile economic and social rights with full democracy, the NAACP, afraid of jeopardizing its legal efforts to dismantle Jim Crow, declared itself an 'American organization.' ... This was a fateful decision. In its rush for Cold War respectability, the NAACP had allowed its Negro soul to be 'bleach [ed] ... in a flood of white Americanism.' The association draped itself in the flag and confined itself to a civil rights platform stripped of the economic rights necessary to overcome more than 300 years of oppression."

An article by Thomas Noer, a Carthage College humanities professor, "Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance," highlights the frightening alignment of Southerners obsessed with regional sovereignty with the hard-core, world-conspiracy-theory conservatives, an alliance under the guise of anti-Communism we contend with even today. The essay helps the reader to understand the negative power of the word "Communist" in those times and thus provides some context for the NAACP's decision.

African American students in contact with other black cultures often bristle at the Diaspora's seeming lack of concern for black Americans. Window on Freedom's second and most compelling theme, the emergence of newly independent nations of color determined to challenge the white supremacy that had ruled foreign policy for centuries, changed all that.

In the book's strongest essay "Birmingham, Addis Ababa, and the Image of America: International Influence on U.S. Civil Rights Politics in the Kennedy Administration," Mary L. Dudziak, a University of Southern California School of Law and History professor, reports specifically on the confluence of events in May of 1963, with the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing and on another continent, the Conference of African Heads of State and Government. Dudziak cites an open letter to John F. Kennedy from Milton Obote, Prime Minister of Uganda. Obote believed that "nothing is more paradoxical than that these events [in Birmingham] should take place in the United States and at a time when that country is anxious to project its image before the world screen as ... the champion of freedom."

Window on Freedom sheds light on how global factors worked to solve the most American of problems. See how you fed about civil rights and foreign policy after you look through Plummer's Window.

Shatema Threadcraft is a Ph.D. student at Villanova University.