Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955.

Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. By Carol Anderson. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 302. Paper, $22.99, ISBN 0-521-53158-6; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-82431-1.)

In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson argues that both liberal and leftist African American leaders of the middle to late 1940s believed that the struggle for black equality required more than "civil rights," or the removal of the formal legal and political restrictions that characterized the Jim Crow era (p. 1). Rather, liberals, such as NAACP leader Walter White, and leftists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, envisioned a broader movement for "human rights" that would remedy the disparities in education, health care, housing, and other social goods that plagued black America (p. 5). Black leaders wanted the United Nations Organization to establish international standards of human rights that would require the United States to ameliorate the social ills caused by centuries of racism. These hopes were dashed. Although liberals such as President Harry S Truman and UN Human Rights Commission chair and NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt were somewhat sympathetic toward black demands for civil rights, they were unwilling to support a broader human rights agenda that Anderson believes would have produced more genuine equality for African Americans.

Anderson argues that the politics of the Cold War explain why black demands for human rights fell on deaf ears. In the postwar period American leaders were much more interested in using the UN Commission on Human Rights to attack the Soviet Union than they were in human betterment. Further, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations would not support international standards of human rights that would bring U.S. racial practices under international scrutiny.

Anderson maintains that the NAACP accommodated Cold War hysteria by trimming its sails in the late 1940s and early 1950s to espouse a more limited "civil rights" agenda. Black leftists who resisted this shift, such as Du Bois, were ousted from the NAACP, and many black leftist organizations withered away during the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s. The result was a restricted "civil rights" movement that sought the demolition of the Jim Crow regime but was unable to address deeper structural inequalities.

Eyes Off the Prize is a well-written and densely researched work that makes an important contribution to the growing literature on African American engagement with U.S. foreign affairs. One may differ with Anderson's assumption that a broader "human rights" movement would have had any chance of succeeding given the political climate she describes or would have produced the results she anticipates. Further, she may underestimate the extent to which the NAACP's anticommunism was driven by its own long-standing differences with the Left, rather than being a capitulation to the Cold War climate. Nonetheless, Anderson illuminates the international context within which the African American civil rights struggle emerged and presents a balanced and perceptive analysis of the black liberal/leftist split of the 1950s. This is a fine book that deserves to occupy a central position in a growing and important field.

Davidson College

DANIEL W. ALDRIDGE III