Cold War Civil Rights

Demands for justice persisted in the early years of the Cold War. African American efforts were propelled by symbolic victories — as when Jackie Robinson broke through the color line in major league baseball by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 — but the growing black vote in northern cities proved more decisive. During World War II, more than a million African Americans migrated to northern and western cities, where they joined the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (Map 27.1). This newfound political leverage awakened northern liberals, many of whom became allies of civil rights advocates. Ultimately, the Cold War produced mixed results, as the nation’s commitment to anticommunism opened some avenues for civil rights while closing others.

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MAP 27.1 Internal Migrations
The migration of African Americans from the South to other regions of the country produced one of the most remarkable demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth century. Between World War I — which marked the start of the Great Migration — and the 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans left the South. Where they settled in the North and West, they helped change the politics of entire cities and even states. Seeking black votes, which had become a key to victory in major cities, liberal Democrats and Republicans alike in New York, Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania, for instance, increasingly made civil rights part of their platform. In this way, migration advanced the political cause of black equality.

Civil Rights and the New Deal Coalition African American leaders were uncertain what to expect from President Truman, inheritor of the New Deal coalition but not opposed to using racist language himself. Though he did not immediately support social equality for African Americans, Truman supported civil rights because he believed in equality before the law. Moreover, he understood the growing importance of the small but often decisive black vote in key northern states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Civil rights activists Randolph and Powell — along with vocal white liberals such as Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, and members of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal organization — pressed Truman to act.

With no support for civil rights in Congress, Truman turned to executive action. In 1946, he appointed the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, whose 1947 report, “To Secure These Rights,” called for robust federal action to ensure equality for African Americans. With the report fresh in his mind, in 1948 Truman issued an executive order desegregating employment in federal agencies and, under pressure from Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, desegregated the armed forces. Truman then sent a message to Congress asking that all of the report’s recommendations — including the abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practices Commission — be made into law. It was the most aggressive, and politically bold, call for racial equality by the leader of a major political party since Reconstruction.

Truman’s boldness was too much for southern Democrats. Under the leadership of Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, white Democrats from the South formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, known popularly as the Dixiecrats, for the 1948 election. This brought into focus an internal struggle developing within the Democratic Party and its still-formidable New Deal coalition. Would the civil rights aims of the party’s liberal wing alienate southern white Democrats, as well as many suburban whites in the North? It was the first hint of the discord that would eventually divide the Democratic Party in the 1960s.

Race and Anticommunism The Cold War shaped civil rights in both positive and negative terms. In a time of growing fear of communist expansionism, Truman worried about America’s image in the world. He reminded Americans that when whites and blacks “fail to live together in peace,” that failure hurt “the cause of democracy itself in the whole world.” Indeed, the Soviet Union used American racism as a means of discrediting the United States abroad. “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics,” the Committee on Civil Rights wrote. International tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union thus appeared to strengthen the hand of civil rights leaders, because America needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world that its race relations were improving (America Compared).

However, the Cold War strengthened one hand while weakening the other. McCarthyism and the hunt for subversives at home held the civil rights movement back. Civil rights opponents charged that racial integration was “communistic,” and the NAACP was banned in many southern states as an “anti-American” organization. Black Americans who spoke favorably of the Soviet Union, such as the actor and singer Paul Robeson, or had been “fellow travelers” in the 1930s, such as the pacifist Bayard Rustin, were persecuted. Robeson, whose career was destroyed by such accusations, told House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogators, “My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to … have a part of it just like you.” The fate of people like Robeson showed that the Cold War could work against the civil rights cause just as easily as for it.

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