The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena

About this book

After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the worlds strongest power and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nations leaders with an embarrassing contradiction. Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. Americas closest allies against the Soviet Union however were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial anticommunist alliance. At the same time U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle. The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authoritys last stand. He reveals Americas efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.