Read the secondary source excerpts below and answer the question at the end.
Secondary Source Excerpts
1. Anti-Colonialism and Civil Rights
Race Against Empire Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937-1957 by Penny M. Von Eschen seeks to identify the political leaders, intellectuals, and journalist, and activists who articulated the bonds between black Americans, Africans, and all oppressed peoples; to emphasize their creative interventions in a rapidly changing world of war; and to trace the process by which their vision came to animate African American political discourse.
This book traces the rise and fall of the politics of the African diaspora from the late 1930s to the early cold war years. At its heart is the story of a political project among an international group of activists and intellectuals and how their project among an international group of activist and intellectuals and how their vision-for a time-animated African American politics. To make sense of their project and its ultimate demise, one must keep an eye on several interrelated political processes. The rapid acceleration of Asian and African challenges to European domination and the crumbling of European hegemony during and in the major European colonial powers and the Soviet Union, followed by the shift as the dominant global power, a position from which the American government fashioned new responses to Asian and African nation building projects. In the intersections of these broad processes one begins to understand the development and collapse of the politics of the African diaspora.
After the McCarthy Era, the following figures of anticolonialism in the 1940s-Du Bois, Robeson, and Hunton-were never again to have a voice in American politics. But although these individuals were marginalized in the U.S. and African American politics, the issues for which they had fought-most fundamentally a conception of democracy that embraced political, economic, and civil rights on a global scale, and a radical democratic critique of American and civil rights on a global scale, and a radical democratic of American foreign policy-were once again debated in the 1960s…
The global vision of democracy developed by Malcolm X just before he was slain embraced anti-imperialism. He also joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), explicitly linking his internationalism with the fight for civil rights in the United States….
African American intellectuals, journalist, activist, and political leaders had argued that the liberation of Africa and Asia would have a significant impact on the struggles of African Americans, and the birth of new African and Asian states did indeed have far-ranging repercussions in American domestic politics and civil rights. The concern with America’s image in the world, which had loomed so large for the Truman administration, continued to appear in civil rights rhetoric. As Martin Luther King Jr. told a rally at St. John’s Church in Birmingham in 1963, “The United States is concerned about its image….Mr. Kennedy is battling for the minds and hearts of men in Africa and Asia…and they aren’t gonna respect the U.S. of America if she deprives men and women of their basic rights of life because of the color of their skin. Mr. Kennedy knows that.”
It was only after the mass mobilization of African Americans and their allies in the southern civil rights movement from 1955 on that the Kennedy administration, in the summers of 1963, set in motion the events that would lead at last to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It may be true, given the political terrain of the 1950s that the moderated civil rights agenda contributed to the movement’s dramatic successes , but it also meant that a host of question s concerning political, economic , and social rights in an international context were neglected in favor of an exclusive focus on domestic political and civil rights. Anticolonial activists of the 1940s had advocated freedom for Africans and those of Africans decent within an anti-imperialist, anticapitalist framework. They also elaborated a profound vision of the rights, and global responsibilities of American citizenship. But civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s negotiated in an international and national terrain dominated by the cold war.
But despite these fissures in the history of anticolonialism and the American government’s aggressive attempts to suppress antiimperialist’s politics, one sees profound implications of the politics of the African diaspora in the continuing challenges to empire and continuing relevance of the analysis of the 1940s activists. The fate of the 940s politics of the African diaspora tells much about the stakes involved in challenging economics inequality and insisting on a global understanding of economics exploitation and the fight for human rights. The collision of anticolonial politics with cold war liberalism illuminates the political and economic conditions faced by later democratic projects – from those of Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba , and the ANC to Maurice bishop , Michael Manley, and Haiti ‘s jean Bertrand Aristides – as well as vulnerability of these projects to internationally organized state repression.
2. Anti-Communism and the Civil Rights Movement
Black and Red: Black Liberation, The Cold War, and the Horne Thesis
-Erik S. McDuffie
In Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, Horne posits what would become a major argument in this and several other works. "This study will there was a close identification between the antiBlack and the antiRed- and that Du Bois did not escape [cold warriors'] attention." Adding that historians have not sufficiently examined the "leftist tilt of the Black community generally," Horne insightfully shows how Du Bois's politics in his later years captured the confluence of socialism, civil rights, anti-colonialsim, and peace. For these reasons, U.S. cold warriors moved to suppress Du Bois's political activism. However, he was not alone in being targeted by McCarthyites. Other African American radicals suffered a similar fate, including Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Claudia Jones, and Benjamin J. Davis Jr., whose historic election in 1943 to the New York City Council made him the first black-red elected to political office. The campaign to silence black leftists underscores the personal and political costs of the anticommunist crusade for black radicals. Their repression, Horne argues, removed some of the most committed African American activists from the local, national and global political stage, but the doors were open for civl rights reforms...
Horne's thesis has important implications for understanding the Red Scare's legacy on African American life and politics, as well as the ideological origins, contours, and contradictions of 1960s black nationalism. This is most evident in Fire This Time. Framing the Cold War as a rupture in black life, he argues that the black left's suppression was a key factor in sparking the August 1965 Watts uprising. According to Horne, the Communist Party branch in Los Angeles was one of the most vibrant nationwide during and immediately after World War II. The city also counted a viable, broad-based black left committed to multiracial coalition-building and proletarian internationalism. Los Angeles black leftists, he shows, won important local civil rights victories during and immediately after the war in the areas of housing, employment, and schooling. The silencing of Los Angeles black left in the McCarthy era, Horne argues created and "ideological vacuum" filled by "narrow nationalism" espoused by various 1960s black nationalist and community groups.These included the religious separatists in the Nation of Islam; the US organization and other cultural nationalist formations; the Black Panther Party; and street gangs. Rejecting the broad-based interracialism and proletarian internationalism adopted by black leftist, these black nationalist embraced "muscular nationalism." This hyper-masculine politics celebrated violence, male chauvinism, and macho bravado, and rejected, in effect, the progressive gender and sexual politics practiced by some black leftist. Unfortunately, the self-destructive tendencies helped make these black nationalist formations more vulnerable to state repression.
-Erik S. McDuffie
In Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, Horne posits what would become a major argument in this and several other works. "This study will there was a close identification between the antiBlack and the antiRed- and that Du Bois did not escape [cold warriors'] attention." Adding that historians have not sufficiently examined the "leftist tilt of the Black community generally," Horne insightfully shows how Du Bois's politics in his later years captured the confluence of socialism, civil rights, anti-colonialsim, and peace. For these reasons, U.S. cold warriors moved to suppress Du Bois's political activism. However, he was not alone in being targeted by McCarthyites. Other African American radicals suffered a similar fate, including Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Claudia Jones, and Benjamin J. Davis Jr., whose historic election in 1943 to the New York City Council made him the first black-red elected to political office. The campaign to silence black leftists underscores the personal and political costs of the anticommunist crusade for black radicals. Their repression, Horne argues, removed some of the most committed African American activists from the local, national and global political stage, but the doors were open for civl rights reforms...
Horne's thesis has important implications for understanding the Red Scare's legacy on African American life and politics, as well as the ideological origins, contours, and contradictions of 1960s black nationalism. This is most evident in Fire This Time. Framing the Cold War as a rupture in black life, he argues that the black left's suppression was a key factor in sparking the August 1965 Watts uprising. According to Horne, the Communist Party branch in Los Angeles was one of the most vibrant nationwide during and immediately after World War II. The city also counted a viable, broad-based black left committed to multiracial coalition-building and proletarian internationalism. Los Angeles black leftists, he shows, won important local civil rights victories during and immediately after the war in the areas of housing, employment, and schooling. The silencing of Los Angeles black left in the McCarthy era, Horne argues created and "ideological vacuum" filled by "narrow nationalism" espoused by various 1960s black nationalist and community groups.These included the religious separatists in the Nation of Islam; the US organization and other cultural nationalist formations; the Black Panther Party; and street gangs. Rejecting the broad-based interracialism and proletarian internationalism adopted by black leftist, these black nationalist embraced "muscular nationalism." This hyper-masculine politics celebrated violence, male chauvinism, and macho bravado, and rejected, in effect, the progressive gender and sexual politics practiced by some black leftist. Unfortunately, the self-destructive tendencies helped make these black nationalist formations more vulnerable to state repression.
3. International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941-1960
- Azza Salama Layton
In the two decades following World War II, the advances in U.S. Civil rights were unmatched in American history. During Franklin D. Roosevelt's second administration, there were hints of a new receptivity to civil rights changes on the part of some within the federal government establishment. Simultaneously, civil rights advocates continued to pressure and mobilize
supporters to end institutionalized segregation and racial discrimination.
The emerging Cold War pressures attendant to the superpower competition for influence in the postwar world order represented a sea of change in the federal approach to the “Negro problem” Domestic pressures had to be accompanied by international pressures. International factors and their impact on America's foreign policy interests swung the pendulum in favor of civil rights. advocacy. Why did the Executive branch of the federal government in 1946, place civil rights reforms at the top of its domestic policy agenda? Why in the midst of an era marked by civil rights violations and colored by rivalry with the Soviet Union and a national phobia concerning domestic Communism that were used to justify repression at home against unions, universities, business, and even government
sectors do we see improvements and a push by the Executive and Judicial branches for civil rights reforms for African Americans?...
The key to explaining why President Truman pushed civil rights reforms to the top of his public agenda following World War II lies, in the dynamic relation between domestic race policy and U.S. Foreign policy interests. America's entry into global politics and the “complex interdependence” of international politics altered the bargaining positions of African Americans and civil rights advocates and also that of Southern Democrats....The increasing international pressures on the U.S. Government to
“put its own house in order” pushed forward reforms that started with executive and judicial measures. International pressures injected confidence into African American aspirations. These pressures
provided new opportunities for civil rights advocate and helped in the peaking culmination of the civil rights movement and the passage of the long overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
We will never know how far or how fast the American political system and American society would have moved by themselves toward equality and full citizenship of African Americans. We will never know what the substance of freedom would have been if the world scene were not drastically altered and brought white supremacy down so abruptly. We will never know if civil rights reforms would have taken just years, as it did, or generations.
What we know is that domestic discrimination was a liability to American objectives abroad. We know that the government's efforts in fighting legal discrimination were secondary to its fight against Communism. Instead of genuinely addressing problems of discrimination, violence, and the denial of rights to black America, the federal government directed its resources to glazing over problems and trying to change, through public relations, the world's perceptions of American race relations. Instead of government officials attacking racism as wrong, illegal, and immoral, officials attacked race policies as being detrimental to the United States' fight against Communism. Moreover, to sell reforms, civil rights advocates had to package their plight with international appeals.
Which excerpt best fits your current understanding of the Civil Rights movement? Explain why?
Warm Up Activity
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Primary Sources
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What do Historians Say?
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Final Activity
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