Cold War Civil Rights Primary Sources Packet
From the President’s Committee on Civil Rights report, To Secure These Rights, 1947:Our foreign policy is designed to make the United States an enormous, positive influence for peace and progress throughout the world. We have tried to let nothing, not even extreme political differences between ourselves and foreign nations, stand in the way of this goal. But our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle.
From a letter addressed to the Fair Employment Practices Commission Chairman from Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 1947:
The existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesmen, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired…Frequently we find it next to impossible to formulate a satisfactory answer to our critics in other countries.
An atmosphere of suspicion and resentment in a country over the way a minority is being treated in the United States is a formidable obstacle to the development of mutual understanding and trust between the two countries. We will have better international relations when these reasons for suspicion and resentment have been removed.
From speech delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren to the American Bar Association, 1954:
Our American System like all others is on trial both at home and abroad. The way it works; the manner in which it solves the problems of our day; the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our Constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile.
Excerpts from various communications from the U.S. Embassy in Cape Town, South Africa:
Most South African Whites are segregationists and, though they may see some similarity in America’s color problem, regard their own racial situation as having no true parallel elsewhere. Their interest in the decisions, then, would be very academic. (1954)
The effect of Little Rock, of course was to confirm to South African ‘Apartheid’ supporters—most white South Africans—that the forces against integration were gaining in the United States (1957)
From a South African Broadcasting Company broadcast in July 1967 on the Black Power movement:
[The Black Power movement is] actually a quest by the American Negro to find his own Bantustan-type homeland and culture far removed from any whites—proving that apartheid is the answer to America’s racial situation as well.
Tass, the Soviet telegraph service, from an anti-American propaganda article widely distributed in India
American imperialism destroyed the largest section of the native population of North America and doomed the survivors to a slow death…equally tragic….America’s soil is drenched in the blood and sweat of Negro toilers.
From a 1949 article in the Soviet newspaper The Bolshevik
The poison of racial hatred has become so strong in post-war America that matters go to unbelievable lengths; for example a Negress injured in a road accident could not be taken to a neighbouring hospital since this hospital was only for “whites.”
From a 1949 article in the Soviet Literary Gazette
It is a country within a country. Coloured America is not allowed to mix with the other white America, it exists within it like the yolk in the white of an egg. Or, to be more exact, like a gigantic ghetto. The walls of this ghetto are invisible but they are nonetheless indestructible. They are placed within cities where the Negroes live in special quarters, in busses where the Negroes are assigned only the back seats, in hairdressers where they have special chairs.
Ta Kung Pao(a Shanghai Communist newspaper), May 6, 1948 responding the May 2nd arrest of Progressive Vice-Presidential candidate Henry A Wallace for breaking Alabama’s segregation laws. Wallace attempted to use the “colored entrance” to address a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress.
We cannot help having some impressions of the United States which actually already leads half of the world and which would like to continue to lead it. If the United States merely wants to ‘dominate’ the world, the atomic bomb and the U.S. dollar will be sufficient to achieve this purpose. However, the world cannot be ‘dominated’ for a long period of time. If the United States wants to ‘lead’ the world, it must have a kind of moral superiority in addition to military superiority…the United States prides itself on its ‘liberal traditions,’ and it is in the United States itself that these traditions can best be demonstrated.
A list of newspaper article titles from India circa 1951:
“Negro Baiting in America”
“Treatment of Negroes a Blot on U.S.”
“Untouchability Banished in India: Worshipped in America”
From an article in the Sunday Observer of Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1949:
The colour bar is the greatest propaganda gift any country could give the Kremlin in its persistent bid for the affections of the coloured races of the world.
James W. Ivy, from an article in the July 1950 issue of The Crisis, a publication by the NAACP:
“Our segregation, our mob violence, and our Dixiecrats contribute grist to the European mills of anti-Americanism. To preach democratic equality while making distinctions of color and race strikes Europeans as bizarre, if not perverse.”
From the NAACP’s “An Appeal to the World” filed October 23, 1947 at the United Nations:
It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi; not Stalin and Molotov but Bilbo and Rankin; internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad….
..Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease. It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation, for an end to these terrible in justices that constitute a daily and ever-increasing violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide.
U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy on civil rights related “street demonstrations”, 1963:
The result is that someone is very likely to get hurt. It’s bad for the country. Its bad for us around the world…get this into court and out of the street.
From the brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae in Brown v. Board of Education (Filed December 1952)
It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of race discrimination must be viewed.
Excerpts from We Charge Genocide, a CRC petition to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights, 1951
It is our hope, and we fervently believe that it was the hope and aspiration of every black American whose voice was silenced forever through premature death at the hands of racist-minded hooligans or Klan terrorists, that the truth recorded here will be made known to the world; that it will speak with a tongue of fire loosing an unquenchable moral crusade, the universal response to which will sound the death knell of all racist theories…
We believe that the test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals and is not to be found in the lofty platitudes that pervade so many treaties or constitutions. The essence lies not in the form but rather, in the substance…
This genocide of which our petitioners complain serves now, as it has in previous forms in the past, specific political and economic aims. Once its goal was the subjugation of American Negroes for the profits of chattel slaver. Now its ai is the splitting and emasculation of mass movements for peace and democracy, so that a reaction may perpetuate its control and continue receiving the highest profits in the entire history of man. That purpose menaces the peace of the world as well as the life and welfare of the Negro people.
Dean Rusk, from a November 4, 1947 memorandum on the creation of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights’ Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities:
...the first session of the Subcommission is a very important one to the United States, principally because it deals with a very difficult problem affecting the internal affairs of the United States. United States problems concerning relationships with minority groups have been fully treated in the press of other countries. This Subcommission was established on the initiative of the U.S.S.R., and there is every indication that that country and others will raise questions concerning our domestic problems in this regard.
From an open letter addressed to President Kennedy from Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda, protesting the treatment of African American demonstrators in Birmingham, 1963:
The Negroes who…have been subjected to the most inhuman treatment, who have been blasted with fire hoses cranked up to such pressure that the water could strip bark off trees, at whom the police have deliberately set snarling dogs, are our own kith and kin. The only offences which these people have committed are that they are black and that they have demanded the right to be free and to hold their heads up as equal citizens of the United States.
From a letter addressed to President Kennedy from President Nyerere of Tanganyika, 1963:
I appreciated your efforts in connection with the reinvigorated demand by the Negro Citizens of America for full equal rights…[I am confident you will] find a solution which gives justice to all American citizens. In doing so you will be making a great contribution to the cause of non-racialism throughout the world.
From a letter addressed to President Kennedy from President Youlou of the Congo, 1963:
Certainly you can measure better than anyone else the repercussions which the events in Birmingham are having in Africa...I believe that the American Negroes are American, , and that, at the present stage of your difficulties they do not yet have any aspiration for national independence. It is your government that either will or will not be able to keep them in the United States, or else make foreigners of them. But it is, first of all, among Americans that the solution must be sought.