Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
tives for racial reform in the United States. Statesmen, policy
makers, molders of public opinion, and even judges
became increasingly sensitive during the postwar years to
the international liability of America’s racial practices in the
struggle with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds”
of people in what came to be known as the Third World. 52
The Communists had some natural advantages in this conflict.
Marxist ideology was insistently “nonracialist”; the
various non-European nationalities in the Soviet Union
were, on paper at least, equal under the law; and blacks
from the West who visited Russia could be entertained in
a manner that seemed to demonstrate a total absence of
color prejudice. During the early Cold War, the Soviets
gained an enormous propaganda advantage in calling attention
to America’s practice of segregation and to the incidents
of racial violence and terrorism that continued to
occur in the southern states. When several of Europe’s African
colonies became independent in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, discrimination against African diplomats in
Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area became a
major embarrassment for the State Department that
helped to provoke some of the earliest federal efforts toward
the desegregation of public facilities. 53
The geopolitical costs of the persistence of legalized
racism in the United States were high enough to raise the
question of why it took two full decades from the end of
World War II and the onset of the Cold War for Congress
to pass the civil rights legislation that outlawed Jim Crow
and gave protection to black voting rights. Indeed, it was
not until 1967 that a Supreme Court decision nullified the
last state laws enshrining the central symbol of a racist re-
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