Essay On Cold War And Civil Rights

Civil Rights’ Impact on Cold War and Foreign Policy President Harry Truman once said, “We have to get tough with the Russians. They don’t know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only twenty-five years old. We are over a hundred and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave” (Kissinger). After World War II, Communism was spreading from the Soviet Union to parts of Europe and Asia. President Truman told the nation that “[a]t the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life” (Dudziak, 27). Nations that “were divided between a way of life distinguished by free institutions, representative government…guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression” and a way of life that “relies upon terror and oppression…and the suppression of personal freedoms” (Dudziak, 27). Thoughts like this influenced the American way of thinking during the Cold War era which then played a part in the pursuit of civil rights justice. This pursuit led to foreign nations’ concern about the United States’ principles; democracy and individual liberty. The widespread international concern about racial discrimination in the United States affected the decisions of their leaders as they handle both domestic and foreign issues.

Dudziak said that “[t]he full story of civil rights reform in U.S. history cuts across racial groups. The U.S. policymakers in this study, however, saw American race relations through the lens of a black/white paradigm. To them, race in America was quintessentially about ‘the Negro problem'” (14). It would then be “the task of this volume to explore the impact of Cold War foreign affairs on U.S. civil rights reform” (Dudziak,