Civil Rights During the Cold War

Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principles, and Policy by Dean J. Kotlowski
Harvard University Press 
404pp   £23.95 
ISBN 0 674 00623 2

'We have been trained as Foreign Service Officers and we are not interested in negroes of any kind.’ This is how, in 1951, American diplomats in Luxembourg treated the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, a black choral group that regularly performed before princes, presidents and prime ministers. The State Department wanted to counteract Soviet propaganda that dwelt upon America’s lynchings, racial segregation, and denial to blacks of the right to vote.  ‘Goodwill tours’ by black entertainers were supposed to project an image of the United States as a vibrant democracy that honoured the cultural achievements of all races. But America’s efforts to plant its leadership of the Free World on moral high ground continually foundered on the rock of American racial prejudice. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that black children should not attend separate schools solely because of their race, racial crises erupted with embarrassing frequency. In 1957 a white mob in Little Rock, Arkansas, stopped nine black children entering a ‘desegregated’ white school. The situation made headlines around the world. A disgusted Louis Armstrong – normally the most non-political of jazzmen – cancelled a government-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. ‘I'll do it on my own,’ he explained. ‘The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country and what am I supposed to say?’