Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena

After World War II the United States faced two pre-eminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for non-white American citizens confronted the nation's leaders with an embarrassing contradiction. Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the US civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America's closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anti-communist alliance. At the same time, US racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle.
"The Cold War and the Color Line" offers a comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths - Southern Africa and the American South - as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anti-communist Western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is relevant for the era of globalization.