The Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War

By Raanan Geberer
Originally published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

On the birth anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King, we celebrate the enlargement of civil rights in the U.S. to include African-Americans in the mid-1960s.

While no one doubts the importance of King, other civil rights leaders and the “freedom riders,” there were other factors, I believe, that also contributed the end of racial segregation in the South and, to a lesser extent, in the North.

One is the increasingly militant attitude of the generation of Black Americans who had fought in World War II. After risking their lives for this country, they had no desire to a life of second-class citizenship.

But there is another factor, one rarely mentioned. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the main conflict in the world was the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the old British and French empires were breaking up. Dozens of former colonies were becoming independent. Most of these nations were in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In other words, most were nonwhite nations.

As long as African-Americans were treated like second-class citizens in both the South and the North, the Soviet Union and Communist China could say to these nations, “See how America treats nonwhites? You can’t trust the U.S.! The Soviet Union, not America, is the land of equality!”

The U.S. was vulnerable on that score, and its leaders, President Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, knew it.

For years, the national Democratic Party had tolerated the prejudice-filled racial beliefs espoused by most elected representatives in the Deep South. After all, these states were an integral part of the Democratic machine, and their leadership was instrumental in getting Democratic-sponsored legislation passed in the House and the Senate.

Up until about 1960, just about the only people willing to plead for African-American equality were African-Americans themselves; lawyers and journalists from liberal states such as New York and Illinois; some academics and clergymen; a few industrial labor unions; show-business types like Frank Sinatra; some Jewish organizations, and left-wing radicals.

There was progress in some fields — such as the integration of major-league baseball and Nat King Cole’s short-lived TV show — but a real lack of progress in others. I once read that in 1950, one could walk from one end of the Manhattan business district to the other without encountering a single black secretary. Here in Brooklyn, the construction of Downstate Hospital during the early 1960s sparked angry demonstrations because the construction unions had effectively barred hiring any black workers other than janitors.

All this soon changed, and in a big way. The stakes were now higher. The U.S. couldn’t tolerate a Soviet-allied Africa, a Soviet-allied Asia, a Soviet-allied Caribbean. Keeping the Soviets out of these areas was much more important to those in power in Washington, D.C., than pleasing “good old boys” in Mississippi and Alabama and Archie Bunker types in New York and Boston.

In short, segregation had to go.

Once again, Martin Luther King’s message was a powerful one. No one doubts the heroism of King, his Southern followers who put their lives on the line, and the Northern college students who volunteered to help his cause. But his movement was not the only force that ended institutional segregation in the U.S. Geo-politics and the Cold War also played a role.