After World War II the United States faced two preeminent
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 nonwhite 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 U.S.
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, anticommunist alliance.
At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the
domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle.
"The Cold War and the Color Line" is the first 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 anticommunist western alliance. In so
doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its
true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for
our own era of globalization.
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