The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Progaganda in the Cold War 082621908X, 9780826219084

Citation preview

The Opinions of Mankind

Richard Lentz

and

Karla K. Gower

The Opinions of Mankind Raci a l I ssue s, Pr ess, and P ropa ganda in the Col d War

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2010 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lentz, Richard, 1942The opinions of mankind : racial issues, press, and propaganda in the Cold War / Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1908-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States—Race relations—Press coverage. 2. Racism in the press—United States. 3. Race relations and the press—United States. 4. Race relations and the press—Soviet Union. 5. Minorities—Press coverage— United States. 6. Press and propaganda—Soviet Union. 7. Propaganda, Anti-American—Soviet Union. 8. United States—Foreign public opinion, Soviet. 9. Public opinion—Soviet Union. I. Gower, Karla K. II. Title. PN4888.R3L46 2010 305.800973’09045—dc22 2010033064

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Jacket Design: Susan Ferber Design and composition: Stephanie Foley Printing and binding: Integrated Book Technology, Inc. Typefaces: Base Nine and Palatino

Contents

vii

Acknowledgments

1

Introduction

CHAPTER 1.

Civil Rights and World Affairs

17

chapter 2.

First Americans, Last in America

31

CHAPTER 3.

Color, Caste, and Colonialism

44

CHAPTER 4.

Pursuing the Dream

59

CHAPTER 5. A Symbol Not Shattered

CHAPTER 6.

Reverberating Symbols

CHAPTER 7. The Scrutiny of Asia

CHAPTER 8.

Crisis after Crisis

v

79

92

108

119

vi

contents

CHAPTER 9.

Riots and Insurrection

136

CHAPTER 10. Snarls Echoing ’Round the World

156

CHAPTER 11. Summer of Shocks

174

CHAPTER 12. Selma and Watts

190

Summary and Conclusions

209

Notes

219

Selected Bibliography

319

Index

335

ack n ow l e d g m e n t s

Dick Lentz would like to thank David J. Garrow, who provided useful advice to a fledgling scholar who sought his assistance while researching and writing his first book and who benefited from his helpfulness equally on a second endeavor. He was both exceptionally encouraging and penetrating in his criticism of the topic of journalistic coverage of racial events in the United States that found its way abroad. Zena Beth McGlashan rescued from a departmental library’s discard pile a very helpful reprint, “15,000,000 Americans” by William Brower, a black journalist whose reporting on American racial matters for the Toledo Blade was preserved by that newspaper. Knowing of my interest in the topic, she passed the collection on to me. I remain grateful for her generosity. John Craft, a colleague at Arizona State University, provided detailed guidance on the topic of technical and other limitations on the movement of television signals across oceans in the pre-satellite era. Much help was provided by archivists and librarians who are too many in number, I regret, to mention by name and institutional affiliation. Above all, however, I never failed to benefit from those helpful spirits who labor at the National Archives as well as the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries. Karla Gower would like to thank Chase Montehue for his unwavering support and love. None of this would be possible without him. We would both like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful suggestions, as well as those at the University of ­Missouri Press with whom we’ve had the pleasure of working: Editor Clair Willcox, Project Manager John Brenner, and Jennifer Gravley and Beth Chandler in Marketing.

The Opinions of Mankind

Introduction

O

n February 25, 1946, a black woman and her nineteen-year-old son entered a radio repair shop in Columbia, Tennessee, to demand the return of their radio. An argument ensued, and one of the white repairmen fell through a plate glass window. Whites gathered in the town’s square, calling for the black mother and son to be lynched. Fearing assault or worse, blacks armed themselves and shot out the streetlights for cover. Four white policemen, half the town’s force, responded to the sound of gunfire and were wounded as they entered the black neighborhood. Sixteen hours of rioting ensued, ending with the arrival of five hundred state militiamen and highway patrolmen. Two days later at the county jail, where those arrested during the riot were being held, two blacks were killed and a sheriff’s deputy and another black were wounded.1 During the Cold War, the Soviets were quick to publicize such racial incidents in the United States.2 Racial violence perpetrated by white Americans was the perfect foil to combat the U.S. government’s claim to be the defender of free rights for all people. Such incidents did indeed make Americans look like hypocrites at best, imperialists at worst. But how did the Soviets and the rest of the world find out about U.S. racial incidents such as the one in Columbia, a town with a population of just barely 12,000? While TASS, the official news agency of the Soviet Union, and Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, did have reporters in New York, that city was 790 miles away from the incident. Most of the information came from U.S. domestic media sources, especially the wire services.3 Covering Columbia firsthand were reporters and photographers from the two major Nashville dailies, the Tennessean and the Banner, a freelancer for the U.S. wire service United Press, and an Associated Press reporter. A photographer captured a powerful photograph for Life Magazine. The picture, which seemed to show a police officer kicking an injured black man on the ground, created a national stir after Time and the African American magazine Ebony published it. A second photograph, showing a casket 1

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defaced with the initials KKK, was printed first by the Communist Daily Worker of New York on March 17 and by the Washington Post two days later. The African American Chicago Defender editorialized that the incident had “all the earmarks of the Nazi pattern of terror and intimidation” and that the shootings in the jail were to be expected. “It was a hundred Negroes against thousands of armed trigger-crazy deputies anxious to taste blood.” Time and Newsweek, probably relying on files from wire services or stringers or both, also published articles about the turbulence and its aftermath.4 Protests flooded into the White House following the event. Attorney General Tom C. Clark ordered a federal grand jury impaneled to look into the affair, but it returned no indictments. The list of black defendants was narrowed, and the trial of twenty-five was shifted to nearby Lawrenceburg, whose reputation for racism produced nearly unanimous predictions of convictions. Instead, the all-white jury acquitted twenty-three defendants; only one man was convicted, and his five-year sentence was eventually reduced to a year of incarceration.5 Covering the trial in Lawrenceburg were journalists from the New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Daily Worker, Pittsburgh Courier, Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service, as well as the New York Times and the Nashville dailies. Although the acquittals deflated the Communist message, the Daily Worker praised the black Tennesseans for standing up to “local Hitlers and lynch mobs.” Each of these media organizations was a potential source for international coverage of the riot and ensuing trial.6 Hoy, the Cuban Communist newspaper, for example, reprinted “Daily Worker dispatches on the Tennessee terror,” as the Worker noted.7 Other Communist organs no doubt picked up the story from Hoy or the Daily Worker, especially in Latin America, where Cuba’s Communist Party was a major supplier of anti-American propaganda. Almost certainly, however, most of the news from Tennessee went to the world via the U.S. wire services. With even the New York Times using Associated Press and United Press accounts in the opening days, it is unlikely that foreign correspondents did any better.8 The mistreatment of minorities in the United States, which ranged from insults to lynchings, had some impact in themselves but won prominent play in foreign public media as a result of factors such as the pressures of the Cold War, the tide of anticolonialism sweeping across Asia and Africa, and the movement to bring down Jim Crow in Dixie. The interplay of these and other factors helped usher in an intense competition between East and West. According to Soviet ideology, racism was “the inevitable concomitant of capitalism and its highest stage, imperialism.”9 Accusations of racism, then, became a powerful propaganda weapon in the competition for the friendship of emerging nations after World War II. Unshackled from

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colonial regimes that denied people of color freedom and equality, those nations turned unfriendly eyes on lands that allowed white supremacy to continue to exist, putting the United States at a disadvantage as accounts of its color line sped across the world. The present study is primarily concerned with international condemnations of America’s racial record and the role the U.S. press played in both publicizing the racial incidents and helping Americans see the effect such actions had on the country’s image abroad. As such, it builds on recent scholarship that fits civil rights struggles in the United States into a Cold War context and explores the connection between domestic and foreign policy. The contribution of this study is its exploration of the crucial role the domestic press had in global perceptions of race in the United States and ultimately in U.S. foreign policy as the government reacted to those perceptions. It also seeks to illumine selected topics related to mass communication, such as the flow of news across the globe, the parts played by print and broadcast media in the global news system, and the social transactions between U.S. publications and their domestic readers.10 The consensus of the recent literature is that the plight of African Americans became an international issue with repercussions for U.S. foreign policy because it offered the Soviets a convenient and powerful prop­ aganda tool in the battle for the hearts and minds of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. But historian Justin Hart has argued that the importance of the U.S. image abroad began to be recognized by the State Department as early as 1941. He suggested that “the increasing interdependence of race and U.S. foreign policy in the post-1941 period” ought to be viewed in terms of “the global, multiracial context of decolonization, rather than solely through the black-white binary of the African-American civil rights narrative.” Thus, this study broadens the discussion of civil rights from African Americans to include other people of color such as Mexicans and Native Americans.11 It is important to recognize that foreign attention to race in America neither began nor ended with the Cold War. A rhetorical assault on slavery was published in Czarist Russia as early as 1784.12 And figures as widely separated in time as the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the novelist Charles Dickens, and the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh took up their pens to scourge slavery or racism. The American Civil War was played out on the world stage, not just in the United States. The Confederacy and the Union conducted propaganda offensives in Europe using newspapers they controlled. In addition, the Union sent numerous propaganda agents abroad.13 The black American journalist Ida B. Wells was forced to campaign overseas against lynching after she failed to build an effective response against it among white

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Americans. Her jeremiads in Britain in 1893 and 1894 against the thousand or so American lynchings in a decade’s time won the favor of the British press and some elites, raising a clamor that crossed the Atlantic, exposing “lynching as never before,” and the number of atrocities declined.14 Human rights violations also caused conflicts between governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The lynchings of Italians and Italian Americans by a white mob after the assassination of a popular New Orleans police official were condemned widely in Europe. Italy received $250,000 in reparations for the crime. Japanese internal propaganda before World War II situated U.S. racial abuses within the context of Western colonialism, informing citizens that “the heavy hand of the Occidental expansionists did not fall on Asians alone.” Propaganda from the Japanese also underscored the injustices to which Indians and African Americans were subjected.15 But as Hart has argued, what changed during World War II and made the American image abroad vital to foreign policy was that the United States became a dominant force at exactly the time when the meaning of world power was being transformed. Great Britain had been an imperial power, but imperialism was dying. The only way the United States could be as powerful on the world stage as Britain had been was to promote the American way of life and promote democracy in a favorable light—to encourage other countries to emulate the U.S. in form of government and become allies. Thus, this book examines how the media in various countries covered racial incidents in the United States, not just the Soviets and newly independent countries. Racial crises sometimes affected not only America’s image, but also those of its allies, some of whom feared their prestige could suffer when America’s declined—much as trading nations could be affected by the weakening of a major partner.16 But there is no question that the State Department was most concerned about Soviet propaganda, in a war that was fought on a battleground in which images and words, not bullets, were the weapons of choice. The U.S. government needed to counter the Soviets’ allegations of racism, but it could not deny the incidents themselves, since they had occurred. The message the government sought to get across was that the racial situation was improving and that things were not as bad as the Soviets and others made them out to be. Although the government had some mechanisms at its disposal to send that message to international audiences and took advantage of them, using its own outlets tended to reduce the credibility of the message. Having the message appear in the American mass media, however, would increase it. Although the U.S. government could not require, as did its Communist counterparts, the domestic media to advance its message, the U.S. press

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did still serve as a cooperative, even subservient party to the creation of the Cold War climate.17 Some stories embarrassing to the government or damaging to its foreign policy ended up skewered on a newsroom spike.18 And the government solicited and often received the assistance of news organizations in countering Communist machinations.19 Paradoxically, however, while the press often cooperated with the government, it also greatly increased Washington’s difficulties by unearthing stories of U.S. racial injustices that were picked up by media outlets abroad, engendering anti-American attitudes. For instance, Time reported an affront to a Malaysian dignitary who visited the United States during the Truman administration. Consular officers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur complained to Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the article was damaging to America’s image. The story was “factually correct,” Acheson replied tartly, and besides, Time’s motive for printing the story was to expose the “harm done by discriminatory practices” in the hope that it would foster a public reaction against the evils publicized.20 And that was the point for the government. It wanted to make Americans aware of the effect their behavior had on the nation’s image abroad and hence on foreign relations. For that, the government needed the American mass media because it had few avenues of its own by which to reach the American people directly. Two strategies dominate this research. One is to introduce readers to (or refresh their recollections of) events, actors, and trends long since vanished from the public stage. This background is essential for an understanding of the impact on the government of what foreigners were thinking and saying about America’s white racism and on how the American media covered those events, actors, and trends. Presidents, secretaries of state, and their subordinates in the foreign policy apparatus believed they could not ignore this phenomenon. The policies they adopted, the actions they took, the statements they issued, the messages they exchanged with the governments of other lands and with U.S. diplomats in the field testify to the importance of the domestic situation on America’s image abroad and its foreign relations. And they had reason to be concerned. Studies in international news have shown that the mass media’s coverage of a foreign nation influences the public’s perception of that nation, with negative coverage having a greater effect on the public than positive coverage.21 Another approach in this study was to conduct textual analyses of the articles and commentary the U.S. press directed at domestic readers, which often were related to themes rooted in American culture.22 The press interprets social conditions, especially social change, to readers, while maintaining some consonance with readers’ perspectives and attitudes. It is the conscience of the country, telling Americans what are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and encouraging social obedience. At the same

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time, journalists, especially at the local level, share the values of their community and tend to reflect them in their coverage of issues. The task is to “catch the press responding to new, complicated social forces, ‘working harder’ to represent them in swift, commanding images or myths, moving with the culture.”23 The significance of journalistic items is illumined by close scrutiny of the social transaction between reader and publication, in particular the use (and manipulation) by the press of powerful symbols and myths. The elements of selection, emphasis, and exclusion are crucial for the analysis. The study also looks outside the United States for episodes of racism involving Americans; a million or so Americans went abroad each year as tourists, and a similar number served under arms, at sea or in foreign duty stations. Inevitably, some of them brought their attitudes about color with them, affording foreigners opportunities to witness firsthand what they ordinarily would have had to receive from news accounts. (Even so, massmediated accounts reached far larger audiences than those who witnessed events firsthand.)24 Those accounts made their appearance in a world news system that was made possible by global news agencies. It proved necessary, however, to exclude most of the contents of agency dispatches. Attempting to capture the flow of news from them would be like dipping a bucket into a Niagara of news. Each day in 1969 the teletypes at the New York Times received a half-million words from the Associated Press and a quarter-million more from United Press International—four times more than the Times published on a given day from all sources, including its staff. And it would have been impossible to compile decades of agency dispatches before computers (not to mention search engines) became common in journalism.25 Television, with few exceptions, is excluded: It was an insignificant presence even in most industrialized states until the mid- to late 1950s. Although network newscasts began in the United States in 1948, they were only fifteen minutes long. The networks did little original reporting, employing some correspondents and film crews in major cities, but mostly relying on stringers and newsreel companies. As limited as television news was in the United States, it was practically nonexistent for a decade or two more in most of Asia and Africa, the cockpit of Cold War propaganda between communists and capitalists. The first television station in China, for example, did not take to the airwaves until 1958, and when it did, it served, of course, as the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.26 The development of television as an international medium of news was inhibited by cost, technological lag, and even government policy. Radio, by contrast, reached far greater audiences, but it lacked the visual images, some of which figured in this study, that were important parts of

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news coverage. Because of this missing element (and the terseness of radio items), the study considers relatively few radio items, most of which originated abroad. The study begins in 1946, the year before Truman enunciated his Doctrine, because the relationship between American journalists and the government changed following World War II. In the aftermath of the war, the traditional formula for news—sex, crime, money, and politics— seemed out of touch with a more complex world. Labor, industrial, and science issues “placed a greater responsibility on newspapers to better serve the public” because the nation’s well-being seemed to require it. Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the New York Times, summed up the feeling of journalists: “The assignment of the newspaper in these days is greater than ever before. [N]ever has the news been so complex and the need of understanding it more urgent.”27 The study ends in 1965, not just because it was the landmark year of the Selma voting rights campaign and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the Watts riot, the first of the great urban insurrections of the 1960s; and the transformation of the war in Vietnam into America’s war. The world was different and so was American reporting. Journalism had changed dramatically in the twenty years since the end of the war. It had grown more professional, with reporters tending to view themselves as having an obligation to serve the public interest and act as a watchdog of government. And more importantly, they had learned how to better cover racial and other complex social issues. Technological advances also allowed news to travel faster and more easily, not just nationally, but also internationally.28 Scholarly studies of the phenomenon of the Cold War and civil rights have tended to focus on government policies and activities with relatively little attention paid to U.S. news organizations. Yet the domestic press was a crucial institution for communicating to foreigners and to Americans alike. A presidential committee concluded in 1960 that U.S. mass media exercised a “direct influence upon the international flow of information, ideas, and news, and thereby upon foreign opinion and international relations.” Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Andrew H. Berding, himself a former journalist, told managing editors that “we can get the message of our foreign policy across to our own and other peoples one hundred times more effectively” with private media rather than through government machinery.29 The government even circulated U.S. media products overseas, purchasing fifty thousand annual magazine subscriptions, for instance, that were sent to its overseas information centers and libraries. The press was much better equipped than the government to inform Americans about what their country had at stake overseas because of

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bigotry. The government was well aware of foreign sentiments about this matter from hundreds if not thousands of reports from its diplomats over the years. But it could not match the thousands of daily newspapers and magazines, nor the broadcasting and film operations, of commercial media. Moreover, it was aware of—and took action to sidestep—the taint of propaganda that lessened the effectiveness of its official channels of communication abroad.30 The government did on occasion attempt to persuade the U.S. press to take a particular line. Berding once dressed down editors for not giving sufficient display to news of racial progress achieved in the United States.31 Wishing to persuade Marylanders of Jim Crow’s pernicious effects on the country’s prestige, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles begged key editors from that state “to join the fight against . . . discrimination.”32 Yet the government lacked the power to shut down the flow of news about the numerous embarrassing incidents that foreign media picked up from the U.S. news system. That news went out to the world in various forms, in articles published in major U.S. and foreign newspapers and magazines. U.S. commercial magazines, for example, claimed a total foreign circulation in 1958 of more than fourteen million per issue; readership, the more crucial measure, was approximately seventy-five million, many of whom were influential elites. The circulation figures were much greater for the wires: 16,050 subscribing newspapers, broadcasting stations, and other organizations, of which 1,500 newspapers and 5,700 broadcasting stations received the services in the United States and 8,850 abroad. Figures for United Press International (UPI) were comparable: 7,079 clients, 2,246 abroad.33 Actual audiences for the products of all U.S. news services, general (such as the Associated Press) or supplemental (such as the New York Times News Service) no doubt reached hundreds of millions, if both direct and indirect consumers are factored in. Newsreels and radio broadcasts contributed to the flow, as did, much more sparsely, television; the propaganda outpourings from the U.S. government and other governments; and dispatches filed by foreign correspondents stationed in America. Foreign media were primarily responsible for spreading the news in a given country, although publications such as Time, Newsweek, and Reader’s Digest reached foreign readers directly through foreign editions. But most news with racial angles no doubt had their origins in American publications, not in foreign prints. Unquestionably, foreign correspondents contributed to the flow of news of race in America. A French journalist, for example, was murdered by a white mob during the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. And some foreign writers opened up facets of a story ignored or not fully developed by their American counterparts,

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focusing on issues or situations salient to them and their audience. Indian journalists tended to be more grounded in Gandhian nonviolence than Americans—and were more likely to see its effects in the Montgomery bus boycott.34 Still, there were relatively few foreign correspondents in the United States, probably a few hundred for most of the 1950s. (By comparison, the New York Times—alone—had “some eight hundred reporters and editors in New York and elsewhere.”) Major papers might send one or two journalists, typically basing them in New York or Washington; foreign wire service bureaus had larger staffs, but even these were leaner than U.S. counterparts.35 Three of the global agencies were headquartered in the United States and were thoroughly American in practices and outlook: the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service (the last was merged into United Press in 1958 to form UPI).36 They seldom engaged in publishing or broadcasting themselves, supplying materials instead to client publications and broadcasters. But the wires were essential to news operations, large or small, foreign or domestic, print or broadcast. The domestic resources of U.S. agencies dwarfed other news organizations. In 1977, the AP had 112 U.S. bureaus and sixty-two overseas; UPI, ninety-six domestic bureaus and eighty-one foreign.37 AP’s “full-time ‘staffer’ strength” was an estimated twenty-five hundred, UPI’s 1,823, most of them assigned to domestic operations. The AP and its competitors used full-time staffers and numerous part-time correspondents to gather news. As a cooperative, the AP also drew directly on the enormous newsgathering resources of its member-owners, as did, indirectly and on a different basis, other wires. Two thousand U.S. dailies—with tens of thousands of writers, photographers, and editors—represented a huge resource, and the wires also drew to a lesser extent on broadcast news operations.38 Where major racial stories broke increased the importance of the wires. Little Rock, Arkansas, was the scene of the most important civil rights story of 1957. It was a small city far off the beaten path of national journalism, but it did have news agency operations and local papers from which the wires could mine stories (and photos). The situation was even more acute in Mississippi, where major stories broke or were centered in such hamlets as Money, Philadelphia, and Oxford. Even the great American dailies depended on the wires for coverage. The New York Times was forced to rely on wire service reports from Alabama for more than a year when it could not post reporters there.39 More typically, the Times used some dispatches and photos for late-breaking news, to supplement staff-produced materials, and as indispensable alerts about upcoming events that the Times would staff with its own journalists. With

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far fewer people and resources than the Times, foreign papers undoubtedly relied on the American news infrastructure and agencies even more. Substantial quantities of American news were fed into the international news circuits. The wire services had to cover domestic news for domestic clients anyway, and they reaped additional returns by selling news to nonAmerican clients.40 India illustrates the importance of the agencies abroad. By 1953, India had more than three hundred dailies and a population approaching 360 million. Foreign news took up 15 percent of the space devoted to news, and readers’ interest in U.S. race relations was high. Yet only one Indian correspondent was stationed exclusively in America as late as 1953. Press Trust of India distributed the dispatches of Britain’s Reuters, whence came “the bulk of all foreign news used in the Indian press.”41 But Reuters did not originate all U.S. news it transmitted to India. Much, perhaps most of it, started out as AP dispatches. Reuters and the French AFP did most of their own news gathering in New York and Washington but relied on the AP domestic wire for news elsewhere, reserving its few people in the United States for the most important stories. In the 1950s, the American bureau of Reuters was the largest of the agency’s overseas operations, but it had only fifty full-time staff and 150 stringers. The AP gave Reuters and AFP access to its domestic wire in exchange for overseas news gathered by the British and French—an arrangement that Reuters ended in 1967 but that AFP continued for some years. The arrangement spared the foreign agencies the huge expense of covering news across the nation firsthand. The arrangement also meant that most of the world was covered by the four big agencies—AP, UPI, Reuters, and AFP (even TASS received the AP service in Moscow).42 In 1949, for example, AFP distributed news services in forty countries. AFP dominated the market in much of Europe, had a strong position in Latin America and was growing in Japan. In 1958, it opened a Beijing bureau. By 1960, it was “present in 125 countries, transmitting 500,000 words a day and employing a staff of two thousand journalists and technicians.” Reuters had offices in forty-two countries in 1945 and employed two thousand people worldwide. Most of its subscribers were part of the British Empire. Both AFP and Reuters had a strong presence in black Africa, however, “while the American agencies remained largely absent from a market that represented an insignificant part of their revenues (1 per cent in AP’s case).”43 AP and UPI also dominated photographic services, until Reuters launched its photo service in 1984. Having pictures and text gave the AP and UPI an edge over agencies with only text for clients. Like stories, photographs were widely redistributed by foreign agencies under arrangements

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such as UPI’s photo deal with AFP and Deutsche Presse-Agenteur. And wire service pictures of racial controversies had great impact abroad. Even Soviet propagandists routinely mined U.S. sources for articles, photographs, and editorial cartoons, which were then used to condemn the United States for tolerating acts of racism. Strikingly, the Soviets often did not greatly alter many such items; few changes were required to convert them into effective anti-American propaganda inasmuch as the originals usually contained sufficiently damning details. And, of course, using American sources made the message more credible. If the American press was saying this about its own people, then the “true” situation must be very bad indeed. Columnist Art Buchwald routinely excoriated bigotry in Dixie; one column featured a hypothetical black Ph.D., who had to struggle past a sheriff’s posse and clouds of tear gas just to apply to vote. But the examiner ruled that he had flunked his voting test even though he had demonstrated the ability to read pages of material from a Chinese newspaper, hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone, and fourteen articles of the Finnish constitution. He was tripped up when he stumbled over one word from a Dead Sea Scroll, but a white applicant who misspelled “cat” as “K-A-T” was passed. Buchwald’s columns were “occasionally run verbatim in the Soviet press” to denounce U.S. racial injustice.44 Other writers had like experiences. The U.S. racial record was ample cause for mortification. Yet American foreign policy principals, including the president, thought there was more at stake than simple embarrassment. Coverage of racial issues affected public diplomacy efforts. Foreign misperceptions and misunderstandings about race could complicate relations between the United States and other nations. In addition, some difficulties confronting the government were freighted with symbolism, which could be as important as arms in the Cold War.45 Racial crises were sometimes magnified, diminished, or otherwise transformed when refracted through the lens of other symbolically charged events, even when they had little or nothing in common. The Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957 and the Red Army’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising a year earlier shared few attributes. Yet the effects of one could spill over onto another, Swiss diplomats observed, and fretted that the furor aroused by Little Rock might hinder Washington’s attempts to portray the Russians as the butchers of Budapest.46 Symbolism, alone or in conjunction with other factors, could influence some quite substantive matters. These included securing and maintaining strategic sites and military bases, importing essential raw materials, maintaining harmonious foreign relations, and keeping alliances in good repair. Capitalists and communists alike were keenly aware of Africa’s and Asia’s great reserves of strategic minerals, such as uranium. National

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security might be compromised should certain resources be denied the United States or its allies, or be made available to its enemies. This possibility was not farfetched. After World War II, as former ambassador to India Chester Bowles pointed out, the British lost control of the resources “of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon,” as did the Dutch those of Indonesia and the French those of Indochina.47 Conflicts with racial overtones could threaten even firm alliances, a lesson thrust upon Washington after two GIs killed a Japanese and a Taiwanese civilian in 1957. Racial elements in those cases enraged Asians, especially the extraterritoriality that they believed was intruding into arrangements to try the defendants. Some locations were important because they commanded sea lanes or other routes, or because bases built and operated on them cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Losing them could cost the United States treasure, strategic position, or prestige. Insults to dark-skinned diplomats hurt relations with Asian or African nations. The incidents also could extract a further cost when the State Department was trolling for votes on matters before the United Nations among delegates embittered by encounters with Jim Crow. Moscow fished these troubled waters freely, denouncing America, in effect, as the Land of the Fettered and the Home of the Bigot. Thousands of domestic and tens of thousands of foreign newspapers and magazines potentially could have been studied. Items from more than eighty newspapers and magazines demonstrate that the discourse was significantly distributed in the U.S. press. The publications range from national papers such as the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor to small provincial dailies, and include distinct types of publications, from the newsweeklies, such as Time, to religious journals. They also represent a range of ideology, liberal to right-wing. The press of Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Europe represented an even greater ideological range, from Communist to capitalist, as well as a variety of journalistic models. For example, Pravda was the official organ of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and therefore required to fill its six to eight pages daily with the official party dogma. Numerous readers vetted each news item to ensure the editorial process was collective. The goal was to produce articles “confirming the eternal veracity of Marxism-Leninism and in harmony with its truest manifestation—the current Party line.”48 Similarly, in Maoist China, the responsibility of the media was “to spread state propaganda, to educate the public, to uphold Party policy, and to help the masses under Party guidance.” Also like the Soviets, China had an official news agency. Xinhua was established in 1931 and built

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branch offices around the world. Xinhua reported directly to the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party. It also served as a publisher with newspapers and magazines printed in several languages.49 But unlike the Soviet system in which “censorship was overt and institutionalized,” the Chinese media were more open to criticism (within carefully confined parameters) and discussion. In fact, even the views of non-Communists were welcomed, in part because Mao Tse-tung believed in two-way communication, in learning from the masses. By 1957, the country had 19 national newspapers, 600 periodicals, 341 provincial-level papers, and 31 minority-language newspapers. With that many media outlets scattered throughout the country, overt control was not possible.50 Foreign news articles were found in numerous sources: government records, such as those of the State Department and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service; scholarly digests such as Current Digest of the Soviet Press, and English-language editions of such Communist publications as New Times (Moscow) and Peking (later Beijing) Review, in which editors, not westerners, controlled the translations. Internet search engines were useful for locating more recent material. As part of the social transaction between publication and readers, the U.S. press served as an educator on matters about which most readers knew little or nothing and who had at most limited access to nondomestic sources of news about the topics. The role of social educator was familiar to journalists, but the exigencies of race and the Cold War required them to have an especially keen sense of audience, and to take on the role of national conscience. The U.S. press (a term which herein refers to publications studied, not the totality of the press) reported the harsh judgments of foreigners about domestic racism; usually the substance of what foreigners were saying was not debunked—not surprisingly, since U.S. news outlets supplied so much of the information about the racial bias in question. Thus, American publications legitimated this type of criticism at least in part. By exposing instances of prejudices and oppression, and publicizing the negative impressions that were generated in other countries, the press demonstrated to American readers that the existence of American racism could not be ignored, because it could come at a high price in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. As a corollary, the press undermined the isolationism that was deeply entrenched in the culture. The press tried to explain that America could not separate itself from the world; it demonstrated that technology, especially communication technology, with its speed, reach, and ability to penetrate to the most distant cultures of the globe, meant that the United States could not isolate itself from the world—nor escape its scrutiny.

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The press also instructed ordinary Americans how they as individuals could make a difference in the Cold War, even though it ranged over the globe and theoretically involved hundreds of millions of persons. To assure foreigners and to reassure Americans of the essential goodness of America, the press spun compelling tales of ordinary citizens coming to the assistance of a distressed countryman or foreigner, often of different color. And journalists celebrated the value of that service performed for strangers, sometimes by using foreigners’ testimony to that effect. But the press did not merely invoke the Golden Rule. Instead, it explained that America would realize pragmatic benefits from establishing and maintaining good relations with foreigners. That proposition was not self-evident, but required educating the audience. For instance, Americans had to be taught not to regard foreign students in the same light as their American counterparts, but as important figures in the eyes of the U.S. and Soviet governments, which competed with each other to recruit them to study in their institutions of higher learning. Once back in Africa, for example, they would rise much faster and far higher than would American graduates—simply because there were so few educated Africans and so many degreed Americans. Africans might rise to lead a country in as few as five years, and sooner or later Washington would have to deal with them on matters of importance and might need them as an ally. But it would be put at a disadvantage if former students risen to prime ministerships were embittered from the insults and injuries that, the press informed readers, took place in their student days. The press added to the discourse a series of recurring themes that spoke to America’s racial record, past and present, to readers at home and abroad. The themes emphasized progress achieved by racial minorities in the United States; celebrated America as an inspiration to the world (and a source of assistance to peoples striving to be free); celebrated Americans of color as defenders and advocates of the country when it was under rhetorical attack by foreigners; encouraged Americans, usually implicitly, to emulate the good works of their countrymen who served the nation by working to avert or ameliorate the scourge of racism; and castigated foreign critics of America by pointing out that their hands bore evidence of the smirch of white supremacy. Acting as the nation’s conscience put particular pressures on American journalists to deal with criticism of the country’s racial failures deftly. Even if it wished to, the domestic press could hardly deny the existence of the atrocities and inequality, which it had itself reported, without undermining its own credibility. Yet the press could not afford to get too far out of step with readers, who would expect that the press would defend the country against criticism from abroad.

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The theme of racial progress pointed to a way out of the dilemma and dovetailed with the government’s message abroad. The racial situation in America might appear horrendous considering the latest lynching or incident, but things had actually improved, and implicitly or explicitly, still more improvement could be expected in the future. The improvement itself might be limited—such as a black child winning a beautiful baby contest, or the hiring of the first black flight attendant—but it was the sense imparted of inexorable progress that was more significant. The press also celebrated America as the last, best hope of humankind. Journalists reminded foreigners (and Americans themselves) that the man who wrote those words was venerated across the world, especially in Africa. But they also fostered the idea that America provided pragmatic contemporary assistance in numerous ways, whether helping Africans frame a constitution for a new country, helping them establish institutions of higher learning or by educating them in U.S. universities, or pointing out that the American civil rights movement taught valuable lessons in challenging oppression in lands such as South Africa. The press bolstered the image of Americans of color as defenders and advocates of their country when it was under rhetorical attack by certain parties abroad, not least by the Soviet Union and Communist China. These Americans came from the performing arts, sports, business, politics and government, the law, education, the church, and so on, and merely introducing them as people of eminence in disparate endeavors was a striking departure from the prevailing portrayals of them as shuffling simpletons. Yet the press went further, pointing out that their defense of America was a task the country needed doing, and that few, if any, of their white countrymen could accomplish as effectively. These men and women did not deny the existence of racism, but they answered faultfinders by saying, in effect, that its force was ebbing and would become spent in time. The press implicitly designated them as national assets who deserved the esteem of their countrymen for answering the nation’s call to join the struggle against America’s Red foes. On the other hand, the press handled roughly other Americans—black and white—who brought infamy on their country. Among them were white racists, whom the press sometimes denounced as traitors because their actions provided grist for Moscow’s propaganda mill. The press also denounced Americans of color who insisted too vehemently that the country had failed to end racism; who chose to expose the hypocrisy of an America that ignored its own principles but refused to acknowledge the progress made in eradicating Jim Crow; or who engaged in comparisons of the United States and the Soviet Union that put the former in an unflattering light. They were arraigned as deviants.

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News and feature items outlined the good works of Americans that averted or ameliorated the damage that racism would cause the country’s image in the world. Implicitly or explicitly, Americans were encouraged to emulate the beneficial actions, whether by extending the hand of hospitality to visitors from abroad or by welcoming into their homes and lives students who came from abroad to experience American life. The press heaped abuse on foreign or external critics who vilified America but refused to own up to their country’s own racial transgressions, essentially saying that people who live in glass houses should desist from hurling stones. The harsh rhetoric might mollify American readers who expected the press to defend the nation when foreigners were denouncing it. But there was an additional benefit: Cataloging the misdeeds of other nations made possible gratifying comparisons that would put the United States in a better light. Numerous nations across the world found themselves berated by the U.S. press for tossing stones in glass houses. But none served as well to make the United States look better in comparisons than South Africa— partly because of the rigidity of its system of apartheid, partly because of its disdain for international public opinion. Both characteristics were much in evidence in South Africa’s leadership, the classic example being the South African minister of justice who posed for photographers while brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails.51 This study is organized chronologically, with chapters devoted to the responses to African Americans’ encounters with racism during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Other chapters, devoted to the similar experiences of Latinos, American Indians, and Asians, are interspersed. While black Americans, the largest American minority, received the lion’s share of attention in this study, this organization was adopted to ensure the injustices visited upon other minorities were not obscured by the time their black countrymen endured on their cross.

Chapter 1

Civil Rights and World Affairs

O

n a dusty Georgia side road on a hot July afternoon, four African Americans—Roger Malcolm, George Dorsey, and their wives— suddenly found the road in front of them blocked by a mob of twenty unmasked men. The two men were dragged to the side of the road; their wives were told to stay quiet in the back seat of the car. But when one of the wives recognized a captor and called out to him by name, they were brought over to join their bound husbands. Screams pierced the air as the gunfire erupted. Within minutes it was over. All four were riddled with bullets, their blood staining the dirt. Dorsey was a World War II veteran. And Dorothy Malcolm was seven months pregnant. The motive? An incident in which Malcolm accused his white employer of raping Malcolm’s wife.1 Although word of the shooting was passed on to the sheriff shortly after the incident, it did not reach an Associated Press bureau, in Atlanta, forty miles away, until the following day. The New York Times put the AP report on page one a day after that under the headline, “Georgia Mob of 20 Men Massacres 2 Negroes, Wives; One Was Ex-GI.” But the news did not stop there. While many in the United States condemned the Monroe murders, the Soviets did as well. Moscow’s New Times, a weekly published in nine languages and distributed in more than one hundred countries, sneered at the “hypocritical dithyrambs” of the U.S. press about black victims receiving equal justice before the law, a theme that resonated strongly with the emerging independence movements in Asia.2 Anticolonialism had appeared in the wake of World War I and was greatly stimulated by the Second World War. Japanese conquests in Asia caused “bitter disgust with colonialism” and wiped out “the prestige of the white man.” The first major strides toward independence in the post– World War II period came not in Africa, but in Asia, partly because Asians 17

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had gained civilian and military experience under Japanese occupation, and quantities of arms became available to the new governments or dissident forces after Japan was defeated.3 Colonies began to win freedom starting in 1945 as Indonesia declared its independence from the Dutch, although their military clashes continued for years. Others followed: the Philippines secured independence from the United States in 1946; Pakistan and India emerged a day apart from partitioned India in 1947; then, in 1948, Burma, Ceylon, Israel, and the two Koreas became independent under American and Soviet auspices. In this period, racial practices that most Americans regarded as strictly domestic matters engendered international scrutiny and condemnation. There was reason now not to shrug off the faultfinding: Racism was anathema to citizens of the states that emerged in the postwar period. They regarded colonialism and racism as essentially the same, and their perspective had to be taken into account lest news of Jim Crow in America tip the scales in the favor of the Soviet Union in its competition with the United States for hearts and minds in the former colonies.4 Although the Soviets are typically considered to have had the edge in prop­aganda during the Truman presidency because of their ability to control information, the reality was far different. Soviet propaganda leaders themselves thought Great Britain and the United States were making a concerted effort to discredit and undermine the favorable image of the Soviets in the aftermath of the war, putting the Soviets on the defensive. In dispatches to Moscow, Soviet diplomats based abroad emphasized that with the end of the war, “‘Anglo-Americans have not curtailed but enhanced their propaganda apparatus,’ retargeting it to the ‘ideological struggle against [the] USSR.’” Those same representatives were envious of the skillful propaganda put out by the West and the financial resources apparently dedicated to it. In a report prepared for the Central Committee, the British propaganda structure was described as “a truly grandiose, multifaceted, and far-flung organization, embracing almost all the corners of the world.” In contrast, Soviet propaganda materials sent abroad were described as “mostly primitive in their content, ineptly composed, and cannot interest the foreign reader.”5 Following Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mis­ souri, in March 1946, the Soviets moved to aggressively counter Western propaganda efforts. At its first briefing on overseas propaganda after Churchill’s speech, the Central Committee’s Foreign Policy Department was asked to “drastically step up the work of demolishing the anti-Soviet designs of the Anglo-Americans.” A conference on propaganda was convened the next month at Stalin’s request. By now, the West was “perceived as being engaged in a global and relentless ideological offensive” for the purpose of engaging in a new war against the USSR.6

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The commission that grew out of the conference concluded that the Soviets had to go on the offensive. It criticized the Sovinformbureau (SIB), one of the many departments responsible for disseminating foreign prop­ aganda, for failing to penetrate U.S. media by “inadequately using the bourgeois-democratic, socialist, labour press and other channels to disseminate information about the Soviet Union.”7 The recommendation was to emulate what were perceived to be successful Western propaganda efforts: “Let us take British intelligence. We must see how they are doing their own propaganda. We should also penetrate well, and if necessary, we could bribe bourgeois newspapers. We could say to them ‘if you publish this or that, we will pay you adequately.’”8 As the quote indicates, the Soviets failed to understand the American mass media system. According to Vladimir Pechnatov, the Soviets “did not make any distinction between official Western propaganda (which was both curtailed and restrained vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. in 1945–1946) and the more openly anti-Soviet private mass media, which was regarded by the Soviet Union as government-inspired.” Thus, the Soviets attributed the extent of the anti-Soviet sentiment as indicative of U.S. government efforts rather than expressions by the domestic media of freely held opinions.9 Despite the Soviet impression, the Truman administration had its own propaganda difficulties. The Office of War Information, which included Voice of America, was terminated at the end of the war, and its “sharply reduced” activities were transferred to the State Department. The House of Representatives even eliminated all funding for the information program, but Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall managed to persuade the Senate to restore it. Conscious of the deepening Cold War and “the deplorable state of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the United States and its policies,” members of Congress wrote charter legislation in 1947 for an information agency. The initial appropriation was only $15 million, but it rose to $47 million by 1950; agency personnel increased from a low of about 2,500 employees to 4,370 in 1950 (13,000 had labored for the OWI).10 As a result, the Voice of America began broadcasting in Russian in 1947 to counter Soviet propaganda. A major Newsweek article informed readers of the VOA’s “worst headache”—the racial issues. “It cannot sidestep . . . a story of an American lynching which it knows Moscow will exploit”; VOA could only hope to minimize the damage by persuading listeners that such atrocities were rare. In fact, as an American academic wrote in the New Republic, the Red propaganda about race was based on actual abuses, not falsehoods. Moreover, he went on to say, for most of it “Soviet specialists cheerfully quote numerous American authorities.” The anti-American messages were promulgated not only by Soviet organs dealing with news

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events, but also in motion pictures, cartoons, and even plays (one was set in a town in the postwar South).11 The U.S. press attempted to persuade readers to heed what foreigners were saying about the American racial problem. The New York Times quoted the actor Raymond Massey to the effect that “‘the entire world’ is watching America and the way it handles its racial and religious minorities.” Massey raised a timely objection to what happened to hundreds of thousands of black veterans who, after returning home, were “stripped of [their] human dignity.” (The sentiments were Massey’s, of course, but, more crucially, it was the Times that chose to print them.) For its part, Time magazine offered the observations of a Nigerian student who wrote a book about his seven years spent in the United States. He scored a telling point by exposing the imbecility of training a white American doctor to go to Africa to treat ill Nigerians while refusing to train a Nigerian to go home to do the same.12 America’s failings included insults to diplomats and dignitaries of color, although these were rare in the Truman years since few dark-skinned diplomats were posted to Washington. When the Ethiopian minister Ras (Prince) H. S. Imru was Jim Crowed, it became front-page news. Imru had been invited to attend an address by Truman at Constitution Hall but was evicted from the diplomatic section, and relegated, according to the New York Times, to a section “reserved for his race.” The State Department apologized, but the Ethiopian legation demanded the offending usher be punished. That would miss the larger point, responded a Times editorialist: the usher “was only implementing what is a condoned practice”—segregation—in the capital that does not reflect the will of most Americans. What should be done was put the District of Columbia “in step with the more enlightened areas of the country.”13 Similarly, when Haiti’s Minister of Agriculture François Georges was turned away from a hotel in Mississippi, where he had been invited to a conference, the Pittsburgh Courier not only objected to the insult, but pointed out why America needed to counter “Soviet attacks against its democracy.” But it could not do so when Washington ignored such incidents.14 Contempt for the quality of Georgia justice was laced through a brief item in the New Republic about white jurors who took eight minutes to acquit a prison warden and four guards of charges of murdering eight black convicts. It recited the testimony of prosecution witnesses that the warden had forced the prisoners to flee by firing shots at them, and that several of them had been killed while crawling under the prison building for protection.15 Stories of this type caused Cedric Dover, a professor at the New School for Social Research, to warn of unintended consequences. Journalists were “trying to be helpful” by reporting “how well we were

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defeating the oppression of minorities,” he wrote, but they were making “foreigners aware of these flaws in our democracy. ‘The feeling abroad is that there is a lynching a day.’”16 That belief was greatly exaggerated, but the reality was grim. The Tuskegee Institute counted seven lynchings for 1945 and 1946, while the Pittsburgh Courier tallied twenty-nine from VJ Day in 1945 to 1947. Whichever figure was correct, there was unquestionably serious racial violence, in North and South alike, in 1946 and 1947.17 And lynching was but one manifestation of racism. New Times (Moscow) sketched a devastating (and generally accurate) picture of the “thralldom” of black Americans: They were “paid less than whites for the same kind of work,” barred from public accommodations and from voting in many states, subject to lynchings, and so on. “Black slavery,” it summed up, “virtually still exists in this highly developed country.”18 New Times used a death at the Lincoln Memorial to reinforce the point. The incident involved a forty-three-year-old black man, James Walls, who hung himself “just below the armchair of the liberator of the Negro slaves.” According to the Washington Post, from which the New Times presumably got the story, Walls was actually found in the basement of the memorial, where he worked as a laborer. But placing the body “below the armchair” of Lincoln strengthened the symbolism and the New Times’s point. The article sought to make his death more than one man’s tragedy by accusing the police and press of not investigating his suicide, ascribing it to fear the revelations would have revealed “slave market practices” that tortured black lives. The New Times was able to make that accusation because the Washington Post itself hinted that there might be more to the suicide. Walls’s wife said he was not depressed, and his coworker said he was in normal spirits shortly before he took his own life.19 President Truman himself regarded America’s failure to assure equal rights to black citizens “as one of its weakest points in the struggle with communism,” his aide Clark Clifford recalled; he realized such attacks “needed to be challenged” since American successes and failures echoed loudly “in every corner of the world.”20 U.S. black leaders were bringing pressure to bear on Truman, who responded, in part, by creating a civil rights committee. In 1947 the committee submitted its report, To Secure These Rights. It decried lynchings; police brutality against minorities; the judiciary’s failure to uphold equal justice; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the denial of the ballot to minorities; segregation in the armed forces; and inequality in employment, public and private education, housing, medical care, public services, and public accommodations. The committee urged the federal government to do more to protect civil rights and recommended measures

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to abolish poll taxes and to end discrimination and segregation in the military and in interstate commerce.21 The report was debated in the national press. Newsweek opened by recounting the horror felt by Truman (and many others) on learning of the Monroe murders. These were just one category of America’s failures. Others included denial of equal justice, inferior facilities for blacks in the South, discrimination in employment, and the limited access of blacks and Jews to northern colleges and universities.22 Time’s list differed slightly, but its purpose—demonstrating the “wide and continuing gap between U.S. deeds and U.S. ideals”—was the same. While predicting many of the recommendations “would remain pious hopes,” Time also hailed the report as “a sharp and much-needed prod to the nation’s conscience.”23 The NAACP applied its own prod to the administration. It took to the United Nations “a frank and earnest appeal to all the world for elemental justice” for black Americans. The force behind the petition was supplied by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading African American intellectual, who enlisted a number of luminaries to draft and line up support for the document. Afraid the UN might not accept the petition, Du Bois leaked it to the New York Times and other major newspapers. The Times, in its report, concluded that it “is not the Soviet Union that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi” and its racists.24 Not surprisingly, the Russians supported the petition, but as the Truman administration desired, it was effectively buried. While the appeal never had the airing at the United Nations for which Du Bois had hoped, it did achieve more than the Truman administration wanted it to. The petition was widely endorsed by Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Belgium, Haiti, Mexico, Norway, China, and the Soviet Union, among others, and it received much press coverage, domestic and foreign. In addition to the Associated Press and United Press, “Greek, Russian, French, Italian, Indian, Danish, Chinese, English, and Norwegian newspapers requested copies of the petition in order to turn out stories.” Editorial reaction was “generally favorable,” but some U.S. papers were displeased that the nation’s racial faults had been exposed. Significantly, it pushed the Truman administration into strengthening the civil rights arm of the Justice Department.25 On February 2, 1948, Truman requested Congress to establish permanent civil rights bodies and strengthen existing civil rights statutes; provide federal protection against lynching; protect the right to vote; establish a Fair Employment Practice Commission; prohibit discrimination in interstate transportation facilities; provide home rule and suffrage in presidential elections in the District of Columbia; authorize statehood for Hawaii and Alaska and greater self-government for island possessions; and settle the claims of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Recognizing

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the message’s propaganda value, the government made it the Voice of America’s lead story of the day. Moscow did not praise Truman for his action, of course, but chose instead to accuse him of wilting under the coercion of civil rights opponents.26 As important as Truman’s international problems were domestic politics. The black vote gained in importance as revolts confronted Truman from different directions. From the left, former vice president Henry Wallace ran as the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948, declaring that “segregation and discrimination of any kind or character have no place in America.”27 From the right, delegates from Mississippi and Alabama bolted the Democratic Party for adopting a strong civil rights plank, triggering the Dixiecrat rebellion, and later nominated South Carolina’s Governor Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate. Henry Wallace also applied the prod. Not that it did him much good with the mainstream press, of which Time was a special case, because cofounder Henry Luce was a philosophical antagonist of his.28 Time considered him a calculating demagogue for proposing the repeal of state laws prohibiting racial intermarriages and taking actions that raised the hackles of southerners. Even Time granted, however, that Wallace had cast a harsh light on segregation, which might cost America “her position of leadership in world affairs.”29 But Time painted Wallace with the Red brush by putting him in the company of “New York’s Communist-minded Congressman Vito Marcantonio” and the controversial activist-entertainer Paul Robeson, and it claimed that Wallace’s speeches sounded “like the gospel from Moscow” and that he “does not quite suit Moscow yet” (implying astonishment Wallace had not quite arrived at that state of disgrace, or, alternatively, the expectation he soon would achieve it).30 America’s racial difficulties put some elements of the U.S. press on the defensive. The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg was responsible for some of that defensiveness after he described “the hierarchy of race in America and widespread discrimination against Negroes” in the South in 1946.31 David Lawrence, the founder of U.S. News & World Report, was notably defensive when he arranged a debate in print with Ehrenburg in 1947. Lawrence conceded that Americans “are not without sin” in matters of race, and he pleaded for patience. “We are making progress with it [through] education and publicity.”32 Robert E. Cushman, a member of Truman’s civil rights committee, even opined in the New York Times that there was no use in resenting the Russians for publicizing “our continued lynchings, our Jim Crow statutes and customs,” since Americans cannot deny the charges were accurate. Cushman implied that owning up to the disparity between what

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Americans preached about equality and what they practiced could be “a wholesome thing.”33 Cushman had a point, but American journalists were probably uncomfortable with readers watching them critically as they seemed to duplicate Red rhetoric about race. With the world scrutinizing America’s color line, and possibly leaning toward friendship with the Communists, national self-interest required exposing and correcting racial injustices, so the press was unlikely to discontinue its airing of the atrocities and the prejudice. Still, with those readers in mind, the press probably felt it advisable at least to weaken the Communist venom.34 One way of doing this was to accuse the Communists of exploiting racial strife. (Testimony from recusant Reds was helpful toward this end.)35 More commonly and perhaps more effectively, U.S. journalists recited the strides being made toward improvements in the racial climate, a theme that enabled Americans to ask foreigners to be patient, that all would be made well in time, as Lawrence had beseeched Ehrenburg. Some items listing black progress were brief but significant: the admission of blacks to white universities in border states; the more severe sentences that southern courts imposed on whites who raped black women; a Supreme Court ruling striking down racially restrictive real estate covenants; the California Supreme Court’s striking down of another law against interracial marriages; University of Arkansas students who so vigorously objected to making a black student attend classes with a railing around his chair that the barrier was removed; the “cool courage” of U.S. District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, a white southerner, who ordered South Carolina’s Democratic primary opened to black voters; and even the selection of “a Catholic, a Jew, and a Negro” as marshals of Harvard’s 1948 commencement.36 The electoral defeat of a racist politician, Mississippi Representative John E. Rankin, was used as another indicator of progress. Rankin, who had campaigned on a platform “of hate and bigotry,” had finished last in a field of candidates for the Senate seat of “the unlamented Theodore G. Bilbo,” cheered the liberal Times of St. Petersburg, Florida, since it “spikes many of the [Communist] propaganda guns.” Bilbo himself had been bad enough, added the paper, because he provided ammunition for “the Communist cry that minorities have no future in the United States,” but Rankin had “wanted to out-Bilbo Bilbo.”37 Soviet propagandists did make effective use of Rankin—and Bilbo. So unwavering a racist was the former, observed New Times, “that even some of his friends and supporters have given him up as a hopeless case.” And Bilbo had repeatedly urged the slaughter of black Americans as inferiors.38

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As a sop to readers’ attitudes, the U.S. press defended Americans (but seldom racists) and U.S. institutions that found themselves the targets of Moscow’s attacks, and when possible undermined the Communist case. Time, for instance, went out of its way to tangle with Pravda correspondent Yuri Zhukov, who accused Hollywood of churning out movies that depicted black Americans as “either imbeciles . . . or wild beasts inspiring the hatred of the audience.” Time did concede Hollywood “is inclined to show Negroes as rather simple, but has not presented a violently villainous Negro since The Birth of a Nation.” (It did not question whether being portrayed as shuffling simpletons went down any better with African Americans than being depicted as wild beasts.) Time vigorously defended Eleanor Roosevelt when she aroused the ire of the Soviets by asserting that human rights were violated in Stalinist Russia. (New Times had fired off a round to the effect that she failed to recognize that Americans of color were not regarded as human beings, and were no more protected by the law than “a stray dog.”) Time lauded her as America’s “great lady” and praised her ladylike answer not to attack each other unduly, but to recognize that “nobody . . . is perfect.” That, Time interjected, was something with which “most of the world’s citizens could agree.”39 As Mrs. Roosevelt herself lost patience with the Russians, her rhetoric grew less ladylike. She reminded them in 1953 that she was well aware of the defects in American life, having “spent the better part of my life fighting to help correct them.” She also advised the Soviets sharply that Americans enjoyed something foreign to the Communist system: the freedom to speak their minds. The Republican Party, most newspapers, and millions of Republicans “have been criticizing and denouncing the government” for twenty years, she wrote. “Yet not one Republican . . . has been imprisoned or hanged for his opposition. . . . Not one newspaper has been suppressed. Not one citizen has been shipped off to a slave-labor camp.” Nor would Democrats suffer any of these fates, she continued, when they “disagree with the [incoming] Republican administration.”40 Some Communist propaganda was welcomed by U.S. journalists on the theory that the more exaggerated it was or the more glaring its blunders, the more it discredited itself. The Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti supplied one howler. The House of Representatives, Time quoted Togliatti as saying, “had been elected by only 4 percent of the U.S. population”—the other 96 percent being black Americans. Newsweek ridiculed a Communist broadside about Buster Crabbe (the movie actor known best for playing Tarzan). Il Lavoratore, the Communist sheet in Trieste, identified him as a Communist who supposedly was shot down for defying an order from Bilbo, the “lyncher of Negroes and Italians, [to] keep his mouth shut.” Actually, Crabbe was “very much alive,” Newsweek corrected

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with relish, and certainly no Communist. In fact, he was “a registered Republican.”41 The U.S. press relished Soviet propaganda when the party line and ideological correctness caused it to stumble. A striking example was Time’s review of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel, The Storm. Originally replete with German villains, it was restocked with fictional U.S. Army officers—or as Time put it, nincompoops and ninnies who talked as if they had just stepped out of a Daily Worker cartoon when they defended segregation. How they won their commissions, Time grumbled, “Ehrenburg doesn’t bother to explain.”42 But Time hewed to its own line, never explaining how the U.S. Army somehow managed the trick of keeping officer’s bars—or general’s stars—off the shoulders of American ninnies and nincompoops. Another self-discrediting fable, “The Hanging of Comrade Abe,” came to the attention of Newsweek in the form of a Radio Moscow broadcast to North America in 1948. As the fable opened, a statue of Lincoln came to life and went to a southern town where an election was under way. Lincoln came to the rescue of a “young Negro veteran and his wife” who were assailed by a mob for trying to vote. But Lincoln himself was hanged from the local “lynching post.” At the conclusion, one Russian announcer commented that what started out to be a legend had the ring of truth. A second announcer replied, “That is America today, and there you are—take it or leave it.”43 Newsweek could be sure Americans would deride it. Collier’s, one of the giant magazines of the day, was less confident that a heavy-handed children’s tale about prejudiced Americans could be counterbalanced. Soviet children read about Mister Twister, an American millionaire who, with wife, daughter, and pet monkey, visited Leningrad and balked at taking lodgings because both whites and people of color were quartered in the city’s hotels. It seemed that “Old Twister can’t stand the sight of those colored races.”44 The Soviets, Collier’s explained, capitalized on white supremacy in the United States with propaganda they disseminated not just in Mother Russia, but wherever people of color lived. The children’s tale so unsettled Collier’s that it urged Washington to appoint the black diplomat Ralph Bunche as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Sending Bunche to Moscow would show both Russians and “the colored races of a troubled Asia” that Mister Twister was “an exaggeration,” that segregation was not U.S. policy.45 Americans who challenged racist practices often were sorted into one of two camps by the national press. Unsurprisingly, loyalty was a crucial determinant. However harsh their rhetoric, critics of unquestioned loyalty could usually get a sympathetic hearing from the national press when Jim Crow was the issue. But often, when the press questioned the loyalty of an individual, it turned out the government did as well.

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A number of U.S. publications questioned the loyalty of the activistentertainer Paul Robeson, whose outspoken defense of the Soviet Union cast suspicions on him until the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and the alliance of the Soviet Union, United States, and Britain brought his views “into greater consonance with mainstream patriotism.” (Even then, the FBI, regarding him to be a Communist, kept him under surveillance. Martin Bauml Duberman has argued, however, that Robeson was never a member of the Communist Party.)46 After World War II, Robeson became even more outspoken. He admitted that the Soviet Union exhibited some totalitarian features, but said also that it had color-blind equality. The State Department was sufficiently worried about Robeson’s impact abroad that it confiscated his passport. With his travel curtailed, the press did its part to damage Robeson’s credibility at home and overseas. Many black Americans, the New York Times quoted Robeson as suggesting, “would prefer the equality in the Soviet Union, with all its acknowledged lack of freedom, to the ‘shadowy’ freedom of speech” available in Dixie. The Times did not let that pass unchallenged. It printed the riposte of Edgar G. Brown, the director of the National Negro Council, who characterized as “the biggest lie” any implication by Robeson that black Americans would welcome equality at the price of an authoritarian regime; he also disputed Robeson’s credentials to speak on behalf of African Americans.47 Robeson spoke out in 1948 against a bill designed to require Communist and Communist-front organizations to register with the government. Time denounced him as a “longtime fellow traveler” who, when questioned about whether he was a Communist, declared that men braved incarceration for refusing to answer that question, and that he stood ready to join them. Time could have conceded this was an expression of principled defiance, but it accused him of cynical posturing. “Nobody,” it sniffed, “asked him to go to jail.”48 In marked contrast was the respect accorded the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who led a cause that could not be separated from national security. When it came to serving in the military, the existence of two unequal classes of Americans, black and white, could not be denied. Despite ample evidence that black outfits had acquitted themselves well in the Civil War, the Indian campaigns on the western frontier, the SpanishAmerican War, and with the French army during World War I, “it was an article of faith in and out of the Army that blacks wouldn’t fight, couldn’t fight.” With rare exceptions, such as the exceptionally effective black fighter pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, blacks were relegated to support roles or menial tasks during World War II. Except for the breakout from the Normandy beachheads and a successful experiment with integrating units

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during the emergency of the Battle of the Bulge, the Army remained segregated, and the status of blacks within the Navy and Marine Corps was not much better and sometimes was worse. But they were essential to national defense: The “Army couldn’t win the war without blacks; there weren’t enough young white men to go around.” Between 1940 and 1946, 1,074,398 blacks were drafted and 88,475 enlisted.49 Conscription ended in 1947, but by 1948, it was evident that volunteers alone would not meet manpower needs. When Truman called for reviving the draft in early 1948, Randolph began to build pressure to drum Jim Crow out of the services. Truman called for ending discrimination in the military, but Randolph and most other black leaders believed segregation might survive. Randolph testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 31 that he would counsel civil disobedience to a Jim Crow draft, even if the United States were at war. Grant Reynolds, who also testified, believed that notice had been given to “the nation and the world that segregation was reaching an unbearable point.”50 The politically vulnerable Truman capitulated. He issued executive orders establishing fair employment practices in the federal government and set in motion a campaign to abolish Jim Crow in the armed forces, which would prove to be one of “the most important steps taken to end racial discrimination.”51 Not until Truman gave assurances that his order unequivocally banned segregation, however, did Randolph rule out civil disobedience.52 Advocating civil disobedience to correct the wrong done black fighting men, radical though it was at the time, nevertheless won the approbation of Time and Newsweek. (Now two magazines merged into one, U.S. News & World Report published a number of stories about reinstituting the draft, but it ignored Randolph’s critical role in the debate about it.) Newsweek and Time agreed that a complacent nation had received an overdue awakening. Black sentiment against segregation, said the former, had reached the boiling point, as was demonstrated when Randolph and his supporters appeared before the Senate committee. Time reminded its readers that “too many Americans forget what the Communists never let others forget”: U.S. democracy is imperfect.53 The Soviets welcomed the confusion in their enemy’s camp and provided details of how unfairly servicemen of color had been treated. The Red Army daily Red Star, a few inaccuracies aside, provided a fairly accurate summary of the inferiority forced on most blacks who served during World War II and of the failure to ban segregation afterwards.54 Some of Randolph’s opponents attached imputations of treason to his position that blacks should refuse to serve in segregated units. Newsweek neutralized some of the venom by showing how badly served by their

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country were blacks in uniform: the Army segregated all black soldiers; and the Navy, which of necessity had to assign blacks and whites to the same ships, had just three black officers and limited 80 percent of black enlisted men to duties as mess attendants. Both Newsweek and Time anointed Randolph as a spokesman for American principles of equality. The former did so by quoting his comment, “I reported last week to President Truman that Negroes are in no mood to shoulder a gun for democracy abroad so long as they are denied democracy here at home”; the latter his statement that “Negroes have reached the limit of their endurance when it comes to going into another Jim Crow Army to fight another war for . . . a democracy they have never gotten.” Time also defended Randolph when Senator Wayne Morse questioned “whether Randolph realized that such civil disobedience would probably be prosecuted as treason.” Time added its own comment to Randolph’s manly response: “He did, and added: ‘We would be willing to absorb the violence, absorb the terrorism, face the music, and take whatever comes.’”55 Newsweek offered up Randolph’s retort that the members of Congress who questioned him at the hearing “would raise hell” if subjected to the “indignities and injustices” inflicted on blacks in the services.56 Crucially, Time and Newsweek defended Randolph against charges that he was a Communist, no light matter even this early in the Cold War. Time did it by publishing, without qualification or objection, Randolph’s justification of civil disobedience: Hitler’s racism was grave enough threat for “the rank-and-file Negro in World War II,” to swallow the abuses of segregation, but that factor was “absent from the power struggle between Stalin and the U.S.” Newsweek based its defense of Randolph on his credentials as an anti-Communist. He could not be “cried down as a Communist because as a lifelong moderate socialist he has been fighting Communists politically for decades.” Indeed, the Communists’ attack on Randolph—that he was “spreading division, confusion, and defeatism among the Negro people”—was used to buttress the argument that he should be known by the enemies he made. Newsweek designated Randolph as the true leader of the opposition to Jim Crow in the services, noting that even blacks who disagreed with him on civil disobedience believed he was right on target in attacking segregation and racial discrimination in the armed forces.57 Black Americans suffered more private humiliations and official injustice in the armed services than other minorities, but as Carey McWilliams commented, inferiority was a fact of life for “all non-Caucasian groups with minor variations.” William Brower, an African American journalist, witnessed many of those variations across the country while researching a sixteen-part series on black life. He found ill-treatment of “Latin Americans and American Indians in the Southwest, Orientals on the West

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Coast, and . . . other dark-skinned foreign-born residents in the East.”58 And while African Americans received the worst and most publicized injustices, the ill-treatment of those other minorities also impacted foreign opinion of the United States. As Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights reported in 1947, “A relatively few individuals here may be identified with millions of people elsewhere, and the way in which they are treated may have world-wide repercussions. . . . We have fewer than half a million American Indians; there are 30 million more in the Western Hemisphere. Our Mexican American and Hispano [sic] groups are not large; millions in Central and South America consider them kin. We number our citizens of Oriental descent in the hundreds of thousands; their counterparts overseas are numbered in the hundreds of millions.” The rest of the world watched closely, indeed, for how their American “relatives” were treated.59

Chapter 2

First Americans, Last in America

P

rivate Juan Vigil returned home after World War II to a small pueblo in New Mexico with “two Bronze Stars, the American Defense Ribbon, the Combat Infantry Badge, and the Good Conduct Medal,” along with “the Asiatic-Pacific Ribbon for thirty-nine months of service.” But this Hopi soldier’s service did not carry with it the right to vote. New Mexico and Arizona denied First Americans that right, even though the Navajos had the highest percentage of voluntary enlistments in the nation.1 In its 1947 report, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights wrote that “our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds around the world. “Those with competing philosophies have stressed—and are shamelessly distorting—our shortcomings.”2 Although discrimination against African Americans received the lion’s share of publicity in the Cold War, they were not the only minorities who also faced inequality and discrimination. Indeed, in some ways, their plight more clearly portrayed the United States as an imperial power. As historian Paul Rosier has written, three major themes surrounded Indian-white relations after World War II. First, whites intended to renew their attempts to get Indian land despite long-standing treaties with the Native Americans (a movement to terminate the reservation system was seen by many as an excuse for a landgrab). Second, such attempts on the part of whites would have repercussions internationally given the United States’ new global obligations; and finally, Native Americans could help the United States in its quest for moral authority in the world by forcing the government to honor its obligations at home. All those themes played out in the national and international press.3 Shortly after the war, President Truman got his first opportunity to correct the perception at home and abroad that the nation had not dealt 31

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fairly with Indians when a bill creating the Indian Claims Commission came before him. Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug advised Truman that the bill would “be widely viewed as a touchstone of the sincerity of our national professions of fair and honorable dealings toward little nations.” Indeed, as Truman said in his statement announcing passage of the bill, the establishment of the ICC was a sign that the United States did “respect . . . the rights of little peoples.”4 The extent of that respect for “little peoples” would be sorely tested at home in the next few years. As it happened, an appalling crisis was confronting the nation’s largest tribe, the Navajo, in the postwar period because of government ineptitude, if not treachery. Dorothy Pillsbury detailed their plight in a series of articles published by the Christian Science Monitor between February and September of 1946. Pillsbury chronicled how the Navajos, who had raised sheep for generations on arid land in New Mexico and Arizona, were facing slow starvation because of a policy by the Office of Indian Affairs that limited the number of sheep a Navajo could own to ten per family member, an unsustainable level. With many Navajos off the reservation for the war effort, starvation had been avoided. But with the end of the war and the Navajos returning home, they were faced with the prospect of supporting, on largely nonarable land, some fifty thousand people whose numbers were increasing at the rate of one thousand per year.5 Part of the problem was that only about 10 percent of the Navajos spoke English, making it difficult for them to find work off the reservation. Compounding the problem, only one-fourth of their twenty thousand children were in school. As early as 1868, the federal government had promised them a school and teacher for every thirty children, a pledge unkept.6 A similar story was told to a million or so readers of Time’s foreign editions, and millions of others abroad with access to alternative news sources. After encouraging the Navajos to raise sheep, Time explained mordantly in November 1947, the government reversed itself in 1933 because overgrazing was causing soil erosion and ordered them to dispose of many of their animals, whence came much of their livelihood. Though vast, the reservation could support no more than thirty-five thousand residents, yet fiftysix thousand were attempting to eke out a meager existence, the result of thousands of Navajos returning to their old homes following military service or after defense industries closed. Time compiled a list of their problems: They were destitute; were denied the vote by some states; had barely a third of their children enrolled in schools despite government treaties pledging to educate them; and were condemned to inadequate health services at a time when tuberculosis struck them at fourteen times the rate of other Americans. And now, in 1947, the Navajo faced mass starvation. That

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bleak prospect Time linked to the fact that the government had “welshed on its promises before,” and if the coming winter was hard, “many of the children and old men would be dead.”7 A Los Angeles Examiner article specifically used the Navajos’ plight to criticize the European focus of the Marshall Plan then under review by Congress. “While the United States is sending billions for the relief of stricken Europe, Navajo Indians face slow starvation in the vast concentration camp of the desert,” the newspaper wrote.8 Letters from citizens concerned about the fate of the Navajos began flowing into the White House as early as April 1947. Most were critical of the aid being provided to European countries when the First Americans at home were starving. Seeking to “[foreclose] those who would criticize my foreign aid program on the ground that we are letting our First Americans starve,” Truman asked Congress to appropriate $500,000 in emergency aid in order to avert “large-scale distress in the Navajo country this winter.”9 The immediate crisis was averted, but the Navajo problems persisted, garnering increasing international attention, especially in the wake of severe winter storms in 1949.10 A proposal by Bolivia for a U.N. investigation into the lives of “aboriginal inhabitants of Central and South America” became a springboard for the Soviet bloc to condemn the “‘intolerable race discrimination’ allegedly practiced in the United States and other countries.” Russian and Polish delegates raised a commotion about the lack of reforms for a quarter-century, pointing out that once again the Indians were starving. “They can’t eat reports to Congress or nice articles in the New York Times,” a Polish diplomat informed that paper sarcastically.11 The Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Bill, which would fund a $90 million reservation improvement project, was meant to alleviate some of the problems at home and abroad. Testifying before Congress, Secretary of the Interior Krug said he favored the bill because “the plight of the Navajos has been used by the anti-American foreign press in an effort to derogate the treatment received by minority groups in the United States.” Passage of the bill would “consequently strengthen this Nation’s international prestige and moral position.”12 Although the House and Senate approved the bill, many national newspapers urged Truman to veto it. A New York Times editorial reminded the government that if its foreign policy was “to be just to minorities the world over, we should begin by being just to those in our own door-yard.” The problem was Section 9 of the bill, which would place all Navajos and Hopis under the state law of New Mexico, contrary to established U.S. policy allowing Indians their own tribal law. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her column, “My Day,” also called for a veto and noted that the Soviets were “particularly watching our attitude toward the native Indians of our country.”

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What used to be important for the sake of simple justice now had international repercussions.13 For the Soviets, the U.S. government’s treatment of the First Americans was an opportunity to score propaganda points with Asians and Africans who remembered vividly the racism and colonialism they suffered under European rule. “While Truman’s government is hypocritically giving assurances that it is solicitous for the needy of the entire world, in reality it has done nothing in the U.S.A. itself to ease the extremely difficult situation of 400,000 American Indians, doomed to slow extinction by a halfstarved existence, insufficient medical service and a shortage of arable land,” Pravda claimed.14 On occasion, the Soviets gave firsthand accounts of the poverty and exploitation of Indians, as did (in two articles) N. Vasilyev, writing about the Seminoles of Florida. “Women dressed in colorful rags cook on stone hearths outside the huts,” he wrote. “Filthy, ragged children with eye sores cluster around the tourists begging for alms in broken English.” Vasilyev used an American academic of “rather radical” views to make the direct connection with colonization and racism: “‘But, then,’ he said, ‘where in America has colonization not been an ugly and bloody tale?’”15 Most often, however, the Soviets borrowed details of the ill-treatment of Native Americans from books, newspapers, and magazines published in the United States or Western Europe. The Soviets mined these sources, in part, because it was there that the most damning material could be most efficiently gathered. There was no need to travel thousands of miles to observe an Indian perishing of starvation or illness when the details could be secured from major papers, magazines, or news agency dispatches. Quoting American sources also lessened or eradicated suspicions that Marxist ideology had distorted the actual transgressions, thus increasing the credibility of the article. One American journalist was quoted in Pravda as saying that most of the land within the reservations “would not feed even a rabbit.” Pravda also cited an article, “How We Are Scalping the Indians,” in American Magazine to back its claim that there were only eighty-three doctors for 393,000 Indians.16 New Times borrowed material from American Socialist. Theft of Indian lands, it said, cut the 150 million acres promised the Indians to 47 million acres, less than a third, by 1933, and the thievery continued during the 1940s when Alaska’s Native population was deprived of significant quantities of land and timber. Lands rich in oil and mineral deposits were rented “at a ridiculously low price” to hugely profitable monopolies, costing the Indians greatly.17 Books were also useful sources. New Times borrowed heavily from Ameri­ ca’s Concentration Camps, whose author, Carlos B. Embry, was a Kentucky

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newspaper publisher. The book was a detailed and scathing indictment of the degradation of Indian lives and culture, for which Embry blamed the national government. Because the government failed to honor its treaty promising to provide one teacher for every thirty reservation children, Embry estimated, 85 percent of Navajos were unable to read or write in any language, and 65 percent could not speak English. A Soviet writer relished Embry’s listing of various forms of prejudice, such as the sign displayed in western restaurants: “No minors, Indians, drunks, or dogs allowed,” which was evidence, according to the writer, that the policy toward them was one of “unconcealed racism and downright colonialism.”18 International politics, no less than domestic politics, made for strange bedfellows. Two of the strangest were the ponderous Soviet monthly International Affairs and what it identified as “a mouthpiece of the colonialists,” the Belgian magazine Mercure. While the Soviets despised Mercure ideologically, they were not about to let that interfere with an opportunity to splatter vitriol on the Americans. Mercure fulminated about the Yankees’ “barbarous and dishonest methods” to exterminate “a most courageous and noble people.” There were more than a million Indians when the European colonists arrived, but by 1900 just 235,000 remained, according to the magazine. Mercure fleshed out dry statistics with scenes of Indians being massacred, cheated out of their furs and lands, and subjected more recently to less horrific but illegal tactics.19 Moscow’s wordsmiths, doubtless realizing they would have been hard-pressed to match the venom of Mercure’s rhetoric, reprinted the full text. The New Times berated the U.S. press generally, and Look specifically, with failing to report on the conditions of the Indian population, which “are more or less of a taboo with the American bourgeois press.”20 Actually some Americans wrote as harshly as the Soviets about the offenses against indigenous peoples. Ruth Muskrat Bronson objected, for instance, to a “new scheme” to seize Native Alaskans’ land and timber without compensation, leaving them no choice but to sue the government to recover damages, an option that would be protracted and expensive and have no guarantee of success—as she illustrated with tales of Indian claims that languished for decades. “Plundering the Indian,” Bronson explained, “is an old American custom.”21 It was also a thoroughly modern practice, according to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which listed a number of serious violations of the rights of the Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts of Alaska. Indians were barred from some white schools; whites subjected them to “virtual peonage”; they were cheated out of gold and jade claims; and some of them, denied counsel to which they were entitled, were tried and sentenced in kangaroo court proceedings.22

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Some Alaska Indians were subjected to forced labor and slavery, according to a report presented to a U.N. committee on slavery in 1950. This accusation was part of a larger indictment that the United States “tolerated forced labor practices on a wide scale” and even “outright slavery.” The Pribilof Indians, residents of islands off the Alaskan coast, were paid about $1 for a seal skin that the Interior Department sold for $70. The Indians were exploited as long as they lived on their islands, and steps were taken to prevent their departures with threats that they would never be permitted to return, not “even to visit their families.”23 For some, the whole reservation system fed into the criticism of the United States and its treatment of the First Americans. The “termination” movement used the Cold War as justification for integrating Indians into American life. Former Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, writing in the New Republic, decried an attempt to block the creation of new reservations, and, perhaps, close existing ones. The motivation behind “this cowardly attack,” Ickes thundered, “is that it will put an end to ‘Communist propaganda’ (which likens) Indian reservations to concentration camps.” Ickes taunted the opponents of reservations for providing Moscow a basis for the accusation that “we . . . steal property and trample on the rights of the Alaska natives.”24 Certainly, some of those who advocated dismantling the reservation system did so because they saw the integration of Native Americans into mainstream society as a way to blunt Soviet criticism. Others saw it in Cold War terms. As Rosier described it, “the avowed goal was to ‘liberate’ the enslaved peoples of the world, who, according to American cold warriors, included Indians ‘confined’ in ‘concentration camps’ or socialistic environments.”25 For the Soviets, the reservations and the general treatment of Native Americans at the hands of the federal government fueled a recurring prop­ aganda theme accusing the United States of committing genocide against the Indians. Literaturnaya Gazeta, a Soviet literary newspaper containing news impacting directly on official culture, mocked those Americans who objected to being portrayed as Nazis. Oozing false sympathy, the Gazeta agreed that the Americans had a perfect right to be indignant “when it is said . . . that they borrowed their misanthropic theories” from Hitler. After all, it employed the devastating conclusion: “didn’t their ancestors . . . [butcher] the ‘redskin’ Indians’” long before Hitler was born?26 From various quarters of the Communist world emanated similar accusations of genocide—and not only as a historical practice. International Affairs averred that American Indians “are still being annihilated in a planned way.”27 Coupling racism and colonialism, Beijing’s Xinhua News Agency cited massacres that diminished “the Indian population from

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three million to . . . 300,000.” Being insufficiently shocking, that statistic was later adjusted downward to 100,000 survivors.28 Still, the circumstances of the Indians were sufficiently grim that little tinkering with the facts by the Soviets was necessary; the truth generally served their propaganda quite well. Naturally, they were prepared to slip in particular emphases, connect disparate symbols, and impose strategic silence to mask an inconvenient fact. There was, for example, the article that appeared in the mainstream American Magazine. For a century, this periodical charged in 1950, “we have lied, cheated, stolen, used our power and their gullibility to give the red men the run-around,” and those and similar practices continued to date.29 While the Soviets used this article as an indictment of the U.S. government’s ineptitude, it was unsatisfactory because it ascribed the Indians’ plight to their being trapped in a bureaucratic hell, one that the bureaucrats made worse, by blocking the Indians from correcting their own problems. Something stronger was needed, and New Times supplied it: U.S. authorities set out “to destroy the surviving indigenous population of America”—that is, to commit genocide. Then it amplified the message. Since “a whole people [had been] deliberately consigned to extinction,” Truman showed his true colors as a hypocrite and dissembler when he claimed that genocide “has not occurred in the United States.”30 Legal bars to Indians voting provided more grist for Moscow’s mill. The restrictions were struck down in 1948 in Arizona by that state’s supreme court and in New Mexico by a federal judge. Three months later, New Times asserted that 400,000 Indians—approximately the entire U.S. Indian population that year—could not vote. The Soviets might have overlooked the rulings of the two courts in 1948 (the New York Times reported them). But the issue was far too valuable to discard, and the Communists continued to rant as late as 1951 that the Americans were denying Indians the franchise.31 Some restrictions all too familiar to black southerners also affected Indians once off their reservations. Two white passengers on a bus en route to New York ordered an Indian teen to seat herself “in the ‘Jim Crow’ section,” but she refused and fled, reported an AP dispatch that the New York Times printed.32 Not even the grave was free of bigotry. A nationally circulated black paper, the Pittsburgh Courier, reported that a cemetery in Sioux City, Iowa, refused to accept for burial the body of a Winnebago Indian, Sergeant John R. Rice, who had died in Korea. The indignant Truman arranged for his interment in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. The Courier waxed equally indignant about the thousands of other “lilywhite cemeteries,” including some, no doubt, in Truman’s hometown,

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Independence, Missouri. Tongue-in-cheek, the Courier suggested a census of Jim Crow cemeteries and circulating the results at home and abroad.33 New Times labeled the Rice case a matter of “discrimination against the dead,” but the item ran in 1959, eight years late, ideology trumping timeliness in its priorities. Besides, it was an excellent illustration of the strange ways of Jim Crow, for example, when a Washington, D.C., pet cemetery refused to allow the burial of a “dog belonging to a Negro.”34 A cause célèbre caught the eye of the New York Times after an Idaho court sentenced four young Indians to fourteen years in prison for rustling a sheep they planned to be the main course at a celebration of the birth of a child. An outdated statute still on the books after eighty-six years mandated the harsh sentence. The Times protested that the defendants were neither represented by counsel nor advised of their rights, and the state supreme court eventually overturned the verdict. The case had international implications. Oliver La Farge, the president of an Indian rights association, commented that overturning the sentence reflected “honor on American democracy before the world,” while the Times coupled the “stopping of aggression in Korea” and the “righting of a wrong” against those Indians as exemplifying a “strong and vigorous democracy.”35 Indians could receive justice in American society, the press maintained, and it sometimes helped the process along. Eleanor Roosevelt made an issue, in her newspaper column in 1949, of legislation that would deny Indians in New Mexico and Arizona, who were aged, blind, or dependent children, eligibility for Social Security assistance. “Why is it we cannot seem to treat the first citizens of this country with decency and justice?” she wrote. “It makes one ashamed.” It also benefited the Soviets, as Roosevelt noted. For example, a newspaper in Lithuania devoted a full page to life in the United States “as it really is.” As reported by the New York Times, the coverage included articles about “American expansionism, destruction of American Indians, use of Negroes as slave labor, war profiteering, [and] the Marshall Plan.”36 In response, the government did take steps to right some wrongs: The Truman administration withheld $100,000 to the state of Arizona when it excluded Indian youngsters from a program for disabled children. The government also protected Indians’ access both to water and to the federal courts, in which the Utes of Colorado and Utah were awarded more than $31 million for more than six million acres seized by the government between 1891 and 1938.37 Signs of the progress made by Indians were publicized in the domestic press. One singled out by Reader’s Digest was Louis R. Bruce Jr., partMohawk, part-Sioux, who had followed the “Indian Trail to Success.” From the article, it appeared that Bruce needed mostly to overcome an

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“enormous inferiority complex brought on by centuries of humiliation and callous treatment by the whites.” But Bruce had some advantages: his athleticism, his marriage to the daughter of a “wise and prosperous [white] farmer,” salesmanship, and the ability to convert his Indian background into an asset. (Not explained was how marrying well and those other assets were available to the general Indian population.) The story seemed designed to answer hostile propaganda, as when Bruce expressed pride in recent accomplishments of Indians.38 The New York Times ran a story about the first Navajo to matriculate at Barnard College. She planned to train as a nurse for three years, then “work among her people.” (She described them as “medically ‘the most backward Indians’ since they still consulted the medicine man.”) Another reason the Indians relied on Native healers was elided: the government had failed to provide enough orthodox practitioners.39 Indians took grievances to the U.S. government over the years, but they also made appeals to the League of Nations between the wars, and the United Nations after World War II (although with scant results).40 The Six Nations, a confederacy of the Mohawks, Cayugas, Oneidas, Senecas, Onandagas, and Tuscaroras living on four reservations in the United States and one in Canada, approached the United Nations in 1950. They alleged treaty violations by the U.S. and Canadian governments, such as failing to provide Indian schools, and not challenging New York State’s purchase of millions of acres of Indian land without receiving federal permission. Adopting the terminology of the Cold War, Native Americans argued that the reservations were underdeveloped countries and that their treaties with the U.S. and Canadian governments “were instruments of sovereignty and thus nationhood.”41 The New York Times treated the Indians’ claims respectfully, as might be expected considering that one of America’s greatest symbols, George Washington, had signed the original treaty with the Tuscaroras in 1794. Even so, the Times regarded their journey as in vain because the United Nations would not act. Five months later, judging from its studiedly neutral tone, the Times was less receptive when representatives of the tribes met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky, who received them with “warm sympathy” at the United Nations. Sensing an opportunity in the meeting and the Indians’ rhetoric about the U.S. government, New Times warned other nations, in effect, not to trust the Americans, the breakers of so many treaties with native peoples.42 The press made the United States look better by putting South Africa in an embarrassingly bad light. The opportunity was created during the Eisenhower administration, when South Africa refused to issue a visa that would permit Ecuadorian tennis player Francisco Segura to join other

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tennis pros in touring that nation, a refusal Segura attributed to his “Indian blood.” The New York Times played the story on page one and derided South Africa in an editorial inside. South Africa, it said, “must indeed be on shaky ground when it has to safeguard itself against contamination from a visiting tennis professional.” The Times also contrasted South Africa’s bigotry with the acceptance Segura received while in America.43 South Africa and France used variations of this tactic against the United States. South Africa’s foreign minister, Eric H. Louw, accused America of hypocrisy for denouncing apartheid when its own hands were stained with the blood of Native Americans and the abuse of their progeny. Louw slyly disclaimed any intent to bring up the fate of the Indians—then did just that, questioning rhetorically, “what happened to the Indians of the U.S.A., Canada, and the South and Central Americas, [and wondering] what the position of their remaining descendants is today.”44 The French were under hostile scrutiny for their brutal guerrilla war in Algeria, which explained to readers why France’s attorney general tried to create a diversion by hectoring a Newsweek correspondent about “the fate of the “redskins.” “You Americans are lucky to have no native problem,” the Frenchman lectured him. “You killed off all your Indians”—but “we French are too humane to do” the same.45 When Congress began considering a number of bills aimed at terminating the reservation system in 1954, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) organized an emergency conference in Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the bills. The NCAI emphasized the implication such legislation would have abroad, “when the eyes of the world are upon our nation.” The conference received considerable media attention, with almost four thousand news outlets covering it. As Rosier noted, “That coverage may also have found its way to European audiences that were included to support ‘the Indians’ in their fight against coercive assimilation in part because of Europeans’ fascination with American frontier history and traditional Indian culture.”46 The coverage no doubt did make its way to Latin America thanks to the Soviet Union. By 1959, one Soviet campaign beamed 120 hours per week of broadcasts to Latin America—most of which were in Spanish, Portuguese, or English, but there were also regular programs in Quechua, the language of “several million Indians in the Andean highlands.”47 As a result, the Soviets were making “great propaganda inroads” in the area, with its millions of Indian and mestizo peoples. That distressing state of affairs was brought to the attention of President Eisenhower in 1954 by the Republi­ can governor of Oklahoma, Johnston Murray, who explained: “[W]e in the United States have treated the American Indian shabbily,” such as denying him any prominent role in government, a fact the Reds made

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much of repeatedly. Murray offered his “help in combating this propaganda,” listing as credentials his Indian blood (one-sixteenth Chickasaw), fluent Spanish, and his years spent living and working in Latin America. Eisenhower passed along the letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who arranged for the USIA to coordinate Murray’s visit to Mexico (home of millions of persons with mixed Spanish and Indian blood) and elsewhere to counteract Moscow propaganda on U.S. Indians.48 Washington eventually sent Murray to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico. “His genial manner and fluent Spanish made him an instant success with press and radio representatives,” the State Department reported to Congress. “He was equally at home with government officials, business leaders, labor leaders, and . . . ordinary workers.” He also generated press coverage. The English-language News of Mexico City published several articles that reported his message that in the United States everyone, “Negro, yellow, white, or Indian, as I am, can improve their cultural and economic situation.” Murray offered as proof of his assertion the “two federal judges” and senators of “Indian extraction” who held government posts.49 Other government officials, information officers, for instance, needed to be prepared for hard questions from foreign journalists about the status of Indians (and other minorities), Reader’s Digest informed its readers. To give them a foretaste of the rough reception to come, the USIA staged mock press conferences, at one of which the “viciously cool” voice of Dr. Conroyski leveled accusations about “Indians in concentration camps.” An American officer replied calmly that he was misinformed. Mistreatment had occurred in the past, but many Indians had since made much progress. The story did include one realistic touch. The unimpressed Conroyski retorted, “Everyone knows that Americans are accomplished liars.”50 The article claimed that Conroyski (actually a USIA training officer) had been soundly “beaten,” but it wasn’t that easy. New Times came upon an article about the training session, and a Soviet writer emphasized what the U.S. officer did not mention: that the Indians’ average life span was seventeen years shorter than that of whites; 85 percent of the Navajo were illiterate; states with reservations deprived Indians of the vote; and in some western states restaurants posted insulting signs saying banning Indians from the premises.51 The commentator stretched some facts, and some were out-of-date, but undeniably he had put his finger on matters the Americans brushed over so as to keep America’s image untarnished. Like other minorities, some Indians had clashes with the Ku Klux Klan. The Lumbee Indians did the honors in Robeson County, North Carolina, thereby earning praises from some elements of the press. Time celebrated, for instance, the “cheerful terror” the Lumbees inflicted on the KKK. The

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thirty thousand or so Lumbees were a “tough but fairly peace-loving lot,” reported Time, but their mood turned hostile when the KKK burned two crosses to warn them “to keep their place.” The Klansmen misjudged their enemy: 350 Indians sent seventy-five Klansmen fleeing before state troopers intervened and disarmed both sides. Time awarded the laurels to the Lumbees, who had made “certain that the race-baiting bunch of newcomers to American soil would not mess around” with the first Americans. Even the Catholic Commonweal, predisposed to nonviolence, confessed to its “warm sympathies” for those who resorted to “ancient Indian customs to protect their rights as Americans.” Pravda, for its part, ran a picture of the Indians routing the Klan (presumably it was lifted from the U.S. press, which had to have better connections in the Carolinas than a Moscow publication).52 The Tuscaroras of upstate New York had an enemy trickier than the Klan in the late 1950s and early 1960s—the New York State Power Authority—and the tribe received national and international publicity for its fight to defeat it. The authority tried to seize thirteen hundred acres, one-fifth of the reservation, which the tribe had held since the eighteenth century. The agency wanted the land for a reservoir that would generate hydroelectric power during periods of low water. The writer Edmund Wilson took up the Tuscaroras’ cause, attacking Robert Moses, the authority’s imperious director, for trying to “evict from their humblelooking homes 175 Indians . . . [rather] than to disrupt” a white community, where exercising eminent domain would have been more difficult politically to accomplish. The condemnation process was set in motion without consulting the Indians, Wilson wrote, and “in complete disregard of their rights.”53 Moscow’s New Times exploited the conflict. The U.S. Supreme Court heard the tribe’s case and ruled that the claims of the authority, New Times said, “outweighed any consideration of laws or equity.” The Soviet periodical selected the dictum of Justice Black—“Great nations, like great men, should keep their word”—to create a context broader than the interests of a few hundred Indians. With its record of broken treaties, New Times implied, the United States could not be trusted to honor its treaties with other nations. To make the most effective use of the dissent, New Times truncated Black’s legal opinion. (The Times of London also quoted from Black’s dissent, but went beyond ideology to speak to the humanity of the Indians.) While the new accommodations offered the Indians were better, said the Times, which quoted extensively from the dissent, that was not the point. Their lands might not be the most fertile or most beautiful, or their dwellings the most splendid, but the reservation, their home, was “worth more than money.” It also quoted Black’s statement of regret that the high court broke faith with the Tuscaroras..54

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Indians generally, not the Tuscaroras alone, became powerful symbols in the hands of Soviet leaders at the highest level. The clash of ideology and propaganda was set in motion when the philosopher Bertrand Russell addressed an open letter in 1957 to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President Eisenhower, urging them to negotiate to end the threat of nuclear war. The round of open correspondence that followed in the New Statesman was covered in Britain, the United States, Canada, India, France, Germany, and elsewhere.55 Secretary of State Dulles, writing on behalf of Eisenhower, declared that never in its history had the United States sought “to spread its creed by force of arms.” By contrast, he went on, the Soviet Union absorbed “one nation after another by force or the threat of force,” as when the Red Army crushed the Hungarian uprising.56 Unintentionally, Dulles had created a “marvelous opportunity,” and Khrushchev seized it, wrote Edmund Wilson. Khrushchev challenged Dulles to name just one Indian who represented his race in Congress or who became a millionaire or billionaire, and the Soviet leader pointed out that the tribes themselves have been driven into reservations, even “put on show” in amusement parks. As a telling example of the United States spreading “its creed by force of arms,” Khrushchev brought up the slaughter of the Indians.57 That the United States spread “its creed by force of arms” was a recurrent theme in the Soviet Union’s Cold War propaganda because it reinforced America’s image as an imperialist power. As the New York Times noted in reporting on a Soviet article on expansionism, the story cited “the SpanishAmerican War as the first imperialist war for division of the world and cites also American annexation of the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone and the Haitian, Dominican and Mexican military expeditions.” The argument was not without merit.58

Chapter 3

Color, Caste, and Colonialism

D

espite U.S. rhetoric about its Good Neighbor policy toward South America, norteamericanos consigned Latinos to “a lower caste” that barred them from restaurants, hotels, and other public accommodations, Robert M. MacIver wrote in 1956. “How can we stand for . . . human liberty before Latin America,” he admonished his countrymen, “when we contradict our principles as soon as the citizens of these states cross our borders?”1 MacIver’s observation was accurate not only for alien Latinos, but also for U.S. citizens of Hispanic heritage, who were deprived of political rights as well as access to public accommodations. News of the discrimination against them made its way abroad to the detriment of America’s image. But the effects went beyond national image to affect strategic issues such as the defense of the Panama Canal and the critical U.S. relationship with Mexico. Few possessions were of greater importance to Americans than the Canal. Its strategic value remained great (albeit diminishing with the introduction of capital warships too large to make the transit on the Canal), and it was intensely symbolic as an epic national achievement. A threat to the Canal would have been unthinkable to Americans. Yet in 1947, a controversy involving race threatened the continued use of bases that the U.S. military deemed essential to defend the Canal. The Panama Canal Zone was controlled by the United States with no local representation. As historian Thomas Berstelmann put it, the Zone “sat squarely in the middle of another nation, whose darker-skinned majority resented American racial prejudices and the support lent to Panama’s lightskinned elite.” The Canal was “dug chiefly by Caribbean Negroes,” who were not repatriated home after the construction. In addition to the 22,102 U.S. citizens in 1947, civilians in the Canal Zone numbered 13,322 West Indians, 9,624 Panamanians, and 2,000 representatives of other nationalities.2 44

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The West Indians, the most downtrodden, were denied citizenship by the United States and were resented by Panamanians because they competed for employment in the Zone, and because their culture was West Indian, not Hispanic, and their language English, not Spanish. Panama barred West Indians from citizenship unless they Hispanicized their identity and culture, but it had not installed a Jim Crow system. Indeed, Panamanians had elevated two “Negroes of old stock” to the presidency, and many of them were descended from black slaves or had a mixture of Spanish, black, and Indian blood. Designated lower caste because of their color, not surprisingly many Panamanians nursed “ill will toward Americans.”3 Officially, discrimination in the Canal Zone was not based upon skin color, but on categories of labor. Skilled and supervisory employees were carried on the Gold Roll, unskilled laborers the Silver. (The terminology was taken from the former practice of paying them, respectively, in gold and silver coins.) In practice, there was a profound bias against people of color. Only three blacks were numbered among the 5,620 U.S. civilians on the Gold Roll (out of a total of 5,793), according to a report prepared in 1947 for the Truman administration by retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Frank J. McSherry. The imbalance was no accident: Contractors were “quietly warned not to bring Negro American citizens” to work on the Canal, Paul Blanshard wrote, lest they claim rights the Gold System reserved for white men. Even though the Zone was a U.S. government preserve, its schools, housing, and most public facilities, including theaters, commissaries, clubs, and drinking fountains, were rigidly segregated. McSherry attempted unsuccessfully to have the racial restrictions erased gradually, pointing out the contradiction of tolerating segregation while the country subscribed “to a policy of non-discrimination” in line with the U.N. Charter, and pledged equal treatment of Panamanians.4 Racial practices were actually worse in the Zone than at other U.S. installations in the region. It wasn’t that the federal government lacked the authority to make reforms, a common justification of Washington for not curbing racism in Dixie. “No state legislatures or southern sheriffs or . . . mobs [could] prevent changing” the caste system if the president ordered it.5 Naturally, there were vocal critics of the system. “Anti-American organizations and individuals,” McSherry wrote, effectively used “the personnel practices . . . for propaganda.” Time, one of the few U.S. periodicals to turn a critical eye on the system, pronounced it “one of the worst examples” of Jim Crow. Worse, it was the government that sanctioned the color line: separate commissaries, drinking fountains, schools, even post office wickets. And it was next to impossible to rise from Silver to Gold status. After forty-three years, only fifty-four Panamanians had made that higher notch.6

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Time worried that these practices created “a Communist’s dream” that was ripe for exploitation. Inasmuch as a local affiliate of the United Public Workers of America enrolled more than fifteen thousand of the twentyfive thousand Canal employees, this meant that most of those working on the Canal “belong to a union dominated by Communists”; in effect, racism was imperiling a U.S. strategic asset. One of the few bright spots Time located was the pledge of the union local’s black secretary-treasurer Edward Gaskin; should union leaders in the States take action hostile to the Canal, “we’d throw them bodily out.”7 What Time did not report was striking. As secretary-treasurer of a union local, Gaskin lacked the status to justify a major article. Time could have skirted the difficulty by quoting the remarks of an internationally known black American who excoriated the U.S. government for tolerating preju­ dices and Panamanian politicians for cooperating with them. But that alternative, the activist Paul Robeson, was unpalatable because his leftist positions aroused the rancor of his countrymen.8 The rancor aroused by the Gold-Silver system played a key role in the bases crisis of 1947. The two nations were poised to conclude an agreement allowing the Americans to continue operating fourteen military bases (including a major bomber base) in Panama but outside the Zone. The signing of the pact triggered a protest riot by Panamanian students that caused the National Assembly not to ratify the compact, and U.S. forces were evacuated from the bases, although they remained in the Zone. Secretary of State George C. Marshall was “convinced that Panamanian resentment” about the Gold-Silver system was “a primary cause of the difficulty in this Government’s political relations with . . . Panama and an important background factor” in the rejection of the bases agreement.9 The United States could have brushed aside any military force Panama put in the field, but there were more important considerations. One was the possibility that “a large proportion of the one million people of Panama” would be mobilized against the Americans.10 Public opinion in the hemisphere also no doubt would have been hostile to a show of force or legalistic interpretation of treaty rights by Washington. For once the U.S. press did not have the jump on a racial story. Panama City’s press enjoyed the advantages of language, culture, and location of the key events—not to mention long familiarity with the grievances spawned by the Gold-Silver system. World Report credited “Panama City dispatches” as the source of details—which probably emanated from one or more of the U.S. wire services but almost certainly drew on local reporting about the crucial students’ demonstration that caused the defeat of the bases accord.11 The story made its way to the world in short order. The Soviets painted the United States as a colonial oppressor, a powerful symbol in Latin

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Ameri­ca, where there was suspicion of American intentions and abhorrence of American practices. The Russians knew that accusing the United States of practicing colonialism and racism at home and abroad would resonate in the hemisphere, where memories of racism and colonialism were embedded. While directing propaganda at Latin America, the Soviets missed few opportunities to stir up mischief wherever the Yankees had a presence— military, economic, or cultural. Radio Moscow, for example, implied that the United States would arrogantly cling to the “war bases,” treaty or not.12 The student uprising was celebrated by various Soviet periodicals. New Times called it a bold stroke “for bread, liberty, and national independence,” phrases penned by the leftist Mexican labor leader Vincente Lombardo Toledano, who had long nursed an ambition to use the Canal to embarrass Washington. In 1949, after listing Panama as a colony “under the heel of American imperialism,” Moscow’s Problems of Economics lauded the students for forcing the assembly to deny America the bases.13 Neither periodical mentioned racism as a factor in the crisis—no surprise since it would have clashed with the Marxist priority of class, not racial interests. But the Times (London) did explore the racial dimension, pointing out, for instance, that the color line was so pervasive that merely buying postage stamps was a Jim Crow transaction. Two of America’s most prestigious papers did not perform as well. The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor gave an inaccurate picture of the system, saying, for example, that some workers were paid in gold and others in silver. (Actually all employees were being paid in U.S. currency well before the crisis.) World Report, not yet merged with U.S. News into a single magazine, blamed the “long standing” resentment of Panamanians on their lesser wages and poorer treatment, but—an example of strategic silence—did not bring up the entrenched and pervasive discrimination that caused the resentment. World Report preferred to blame Communist agitators for the student protest. Most strikingly, Time, which had previously excoriated Jim Crow’s hold in the Zone, now ascribed the problems to Panamanian agitation and hysteria. By contrast, Newsweek blamed U.S. officials for failing “to soothe the perennial local resentment against the Army’s Jim Crow policy”—which could not be expected to go over well in a nation where people of mixed- and nonwhite blood far outnumbered whites. The black Pittsburgh Courier was even blunter: Black, brown, yellow, beige, and white Panamanians in the National Assembly voted against America’s “exploitation, racial discrimination, and ‘white supremacy.’”14 The overriding concern of the U.S. press was whether the Canal could be defended without the bases. (The consensus was that it could be done, but it would require making some adjustments.) There also was some selfcongratulatory patter to the effect that respecting Panama’s sovereignty

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would burnish America’s image. The New York Times favored an explanation grounded in realpolitik: Had the United States not evacuated the bases, its “whole moral argument against” the Soviet Union’s tactics in the Dardanelles, Iran, and Eastern Europe would have been undercut, a steep price Washington was unwilling to pay.15 Despite the recommendations of McSherry (and others), Jim Crow remained entrenched in the Zone. The terms Gold and Silver were eliminated in 1948, but the system itself continued under the rubric of “U.S. rate” and “local rate,” although fear of Communism and other factors had combined by 1950 to abate “the rigid racial etiquette of the Zone.”16 Not for decades would the United States cede the Canal to Panama. In the interim, Washington suffered more embarrassments over its possession and even was hoisted on its own petard. At an inter-American conference in Caracas in 1954, Washington introduced a resolution declaring international communism a threat to the peace of the hemisphere. Señora Cecilia Remón, the wife of Panama’s President José Remón, offered an amendment to the effect that the United States was playing into Communist hands, that it could “give ‘keen displeasure’” to the Soviets by terminating Jim Crow in the Zone. Her maneuver had a “most profound effect” at the conference, the New York Times reported. President Eisenhower himself took a “considerable amount of interest” in her tactic, according to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.17 And there was the glaring failure on the part of the United States to adhere to pledges of equality of treatment that it made in 1955. Eighteen months later, claimed the liberal Nation, the Canal had not begun to equalize pay or promotions for workers on the Silver list. Panama also took its grievances against the United States to the U.N. General Assembly in 1957 and 1959. It had a good case, noted Michael L. Conniff; the Canal authority still did not honor the “principle of equal pay for equal work” and kept in place “racial or national distinctions” among workers.18 Because of some exchanges over the Panama and Suez canals, the United States laid itself open to Soviet allegations that it was a colonial power. In the aftermath of the Suez crisis of 1956, Washington attempted to broker a deal to internationalize the Suez Canal while insisting on retaining U.S. control over the Panama Canal. East German Radio noted sarcastically that what distinguished the two canals was that Washington regarded the Panama Canal as “exclusively American-owned.” A takeover of the Canal by Panamanians “would be “a horror . . . [to] Dulles.” In fact, Dulles did claim that under a 1903 treaty the United States exercised all rights to the Canal “to the exclusion of Panama’s sovereignty.” Infuriated, Panama’s President Ernest de la Guardia fired back that Panama relinquished sovereign rights only in matters of “administration, maintenance, and defense”

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and rejected the U.S. claim of having perpetual rights in Panama: “Only God makes eternal things,” he responded, “men make treaties.”19 Relations between Panama and the United States remained tense into the 1960s. And then on January 9, 1964, heated arguments between Ameri­ can and Panamanian students over which country’s flag should fly over the Canal Zone’s Balboa High School erupted into violence. “Over the next three days, approximately 30,000 Panamanians joined an anti-American riot that spread from coastal cities deep into the country’s interior.” Four U.S. soldiers and 24 Panamanians were killed; 85 Americans and more than 200 Panamanians were wounded. Panamanian President Roberto Chiari responded by accusing the United States of “unjustifiable aggression” and breaking off diplomatic relations.20 For his part, President Lyndon Johnson initially perceived the Pana­ mani­an crisis through a Cold War national security lens and offered his support to Chiari to prevent Panama from becoming a “second Cuba.” But he was quickly disabused of the notion that Communists were behind the student protests when Chiari took to the airwaves. Panama would settle for no less than “total revision of the treaties governing the relations of the two nations,” Chiari told his people. Then he went to the Inter-American Peace Commission (IPC) of the Organization of American States (OAS), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), and the United Nations Security Council to complain about “machine gun bursts” and “tear gas bombs” fired against “defenceless citizens” perpetrated by U.S. troops and charged the United States with human-rights violations. Suddenly, American credibility was at stake, and Johnson was faced with a quandary. As Michael Latham put it, “If the charges went unanswered and the crisis dragged on, the United States would continue to stand accused of a brutal attack while Panama rallied support around the world and aired its case before international bodies. If he conceded to Panama’s demands, however, Johnson feared that the United States would lose authority abroad while he came under attack at home.”21 Most Americans viewed the Canal as a symbol of American will and tenacity. Letters to the White House ran “between 10 and 15 to 1 in favor” of not giving in to Chiari’s demands. Polling data results were similar. No doubt many Americans would have agreed with Georgia Senator Richard Russell’s assessment of the situation. “Those people down there have had a chip on their shoulders for a long time. . . . We brought them out of the jungles where they were hiding thinking that old Cortez was still trying to get them for slaves.” Giving in to the “most primitive people in all of Latin America” would damage America’s image abroad, he told Johnson. And Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater were quoted in the media suggesting the country would look weak if it gave in to the Panamanians.22

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But some in the media took a different view of the problem. In an editorial, the New York Times warned about real trouble in the area if the crisis was allowed to drag on. The Nation questioned the president’s reluctance to negotiate with a small power even though it was evident it was in both nations’ interests to do so. Reinhold Niebuhr put it in imperialist terms in the New Republic: “Did we not outrage the Europeans in the Suez crisis when Mr. Dulles explained our unconcern about the European lifeline by observing that we were free of the ‘colonial tradition’? No doubt, the British smile at our present embarrassment, unless they fear to offend a super-imperial anti-imperialist.”23 Mexicans could relate to the Panamanians’ attitude toward the United States’ imperialist tendencies. While Americans “barely remember the Alamo,” Time quipped in 1995, Mexicans recite “a litany of humiliations,” led by the loss of half of their country’s territory in the Mexican-American War. Such was their hostility, Milton S. Eisenhower wrote, that Mexicans would have deposed any of their political leaders rash enough to suggest “ceding a single inch of Mexican territory to the United States.”24 Exacerbating the animosity was a century of savage violence. California, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado became notorious for lynching Mexicans. Mexicans believed as well that the gringos had designs on their country’s mineral wealth, and seared into the nation’s collective memory were national humiliations such as the Veracruz incursion of 1914.25 Migration fueled the friction. Pushed out of Mexico by political turmoil and pulled to the United States by the availability of work, the migrants began moving northward at the turn of the twentieth century. They migrated in especially large numbers during the labor shortages of the two world wars. In the 1920s, anti-Mexican attitudes produced legislative proposals to exclude them “as rigidly as Orientals.” Even though legal immigration virtually ceased in 1929, Mexicans in El Norte totaled more than 1.2 million in the 1930s.26 Even greater labor scarcities during World War II made it essential to dismantle the barriers, and four hundred thousand Mexicans found work in the United States. Their labor was essential to the war effort, but they faced discrimination, hostility, and even assaults. Mexican Consul Luis L. Duplan compiled sixteen pages of grievances in Texas, and Latino visitors listed as their “most unfavorable impression” of the United States the indignities suffered by Mexicans along the border and black Americans in U.S. cities. The negative image affected not just Mexican attitudes toward America. The Axis powers were quick to take advantage of the discrimination in its propaganda to Latin America and other parts of the world. As the Pittsburgh Courier put it, “what all government departments fear is for . . . the millions of colored peoples in Central and South America,

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whom they are now wooing under the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ into socalled hemisphere defense, [to] know how closely Uncle Sam follows the policies of Adolf Hitler.”27 The June 1943 Zoot-Suit Riot in Los Angeles, in which U.S. servicemen attacked young Mexicans, brought international criticism and forced the State Department to attempt to influence media coverage of the event in Latin America. The U.S. consul in Monterrey, Mexico, told local reporters, apparently with the desired effect, that the riots were not linked to racial discrimination, but rather were related to the socioeconomics particular to Los Angeles.28 Even possession of high honors did not necessarily shield Mexicans and Mexican Americans from racism. Two of five Mexican Americans from Texas won the Medal of Honor during World War II yet were denied service at restaurants in that state. When one of them, Sergeant Macario García, insisted on being served, a brawl erupted, and he was arrested. The Associated Press reported the event, causing “a great furor in Mexico” and controversy in the United States.29 The “prickly relations” of Texas and Mexico were further roiled in 1949. Private Felix Longoria, who had died in the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, was denied the facilities of a funeral parlor in Three Rivers, Texas, because he was a Mexican, the New Republic explained. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had won election as U.S. senator with solid support from Mexican Americans, arranged for Longoria to be interred in Arlington Cemetery. The international implications became undeniable when Mexico’s ambassador sent flowers and his embassy’s first secretary to attend the reburial of a U.S. Army private, and Truman’s military aide General Harry H. Vaughan represented the president.30 Postwar conditions above the border were bleak for Mexicans, many of whom found only intermittent work in menial jobs at low wages, and had dwellings “far below the minimum standards of decency.” Real estate covenants barred them from some districts, and their children’s schools often were racially segregated. Politically, they were denied the vote by poll taxes, were barred from juries, and suffered other forms of discrimination peculiar to their circumstances: Mexicans could be “dismissed without pay, and threatened with deportation” for trying to collect wages owed them, and some employers seized immigration papers in order to maintain control over workers. So harsh were the inequities and so glaring the publicity about them that Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights was advised that securing civil rights for Mexicans would “do much to help our relations” not only with Mexico, but also with other nations “to the south.”31 More than those of most foreigners, Mexican views of the United States were shaped by experience gained firsthand or vicariously, from friends or

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relatives. Yet the press and radio were important sources. News agencies’ dispatches flooded into Mexico, where Mexican newspapers published them, and Spanish-language editions of U.S. magazines, such as Reader’s Digest, circulated widely there by 1952. The Mexican press condemned the abuse of their countrymen. The magazine 1945 posed a rhetorical question, “Is Racial Discrimination the Good Neighbor Policy?” illustrating it with what a young Mexican girl might experience: She would be barred from trains, schools, hospitals, entertainment, and restaurants reserved for whites in parts of the United States. A typical headline ran in Mexico City: “People of Our Race Treated Like Animals.”32 Stories circulated by the press and word of mouth made “Texas notorious in Mexico as a horror place for Mexicans.”33 Irritated by the “almost constant attacks of Mexican papers,” one Texas paper printed a month of examples, including “Yankee Patrolmen Shoot Wetbacks,” from Novedades; and “Texas Farmers again Try to Exploit Braceros,” from El Popular. The Texas paper noted, “Not only the Mexican press but the Mexican government has jumped on every instance of alleged mistreatment of their nationals, and even of Texans of Mexican descent.”34 The Mexican government took a stiff stand in some instances by denying the labor of braceros to locales where the discrimination was rife. In 1953, a “disgracefully high” fifty-one counties were blacklisted, put there for official or unofficial violence against Mexicans; Jim Crowing Mexican school children; denying access to public accommodations; refusing to rent or sell them dwellings; and harassments, insults, and refusals to provide proper housing or sanitary facilities.35 While the legal braceros experienced difficulties, the illegals, then almost universally denigrated as “wetbacks,” suffered the most. The U.S. press exposed their wretchedness. Illegals were subject to “all kinds of discrimination” and had “to live in filth,” Newsweek reported. Once harvests ended, they were often “chased off without being paid.” The New Republic listed that and other “slavery conditions.” If no housing was provided, “the wetback [who] . . . can’t find packing boxes with which to build a flimsy shack . . . sleeps under a tree” and had no choice other than “to buy his food from farm-owned commissaries at premium prices.” Fearing deportation, he “dares not complain.”36 The Mexican press was outspoken about the plight of the illegals. Papers south of the border accused U.S. labor unions in 1952 of beating and loading thousands of them onto trucks in California, New Mexico, and Texas for “expulsion, like beasts.” A dispatch in July accused U.S. authorities of refusing to give thirty thousand deportees “even a crumb of bread” to make the long trip home; one Mexican journalist even likened a detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp replete “with all the . . .

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tortures.” U.S. officials retorted that no Mexican journalist had even visited the camp.37 Even Mexican diplomats were moved to anger. Manuel Aguilar, the director general of the Consular Section in the Ministry for Foreign Relations, was infuriated when he came upon “the graves of four Mexicans” in the dumping ground of a small town in North Texas, where they had been buried after “the ‘white’ cemetery” would not accept them “because of their race.” This sort of bias convinced Aguilar that the United States exhibited more racism than was found elsewhere in the world.38 The U.S. press warned readers of repercussions to come from acts of racism. Business Week lumped Mexico in with all of Latin America, where “all is not well.” Losing the hemisphere to the Communists was not likely, the periodical conceded, but the Kremlin would “gain a priceless—and bloodless—victory” should Latin America merely opt for “strict neutrality.”39 The Saturday Evening Post opened and closed an article on this note: Moscow was watching, and so was South America. Illustrating its thesis was the edict posted by a Texas café owner, “No Mexicans,” which he backed up with a baseball bat. Knowing they needed Mexicans to harvest crops, the townspeople persuaded him to remove it. Taking it down was in the country’s interest, the Post continued, not just the townspeople’s, since the Reds eagerly circulated news of “insults to our Spanish-speaking neighbors.”40 That was even truer for the illegals north of the border. Russia’s leading daily newspaper, Pravda, issued a harangue in 1951 about a “large network of Wall Street agents” that smuggled impoverished peasants and workers across the border and sold them into slavery.41 Such barbarity served as effective counterattacks for the Soviets. For example, when Newsweek belabored the Russians for imprisoning millions of people in the slave camps whence few returned, New Times responded this was like a “thief crying, ‘stop, thief!’”42 The Soviets tapped U.S. periodicals for source material, one being the United Mine Workers Journal, which charged, according to New Times, that major landowners employed not merely forced labor, but “even slave labor”—and Washington closed its eyes to the practice. Particularly compelling examples were fifteen thousand Mexicans said to be “virtually slaves” in Colorado. Adding to their visibility, they labored for the arch-capitalist Rockefellers. In sum, America used slave labor and stood for colonialism and racism at home and abroad.43 Soviet propagandists offered historical examples as proof of contemporary actions. When U.S. oil companies boasted of showering benefits on Arab nations, New Times dredged up the “brigandage of their forerunners,” who wanted oil from the Mexicans “and . . . got it, and the hell with the natives.” The natives were exploited by low wages, poor working conditions, and violence; it had occurred in Mexico (the magazine implied) and

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would happen again if other nations were foolish enough to allow the Yankees in.44 In contrast to exploitative Yankees, the Russians bragged they were the compadres of Mexicans. After storms in 1955 left tens of thousands of Mexicans homeless, societies in the Soviet Union sent one hundred thousand pesos in relief aid. TASS preened that Mexico “valued this noble gesture highly.” Five years later, New Times gushed over Mexico’s Independence Day—predictably, since Mexico was one of the first nations to give diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. But the Soviets went a step further, hailing Mexico’s “great revolutionary tradition” of struggle both against European colonialists—and in opposition to the “new exploiters”—the gringos of course.45 The U.S. government knew about its unhappy relations with Mexico; indeed, it spent $750,000 a year during the early 1950s to court Mexican public opinion, one of the largest sums Washington expended for that purpose. To counter adverse publicity, the U.S. press attaché in Mexico City went trolling for stories of “how discrimination is being eliminated” in Texas. That state’s Good Neighbor Commission obliged with the story that Mexican children once denied admission to a state institution now were freely admitted. That represented some progress. Still, as a writer quipped in the New York Times Magazine, U.S. propaganda efforts had only managed to drive “a thin wedge . . . between the Mexican equivalent of ‘damn’ and ‘Yanqui,’” but was a long way “from splitting the phrase.”46 The phrase remained unsplit for years, one reason being that reports of the mistreatment of Mexicans in the United States echoed in the Americas. One echo emanated from O Mundo of Rio de Janeiro. “Hundreds of bodies of murdered people are found annually in the Rio Grande,” O Mundo alleged, but Texas peace officers did “nothing about it.” O Mundo demanded the Americans put an end to the “incessant butchery.”47 President Truman tried to foster goodwill in 1950 by arranging to return sixty-nine Mexican battle flags captured during the MexicanAmerican War. Truman diplomatically bypassed that war and its effects, choosing instead to pay tribute to the valor of Los Niños Héroes, six cadets who became symbols of Mexican nationhood by leaping to their deaths rather than surrendering to the Americans storming the stronghold of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City.48 Intense symbolism marked the occasion, most visibly in an honor guard mounted by fifty thousand Mexican soldiers in Mexico City. Items published by the U.S. press emphasized the solemnity of the ceremony, the generosity of the gesture of returning the flags; and the sealing of the bonds of comity between two nations—the conversion of “war flags . . . into peace flags,” as the New York Times said, quoting the remark

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of Mexico’s defense minister, General Gilberto Limon. Newsweek also featured another gesture of reconciliation, this of U.S. cadets and midshipmen presenting twelve flags to their Mexican counterparts.49 Still, the occasion did not heal the relationship. Some Mexican papers thought it was more “likely to revive old hatreds,” reported Newsweek, and some students intended to demonstrate “against the ‘shameful’ occasion,” but were stopped from doing so by the police.50 Clearly, some wounds remained unhealed in the United States–Mexico relationship. Their lingering influence affected matters of defense, national security, economic affairs, and strategic resources of the two republics. Mexico had been an ardent participant in the war against the Axis powers during World War II—but exhibited little enthusiasm for lining up with the Yankees. Nevertheless, it permitted the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans for essential agricultural and railroad work north of the border, sent an air force squadron to the Philippines in 1945, and apparently permitted many thousands of Mexican nationals to serve in the U.S. armed forces. After the war, however, things changed: Mexico raised “instantaneous objections” to a U.S. proposal to establish a guided missile range over the Gulf of California, and it withdrew the permission it granted in 1943 for U.S. Navy aviators to practice bombing in Mexican waters. Overriding Mexico’s officer corps, Mexican politicians also vetoed a U.S. proposal for a “hemispheric defense council.”51 During the chaotic early days of the Korean War, the United States badly needed forces to relieve exhausted American soldiers who had been on the front line for nine months, and Secretary of State Acheson asked Mexico to contribute a division to the effort. Expressing pain at “what he was about to say,” Foreign Minister Manuel Tello refused. Mexico’s public would not accept sending their soldiers to serve outside the country, Tello explained, which was probably true, but the resistance might have been overcome, the Americans thought, had the proper groundwork been laid. Tello claimed further that Mexico could not afford the cost of keeping a division in the field, probably no sticking point since Acheson promised the United States would make good any deficiencies in Mexican equipment and would help train, transport, and maintain Mexican soldiers, with any reimbursement to be negotiated later. (It is unlikely that Washington would have demanded reimbursement for preparing troops to come to the aid of hard-pressed GIs.)52 Probably more important than the issues Tello raised was cultural antipathy toward the norteamericanos—which was rooted in grievances that included, but were not limited to, the color line’s effects on Mexicans. Cultural antipathy undoubtedly was present when Mexican public opinion forced the rejection of a military assistance pact with the United

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States in 1952. Domestic Communists cranked up a propaganda offensive against the agreement, stressing “the threat of the ‘foreigner’ to Mexican economic and political independence.” This theme, the Times went on, was “calculated to strike a responsive chord in Mexico where there is distrust and fear of the foreigner in large sections of the population and where outside efforts to aid this country are viewed with considerable cynicism.” In this case, the foreigner had a specific nationality and persona. As a Mexican source explained to Times correspondent Sydney Gruson, Mexicans viewed the Cold War as “mostly a case of liking a devil you don’t know”—the Russians—“better than a devil you have known”—grin­ gos. Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose work was featured in the campaign, used Truman’s face as the devil Mexicans knew, depicting him shackling the wrists of a kneeling Mexican peasant. “Antipathy to the United States is the overriding factor in Mexico’s caution” about the pact, Gruson wrote. Since the response came from the far left to the far right, it was cultural more than political, and it fed on resentment accumulated over decades of friction between the two nations.53 Soviet propagandists capitalized on the setbacks for the United States, praising Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, and Cuba for refusing to send soldiers to Korea.54 (Presumably they were unaware of the meeting of Acheson and Tello.) Red organs also hailed the rejection of the military pact in 1952 as a U.S. defeat. Brazil’s Imprensa Popular devoted three long articles on a single day to attacks in print on the United States and urged Brazilians to emulate what Mexico did. The failure of the security campaign was “a very nasty pill for Washington to swallow,” New Times jeered. That observation was on the mark. Washington worried that halting the negotiations abruptly “would adversely affect similar discussions with other Latin American countries” and intensify anti-American propaganda in Mexico. So it directed its embassy to keep the talks with Mexico “alive for [the] time being” even though there was no reason to anticipate a favorable outcome.55 Mexico also thwarted U.S. plans to exploit strategic resources. Eager to develop an emergency source of oil closer and more secure than Saudi Arabia, Washington offered $200 million in credits to expand Mexico’s state-owned oil industry. But when it tied the offer to revising oil laws so that Mexico “would become once more the happy hunting ground of the major oil companies,” Mexico angrily broke off the discussions. The affair revived Mexicans’ bitter memories from the expropriation crisis of 1938 when six foreign oil companies refused “to abide by a decision of the Mexican Supreme Court concerning wages” and ignored “Mexican rights and interests”—high-handedness that smacked of cultural or racial arrogance rather than hard bargaining. New Times recognized the importance of that episode in Mexican history. It denounced the “U.S. monopolies” for

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seizing “Mexico’s oil,” while obstructing “the country’s industrial development,” of establishing “control over its strategic raw materials and power resources, [and] undermin[ing] Mexican trade.” Those events were not simply something lost in a distant past, New Times said, underscoring the link that supposedly existed between U.S. policy, present and past.56 Mexico also created difficulties with the Eisenhower administration’s desire to find reserves of uranium below the border. To stimulate exploration, Washington offered assistance and purchase contracts. Mexico City did not even respond, probably, according to a U.S. estimate, “due to nationalist and domestic political considerations.”57 One consideration, probably, was the Yankees’ mistreatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Particularly objectionable was Operation Wet­ back, a program of mass roundups and expulsions that effected as many as 875,000 apprehensions in 1953 and 1,035,282 in 1954. The program “dredged up bitter memories” of mass deportations from the 1930s and reinforced the belief that Hispanics were not welcome in the United States.58 The intense feelings in Mexico even gave rise to a “wild rumor” to the effect that Attorney General Herbert Brownell “favored the shooting of wetbacks” crossing the border. The excesses of Operation Wetback probably stimulated the rumor; anti-American attitudes created such ill feelings that Mexico refused even to accept relief shipments from the United States of “much-needed powdered milk for undernourished . . . school children.” And there were other sources of bitterness. An extended period of public indignation followed “the drowning of four wetbacks” being deported. The Mexican press cited the deaths as proof of U.S. callousness toward such laborers.59 Soviet organs continued to fish in these troubled waters. Pravda devoted four columns of its six pages in one 1953 issue to the asseveration of the leftist American writer Stetson Kennedy that four million Mexicans working in the United States were subjected to forced labor. Portions of his article were recycled years later by the Red Army’s Red Star for a condemnation of the Americans.60 Even a motion picture became part of the discourse. The film Salt of the Earth set off alarm bells by relating the story of a miners’ union strike in New Mexico. The filmmakers were drawn to the strike because, after a court enjoined the miners from picketing, their wives performed their duties with bravery and resourcefulness. But it was the background of the filmmakers that was so controversial north of the border. The Congress of Industrial Organizations had expelled the union as Communistinfluenced, the film’s director, Herbert Biberman, had been imprisoned during the Communist witch hunt of the late 1940s, and other associates had been tarred with the Red brush.61

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Salt of the Earth was subjected to attacks in Congress and elsewhere as a “Communist-made film” that would feed the Communist propaganda mill. California Representative Donald L. Jackson persuaded the film industry and unions to withhold services needed to complete the picture and the government to prohibit the export of a production “designed to inflame racial hatreds and to depict the United States . . . as the enemy of all colored peoples.” If shown in Latin America, Asia, and India, Jackson continued, Salt of the Earth would be “a new weapon for Russia” and “will do incalculable harm” to America.62 The motion picture made news in Mexico. Hispanoamericano scoffed that the film was no Red propaganda tool, but was primarily “a story of love without romance” between the miner Juan Chacón and his wife, Esperanza Quintin. Only secondarily, the magazine went on, did it address the miners’ struggle for improved safety measures and equality.63 Newsweek and Time fretted about the effects of Salt of the Earth south of the border. According to the former, residents of Silver City, New Mexico, where the film was set, thought scenes of “a deputy sheriff . . . brutally pistol-whipping a Mexican-American child” and of “women and children jammed into the local jail” would create ill will “south of the border.” Time attached a pun to a similar message: “Will Salt, if shown in theaters overseas, give the Communists ready-ground propaganda with which to pepper the U.S.?” It was hardly a surprise that Time denounced the film on ideological grounds. “The dice are loaded,” claimed Time. “Every boss who crosses the screen is either a sleek deceiver or a leering flunky, and the police are slavish doers of the corporate will.”64 Curiously, however, Time’s separate review praised the film as, “within the propagandistic limits it sets, . . . vigorous art, . . . crowded with grindingly effective scenes through which the passion of social anger hisses in a hot wind; and truth and lies are driven before it like sand.”65 Indeed, the tenor of this review was not so distant from one written by a Pravda reviewer, who confessed himself deeply moved by the “lofty poetry” of Salt of the Earth.66 Despite official U.S. efforts to suppress it, Salt of the Earth was eventually exhibited overseas, including at some venues in the Soviet Union and mainland China. The film, according to its director, won critical acclaim abroad.67 The U.S. press also made room for Mexicans in the racial progress theme. The New York Times conceded, for instance, that discrimination still afflicted them in the thirteen states of the West but even here noted their circumstances had improved. Spanish speakers were no longer considered “‘non-white’ in many communities” in Utah, and New Mexico, with its “Anglo-Spanish culture,” even elected Hispanics to Congress.68 And they were not alone, according to the media. The lot of African Americans appeared to be improving as well.

Chapter 4

Pursuing the Dream

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decade before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave voice to his great dream in Dixie’s hostile racial climate, bus driver Harvey Clark Jr. pursued his more modest but profound dream of improving the lot of his family in Chicago. What Clark wanted was to move his African American family into an apartment in the white Chicago suburb of Cicero. But Cicero, in its own way, would prove no less hostile to black residents than its counterparts in the American South. Clark did get his family into their new home, but police, acting to preserve the peace (they claimed), forced them out. Undeterred, Clark appealed for an injunction in the federal courts. After all, the signs were encouraging. Even the right-wing U.S. News acknowledged that all sorts of racial barriers were falling in different locales and for different activities in the final years of the Truman presidency. In the armed forces, “both races sleep in the same barracks, use the same swimming pools, [and] patronize the same service clubs.” Federal agencies were hiring blacks for jobs more elevated than elevator operator, messenger, and porter. The Supreme Court had extended constitutional protection to activities ranging from jury service to voting, and while declining to abolish segregation immediately, had ruled unanimously “that people of all creeds and colors must get equal treatment in all things that are publicly supervised.” Eventually, U.S. News implied, Jim Crow would perish as the Court moved closer to the spirit of Mr. Justice Harlan’s great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson of a color-blind Constitution that “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”1 So Clark got his injunction. But the mere presence of Clark and his family in Cicero touched off three nights of violent riots, requiring National Guardsmen to be sent in to restore order. The following day, “barbed wire, forming a fence five strands deep, barricaded all street and alley entrances in the square block around the building.” The “implacable hatred” moved 59

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Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to liken the rioting in Cicero to a southern lynching. Newsweek illustrated how the hate spread. A small boy pitched a stone through a window of the integrated building, prompting his mother to announce proudly to a cheering mob, “That’s my boy.” That encouraged other children to seize their own rocks to hurl. It was indeed the best and worst of times for African Americans.2 Perhaps coincidentally, Truman’s last State of the Union address reviewed the “great economic and social gains for millions of our fellow citizens . . . held back by prejudice,” attributing this progress to a “great awakening of the American conscience.” While “far from complete,” Truman continued, the progress achieved answered “those who questioned our intention to live up to the promises of . . . freedom for us all.”3 Truman no doubt numbered among those questioners the Soviets, who derided American racial progress, to the distress of some U.S. allies. A Dutch diplomat conceded that America had gone far toward “eliminating the worst aspects of racism” and that Moscow exaggerated the “nature and extent of American racial feeling.” Even so, he went on, the actual racial problems provided “a very solid foundation for the fabulous structure of lies” the Russians had constructed, and Washington needed to counteract the impression imparted of racial injustice.4 The United States and the Soviet Union were competing for influence in emerging states. Already, by 1953, twelve new nations, with more than six hundred million people, had appeared on the world stage.5 All but two, Egypt and Libya, were in Asia. Egypt had been nominally independent but British-controlled until a coup d’état deposed King Farouk in 1952. World War II shattered Italian control of Libya, which dated back to 1911, but not until the end of 1951 was the United Kingdom of Libya proclaimed. Liberation had yet to arrive in sub-Saharan Africa, although its first great freedom movement, Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion, was already capturing world press attention.6 Mobs in addition to those in Cicero, Illinois, also caught the eye of U.S. journalists. In 1950, five hundred whites attacked a “quiet, orderly Negro swimming party” of fifteen people assembled in Colonial Beach, Virginia, to test the reaction to an antidiscrimination lawsuit filed in federal court. At the southern end of Illinois, crosses were burned, shots were fired, and dynamite bombs were exploded in 1952 in the town of Cairo as racists attempted to frighten off black parents who had enrolled their children in white schools. Police detained four whites believed complicit in the violence, but they arrested eight members of the NAACP, which had encouraged desegregation, on vague charges such as conspiracy to commit unlawful acts.7

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Bombings were not uncommon—there were at least forty in the South in less than two years, most involving “housing conflicts.” That total did not include an explosion at the Florida home of NAACP leader Harry T. Moore, which killed him and fatally injured his wife. Moore had led a campaign to secure the prosecution of a white sheriff in Florida who had shot two manacled black prisoners, Sammy Shepherd (who was killed) and Walter Irvin (who was wounded), as they were being transported to jail. Convicted of rape, they had been sentenced to be executed, but the Supreme Court had overturned the convictions and ordered new trials.8 Headlines about the violence appeared overseas. News of the Cicero riot reached Asia and Africa. A resident of Accra (in what would become Ghana) wrote the mayor of Cicero, protesting the savagery and demanding an “apology to the civilized world.” The Cicero rioting incensed the Nigerian press, the U.S. consulate in Lagos advised Washington. Washington tried to soften later criticism of incidents by shipping two documents of five thousand words each to U.S. diplomatic posts, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson apologized for not providing sooner to diplomatic personnel the urgently needed “factual accounts of incidents such as the Cicero affair.” Francis H. Russell, the State Department’s public affairs director, recorded Cicero as a U.S. defeat. “What we do in the field of human rights, and particularly race relations, can be decisive,” he informed the New York Times, adding that the country needed to satisfy foreigners of its sincerity when it pledged equality of opportunities for all races. Still, other black families moved into white enclaves near Chicago, and the mobs ran riot.9 There was some grumbling, inside and outside the U.S. press, that foreigners had misread or exaggerated the racial problems. New York governor (and former Republican presidential candidate) Thomas Dewey raised an objection while making a speech in Singapore. Dewey questioned why Cicero, “an incident of racial prejudice involving a few hundred people out of a nation of 150 million people,” merited a four-column photograph on page one of the Straits Times (Singapore).10 Dewey, stretching for a comparison that would show how badly distorted were foreigners’ perceptions of Cicero, likened it to a brawl between two sailors. What happened, however, was much more serious than any fistfight. The situation had gotten so out of hand that five companies of the Illinois National Guard had to be brought in to disperse four thousand rioters who were hurling stones and bricks, and, as the New Republic pointed out some months later, the rioting was only one in a series that broke out after black Americans tried to move into white districts.11 The Straits Times splashed the story and a four-column photograph of troops holding back the rioters. A streamer above the photograph commented acidly, “And all this because a Negro rented a flat.” The Associated

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Press provided the photograph, according to Dewey, and probably the article as well.12 Dewey’s diatribe was suppressed by Singapore’s press, Time alleged, unconvinced by the explanation of the embarrassed editors of the two papers that they had not printed Dewey’s speech because the press had not been invited to the occasion. The New York Times informed readers (using an AP dispatch) that “Asian newspapers regularly give a big play to Negro and other racial problems in the United States.” For its part, the New Republic assigned greater blame to Cicero officials who condoned the violence than it did to the actions of the Singapore papers that merely printed, as did others across the world, that rioters kept a black man out of a dwelling.13 The Soviets wrung propaganda advantages from the shootings of Shepherd and Irvin. Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky hastily incorporated the atrocity into a speech delivered at the United Nations, including the sarcastic comment (which Time quoted), “This is human rights in the U.S.A.” Salvaging what it could from an unpromising situation, Time insisted that at least America “had protected the civil rights of Walter Irvin through . . . [legal] procedures unknown to Vishinsky’s masters.” Yet Time had to acknowledge that Vishinsky’s remark was not lacking in justice, that the country needed “a good and careful answer for Vishinsky’s taunt.”14 The New Republic and the Nation found no good and careful answer. The former scoffed at the canard that the men were shot while escaping; it was the “cold-blooded killing of one Negro prisoner and the shooting of another by a race-hating county sheriff”; once again southern justice, it continued, had given “Radio Moscow . . . ample propaganda fodder.” (Radio Moscow made use of the incident as part of an “endless list of monstrous crimes.”) Dr. Channing Tobias, a black U.S. delegate to the United Nations, expressed the exculpatory view that the shootings defied the law, but the Nation corrected him sharply. “It was the ‘law’ that shot down the two Negroes.” President Truman ought to rebuke local and state officials for not doing their duty, the Nation went on, and to prod federal prosecutors to intervene, if necessary. The leftist journalist Stetson Kennedy, also writing in the Nation, agreed that the world press followed the case, but thought the “national and international indignation” had backfired. Locals initially regarded firing a weapon into manacled prisoners as “too much like shooting quail on the ground” but rallied to the sheriff’s side after the criticism of his actions swelled.15 Of the comments in the black press about the bombing deaths of the Moores, none was more incensed than Ebony’s—the African-American magazine. To a white man who gloated, “That’s one coon who will keep his mouth shut,” Ebony snapped that the author of that racist remark

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should recognize America would pay a price for it in the international reactions—from France, Brazil, Israel, and the Philippines, not to mention behind the Iron Curtain. All of this showed, Ebony concluded, that racists “must answer to a new judge and jury—world opinion.”16 As usual, the U.S. press countered the embarrassment with news of progress on the racial front, such as the actions of the Supreme Court (and the Interstate Commerce Commission) banning racial segregation in railroad dining cars in interstate commerce. The high court also ordered the University of Texas law school to admit a black applicant (because the inferior Texas law school for blacks failed the Plessy standard), and the University of Oklahoma to stop segregating a black graduate student. Lesser federal courts also required more than half of southern states with segregated colleges to provide equal facilities. Knowing they could not afford these facilities, some institutions began permitting integrated classes.17 Progress was also seen in the recognition of black achievements, most notably the first Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a black American, Dr. Ralph Bunche, for negotiating an armistice in the Middle East combat in 1949.18 There also were hopeful signs domestically, such as the election of a black physician, Dr. William Hampton, to the city council of Greensboro, North Carolina.19 Time and Newsweek pointed out that black Americans were receiving justice, North and South (four defendants were convicted after the Cicero riots; in the South, juries returned verdicts and judges imposed sentences against some white defendants in racial cases). The press welcomed prosecutions in the Carolinas of Klan leaders, including Imperial Wizard Thomas L. Hamilton, who was sentenced to four years in prison. Newsweek piled on the alliteration, snickering that the “Ku Klux Klan . . . has been kaught, konquered, klobbered, and dekapitated.” Time relished the remark of Hamilton’s former accomplice, one Early Brooks, who thought the wizard deserved worse than he got. “Somebody ought to be assigned to whip hell outa him,” said Brooks, volunteering to do just that.20 The freeing of a black Virginian, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a white policeman, also signaled improvement. The example was strengthened because it was a white southern journalist, Jack Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader, who was primarily responsible for correcting the wrong.21 So eager was Newsweek to press its claims of reforms that it stretched the thesis to the snapping point by concluding in 1951 that economics were eradicating “racist mores” in the South. “Segregation in industry is impractical,” Newsweek asserted, ignoring contrary evidence in Dixie and South Africa. Newsweek also read the absence of lynchings in 1952 as a

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portent. But the magazine had to allow that even though lynchings were not in evidence, there had been “a resurgence of . . . beatings, floggings, incendiarism, bombings,” as well as police killings of suspects.22 The press taught Americans that the world was scrutinizing their country’s handling of racial problems and linked the phenomenon to the Cold War. Time explained, for instance, that the southern journalist Kilpatrick avoided sensationalism lest Communists leap “into the fray for propaganda purposes.” Reporter magazine prefaced a special issue on African Americans in 1949 with the comment that Communists “have tried to make the Negro a symbol of our injustice and hypocrisy,” and further declared that “with a large measure of truth to work with, they have had no little success.” Europeans ranked mistreatment of black citizens fourth among reasons for disliking or distrusting the United States, while more than a billion Asians were said to make “the status of the U.S. Negro” the test of “our integrity and our intentions.”23 The “searchlight of world public opinion” caught the attention of America’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano, which warned that the “fiendishly hostile eyes . . . of the Kremlin” were focused on “our weak spots.” If the United States was to maintain its world leadership, morality, and social justice, Il Progresso asserted, it had to end “the lingering evil of . . . racial and religious discrimination.”24 Qualities of both idealism and nagging marked such presentations: Americans were urged to honor the best in their country—and themselves. Time sounded that tone when it made the Colorado town of Fruita a metaphor for America. Like many small towns, Fruita had an ordinance forbidding “Negroes to remain in town after sundown,” but since all its two thousand residents were white, no one even remembered it— until the ten members of a black family, the Minters, had a wreck while driving through, killing one child and injuring the others. The “Good Neighbors” (Time’s headline) sprang into action, true to their frontier heritage, to their American heritage. They took the injured to a hospital, offered the family housing for as long as the Minters wished to stay, stocked it with furniture and food, and fixed up Mr. Minter with a job. While his wife was recovering, the town’s women “took turns caring for the family.” The townsfolk also paid for repairs to the truck, the family’s hospital bills, and the child’s funeral.25 Still, that embarrassing ordinance remained, an uncomfortable commentary on the town. But the city leaders quickly repealed it. The Minters decided to settle in Fruita—a decision that reinforced the didacticism of a tale that was as much about America ridding itself of bigotry as it was about one town ridding itself of an archaic ordinance. And Time’s conclusion stood for America, not just Fruita. As Minter said, “Why would a man leave a place like this?”26

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That story potentially reached considerably more than a million foreign readers of Time. So did a similar tale with a Cold War twist. For a magazine of Henry Luce’s, the missionaries’ son who detested Reds, the story had everything. As heroine Rozella Switzer put it: “We’ve got a chance to whip some Communists, and all we have to do is act like Christians.” It seemed that some residents of McPherson, Kansas, had acted inhospitably to Africans newly enrolled in the local college. A barber insulted one by refusing to cut his hair. Another student landed a job in a laundry—but at half the white wage. The Africans wishing to watch a movie had to file upstairs to the Jim Crow balcony to do so and could dine on restaurant meals only in the eatery’s kitchen.27 Switzer, the town’s postmistress, heard the students’ accounts of friends in Nigeria who came home from studies at Communist universities singing the praises of Marxism and with pockets stuffed with cash for political activity. This disturbed Switzer: “All they knew about America was what they knew about McPherson.” Determined to “whip some Communists”— and do her country a service—she persuaded the townspeople to take the students into their homes and hearts.28 Plainly, Time wanted Americans to emulate her example and burnish America’s image in the process. But there was more chance of this happening in Kansas than in Wash­ ington: The city that ought to have represented America at its best instead showed America at its worst. In the nation’s capital, the color line persisted in housing, employment, welfare, police actions, recreation, access to restaurants and entertainment, and more. William Brower, a black reporter for the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, found a few improvements in the capital in 1951—such as integrated student bodies in all but one of the city’s colleges—but little change in the abject slums, segregated public schools and many public accommodations, and a color line in civic affairs.29 The national press could be unsparing in denouncing Jim Crow’s presence in the capital. A trip to Washington for winners of a school contest in the New York area even made the front page of the New York Times after it was spoiled by “segregation and discrimination.” The children had hoped to visit the attractions of Washington, and one was even scheduled to receive a medal from President Truman for saving a woman’s life. But the hotels refused to host the four black children in the party, and school officials canceled the outing rather than cooperate with the violation of the “principles of justice and equality.”30 The Soviets repeated such stories with glee. TASS told of segregation in Washington ruining trips for high school students from Massachusetts and New Jersey (no doubt borrowing details from the domestic press). New Times maintained that segregated housing was the rule. Lest publication in one of Moscow’s organs detract from the message, it credited the

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U.S. press as the source of details of the deplorable conditions, noteworthy, the New Times interjected, because journalists there printed only “occasional articles” about such matters, suggesting of course that the United States did not have a free press.31 New Times was not far off the mark. Black Americans were almost invisible in the nation’s daily newspapers in the late 1940s and even into the 1950s. In 1947, Leon Svirsky noted that “as pictured in many newspapers,” if seen at all, “the Negro is either an entertaining fool, a dangerous animal, or (on the comparatively rare occasions when a Negro’s achievements are applauded) a prodigy of astonishing attainments, considering his race.”32 Of course, when the press referred to African Americans by their race that made it easy for the Soviets to find material to use for propaganda purposes. Communist sheets printed details of various topics about racism:33 specific examples such as lynchings and extralegal assaults;34 economic inequality that afflicted blacks;35 the denial of political and social rights in “all spheres of American life,” even sports and higher education;36 comparisons of racial oppression in the United States to practices of the Third Reich;37 and practices in South Africa supposedly inspired or encouraged by Dixie’s.38 Some causes célèbres were prominently featured in both Communist and non-Communist prints. The Martinsville Seven, seven black men convicted of rape and executed in Virginia, inspired protests and comparisons to a similar case in South Africa. Their executions revived the disenchantment of India’s press with America. India, although it achieved its independence in 1947 and became democratic, did not necessarily align itself with the United States in the Cold War. India was particularly concerned with U.S. support of military dictatorships, such as in Pakistan, and conservative religious governments. As Raja Mohan has noted, “as it watched military coups undermine many nationalist regimes and nascent democracies in the newly decolonized states, India was anxious that its own democracy might be targeted by the West,” forcing it eventually to identify the Soviet Union as a natural ally. Not surprisingly then, Amrita Bazar Patrika thought its racism disqualified America “from championing democracy” in the world, while Basumati, a Bengali daily, likened the executions to “Hitler-inspired color prejudices.”39 Time fired rhetorical volleys at Communists, domestic and foreign, over the Martinsville Seven. Its account was strident: the Daily Worker “screamed” in a headline, “Millions Fight to Save Innocent Negroes”; Red demonstrators in New York “chanted” about the “lynching”; the international “Communist [propaganda] calliope swung into high”; Polish Reds “cabled a demand” to save the seven; and Communist China denounced the “barbaric sentence.” Outcries came from the novelist Howard Fast,

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then a fervent Red, who jeered that so mammoth were overseas demonstrations that they forced “even our corrupt and rotten New York City newspapers” to mention them in “brief, sneering notices [buried] . . . in the back pages.” Chinese Communists alleged that confessions were extracted by torture, and the defendants recanted them; that blacks were excluded from jury service, and the jury selected was prejudiced; that their accuser was unstable; and that they were tried in a “lynch-law atmosphere of . . . KKK racial hatred.”40 The trials and execution of Willie McGee, a black Mississippian accused of raping a white woman in 1945, also created an international furor. That state’s supreme court twice overturned his convictions, but affirmed the outcome of a third trial. McGee was executed in 1951 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his appeal.41 McGee’s fate, wrote the centrist black journalist Carl Rowan, gave the Communists “a propaganda bonanza.”42 New Times was especially vitriolic about this “legal lynching.” It emphasized how widely distributed were the protests from abroad, emanating from Britain, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, Ireland, Hungary, China, Denmark, Canada, and Mexico.43 Phrases similar to those Time had used for the Martinsville Seven were repeated when McGee was condemned and executed. While twice noting that eminent non-Communists such as Albert Einstein had castigated the execution as a miscarriage of justice, Time hewed to its theme of Communist distortion: Petitioners in England, France, China, Russia, and elsewhere who “demanded that Willie be freed” were not motivated by conscience it seemed, but instead showed their true colors as “Communist-liners and manifesto-signers.” Infuriated by a claim “that McGee had been intimate with the [victim] for several years and had been framed because he tried to break off the relationship,” Time sputtered, “There was utterly no evidence of such a relationship.”44 Whether or not there was an affair, the case had constitutional issues, which Gerald Horne has listed: the denial of McGee’s rights to representation by competent and unbiased counsel; to testify in his own behalf without fear of lynching; to freedom from confession coerced by violence; and to be spared unusual punishment (few whites were executed for rape).45 The case of Mack Ingram was an absurdity as well as a miscarriage of justice. The middle-aged black farmer was convicted of assaulting a young white girl in North Carolina, even though he did nothing but watch her from a distance of sixty-five to seventy feet. The county was deluged with protests and messages. (One of the latter came from the State Department, which evidently was bracing for trouble abroad.) Some respondents mocked the verdict, as did Ebony, which compared the defendant to

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Evil-Eye Fleagle, a character in the comic strip Li’l Abner, whose mere look could smash “a man to smithereens or [halt] a speeding train.” (More seriously, Ebony pointed out that the trial attracted “world-wide attention.”) “The Ingram case became a cause célèbre,” Newsweek agreed. “London papers carried the story, and the Communist press pounced on the ‘frameup.’” Time added: “The Daily Worker seized on it,” and the NAACP, after ensuring “that the Communists’ legal beagles didn’t get in on the case,” helped Ingram with his appeal. It was successful: The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1953.46 The shooting wars of the Cold War included bitter propaganda volleys about race. They were fired in the early stages of the Korean War. North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. After a week of fighting, the North Koreans advanced fifty miles against “ill-trained, ill-equipped, illled, and thinly disposed American units”—a rout that continued until the U.N. forces were pushed almost to the bottom of the peninsula.47 A bold amphibious landing at Inchon on September 15 reversed the disaster; the North Koreans were defeated, and General MacArthur’s forces recaptured the two capitals, Seoul in the South and Pyongyang in the North.48 The Chinese were already suspicious of the U.S. government, which had backed Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) during China’s civil war, when the Korean War broke out. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the United States was “the instigator of war” and a dangerous imperialist power. “Virtually every member of the Chinese Communist Party had suffered the sting of foreign exploitation. Each had experienced debilitating anti-Chinese discrimination in his own country,” Nancy Tucker has noted. Now, with the United States right next door and the North Koreans clearly losing, Mao Tse-tung “threw caution to the winds” and the Chinese army into battle against the Americans.49 One day later, CCP’s central leadership called for a “unified understanding and position on U.S. imperialism” and for the fostering of “a widespread attitude of hating, disdaining, and despising the United States.” Although depicted as the archenemy of China, the United States was also just a “paper tiger” that was politically isolated and militarily weakened by overstretching in the eyes of the CCP. It was the first authorized Chinese attempt to shape attitudes toward the United States, and it included playing the race card.50 Beijing’s Xinhua News Agency accused the Americans of employing “a form of racial murder” so terrible that not even Hitler had resorted to it. Xinhua also alleged the Americans refused to issue their Filipino allies clothing essential for protection in the bitter Korean winter. Similarly, U.S. monitors found in 1950 that Soviet broadcasts related U.S. race discrimination to “wanton and haphazard bombings in Korea” as part of “the

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Americans-are-cannibals theme.”51 Moscow also linked American actions in Korea to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Black soldiers became a propaganda asset for the United States: Their very presence refuted Communist claims that they would not fight alongside white oppressors. Time credited black soldiers with “the first sizable American ground victory” of the war. While identifying them as “men of the famed 24th Infantry Regiment”—a black outfit since the Indian campaigns of the West—Time’s larger point was that they were American fighting men, who happened to be black. Time paid tribute to a black Tennessean who saved his platoon by knocking out machine guns that had trapped them, then covered their withdrawal. The platoon escaped, but not the GI, Eddie Cleaborn, whom the army decorated posthumously with the Distinguished Service Cross.52 Despite Truman’s order to cashier Jim Crow, the army had remained “rigidly segregated and racist” until the emergency in Korea made it impossible to prop up segregation. The Chicago Tribune found “no color line in the front-line foxholes,” but seemed not to have looked hard for it. Blacks’ exploits were disparaged, and a familiar canard began to circulate through the white army that “blacks were cowardly and would not fight.” A black lieutenant, Leon Gilbert, became the first U.S. soldier in Korea to be sentenced to die for misconduct under fire. Disputing the aspersions, black soldiers said their units were officered mostly by whites who were racist, incompetent, or ill-prepared.53 The basic problem, however, was that the GIs, black and white, unbloodied in combat, were thrown into battle and were defeated. The NAACP sent counsel Thurgood Marshall to investigate. Marshall compiled convincing evidence of the disparity in sentences of blacks and whites. In sixty-eight courts-martial on charges of misbehavior in the presence of the enemy, sixty of the accused were black, eight were white. (White soldiers outnumbered blacks by almost four to one.) Thirty-two blacks and two whites were convicted; the former received the harshest sentences. Marshall ridiculed some verdicts. One black defendant who enlisted at fifteen years of age stayed with his outfit though aware he could have gone home as a hero at any time. But “this coward,” Marshall wrote wryly, “remained in the front lines of his own free choice.” Another black soldier was sentenced to ten years in prison despite evidence he had been in an army hospital, not with his unit, when he supposedly shirked his duty. Regarding Lieutenant Gilbert, Marshall cited the finding of medical officers who concluded that Gilbert had been emotionally disturbed, and Gilbert explained he had not slept for six days before the incident, went without food or water part of that time, and was suffering from acute dysentery. Marshall appealed to President Truman to dismiss the charges

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against Gilbert, but he only commuted the death sentence. The NAACP persuaded an army board, however, to reduce numerous other sentences against black soldiers.54 As the fighting continued, more blacks won medals, including the nation’s highest military decoration, which was awarded posthumously to Sergeant Cornelius Charlton in 1952. Time coupled his death to an extrinsic symbol, Abraham Lincoln, on whose birthday Charlton was awarded the Medal of Honor. Charlton also was exalted as a symbol whose sacrifice taught a lesson to radicals and racists. His son’s death, Time quoted his father as saying, “makes a liar out of Paul Robeson and others who have said the Negro will not fight for our country,” while those who scorned blacks “as second-class citizen[s] must know in their hearts that it isn’t so.”55 Time denounced Communist perfidy. The Chinese had vociferously charged America with discriminating against blacks but were themselves segregating prisoners by race, Time revealed; their captors refused to allow blacks to converse with whites on the ground that “You can’t talk to them in America; why talk to them here?” Blacks also were lectured “on the Negro problem in the U.S.” for two hours per day and were punished for making ideologically incorrect responses. Time commended a black corporal, Joseph Green, who apparently made fools of his indoctrinators by convincing them his family lived in a mansion, drove Cadillacs, and had Hollywood stars Clark Gable and Henry Fonda as close friends.56 The irony of the lie was apparently lost on Time. Time and Newsweek did not necessarily castigate critics of domestic racism unless they embarrassed the nation by speaking out too vehemently about unfair treatment and disregard for equal rights, and typically those singled out were also on the government’s watch list. No one was more vehement on those counts than the black expatriate and entertainer Josephine Baker. Born in St. Louis in 1906, Baker left the United States in the 1920s, after being unable to break out of stereotyped black vaudeville roles, and became the rage of Paris; after the war (by then a French citizen), she was decorated for serving in the Resistance. While in America in 1951, Baker supported such causes as the Martinsville Seven. A cause célèbre flared up after Baker and some friends were refused service at Manhattan’s Stork Club, whose owner Sherman Billingsley permitted few black customers. Having a former American “screaming ‘Shame on America!’” while waving a French passport disturbed Paris, which sent a diplomat to rein in Baker. It was an impossible task: She promptly announced she would continue her fight even if deported, a distinct possibility at the time.57 During trips Baker made to South America beginning in 1952, she told of witnessing the “lynchings of entire Negro families” in the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department found her

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remarks irritating not because she was distorting the facts, but because “not once was any mention made of what the American people have done and are doing to eliminate racial and religious discrimination.” They were also concerned because she seemed to have an effect on her audiences. As a result, the State Department strove to discredit her and her allegation. Officials from the U.S. embassy visited the press in Montevideo in advance of Baker’s arrival in that country asking them not to publish her speeches, a request to which the majority of the newspapers agreed.58 The U.S. embassy also “planted discreetly” with Cuban journalists in 1953 the notion that she “might use the Cuban press, particularly its communistic elements,” to spread tales of the abuse of black Americans. That message was also communicated to the firm that booked her shows. Her contract was ultimately canceled, ostensibly because she missed a performance. Baker also perturbed other U.S. diplomats in Denmark. After she delivered a speech in Copenhagen in 1954, the Danish parliament and government honored her with an official reception that American representatives protested on the ground that she had made “a thinly veiled direct attack” on America.59 Time mocked Baker as a troublemaker who specialized in creating incidents. For example, she blew the incident at the Stork Club out of all proportion by making an appeal to Truman himself. “‘This matter is much bigger than Josephine Baker,’ she cried. ‘It is a matter that concerns America itself.’”60 One particular word revealed Time’s editorial line: cried was its verb of choice when Time ridiculed someone as a demagogue, belittled him or her as a fool, or both. Cried also appeared in a report from Latin America. “Baker cried: ‘The United States is not a free country,’” but a place “where ‘Negroes are treated like dogs.’” Time tacked on a womanwithout-a-country conclusion likely to resonate in American culture, relating that the former U.S. citizen had announced defiantly: “To be barred from entering the United States is an honor.”61 Paul Robeson, who also refused to temper his harsh words about U.S. racism—and his leftist sympathies—was similarly roughly handled. Time portrayed him as a sycophant of the Reds. A caption reiterated the message—“Paul Robeson: In Russian or English, the same libels.” Time was far from the only periodical baying after Robeson. The white press, wrote biographer Duberman, inveighed “against him as a traitor.”62 Black figures—such as the NAACP’s Walter White—were pressed into service to rebut Robeson.63 More widely known was Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in major league baseball. While Newsweek contented itself with quoting Robinson’s statement that “neither he nor Robeson had any right to speak for fifteen million American Negroes,” Time anointed Robinson “to answer, on behalf of other Negroes, Party-Liner

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Paul Robeson’s assertion that the fifteen million U.S. Negroes would never fight in a war against Soviet Russia.” (In fact, Time’s own correspondent Frank McNaughton reported that Robinson “admitted that he was not a spokesman for the entire Negro race, any more than any other person could be,” a statement that did not make it into Time.) But at least Robinson, to Time’s gratification, “dismissed Robeson’s statement as ‘silly.’”64 Time went further. Despite the wealth and fame America had given Robeson (implying he had not earned them), he was an ingrate because he turned to Moscow, Time implied. If his countrymen reviled Robeson, Time implied, he had earned their enmity by embracing Russia over his homeland.65 Still, Time and Newsweek did have harsh words for Americans who attempted to stop concerts in 1949 on Robeson’s schedule near Peekskill, New York. Not that they cared whether Robeson performed; they objected to providing ammunition for Communist propaganda. The skirmish, said Time, became a “slugging, shouting riot involving some thousand persons. . . . The Communist-line Civil Rights Congress, sponsors of the concert, quickly denounced the sorry affair as an attempt to ‘lynch Robeson.’” A pox on both houses, Time declared, the Civil Rights Congress for its extravagant claim, and the mob for its “misguided patriotism and senseless hooliganism” that provided an opening “more useful to Communist propaganda than a dozen uninterrupted song recitals by Paul Robeson.” At a second confrontation, both sides were “out for trouble”—the judgment of both Time and Newsweek. Four persons were seriously hurt and more than a hundred others had minor injuries. Once again, Newsweek said impatiently, hotheads had given the Reds a major propaganda triumph.66 While many in the press were quick to condemn those involved with the Robeson concert affair, they effectively ignored a charge of genocide brought by the Civil Rights Congress. The petition, submitted in late 1951 to the United Nations, argued that African Americans “suffer from genocide” because of the policies of Washington. William A. Rutherford of the Associated Negro Press reported that the petition “ran into a wall of silence.” The New York Times, for instance, gave two paragraphs to the petition but three paragraphs to a rebuttal by Dr. Raphael Lemkin, who portrayed it as an attempt “to divert attention from the crimes of genocide committed against . . . Soviet-subjugated peoples.” The Christian Science Monitor referred to the petition only in an editorial, which stated that most Americans knew the purpose of the treatment of blacks was “the preservation of ‘white supremacy,’ not the liquidation of the Negro” as was suggested by the Civil Rights Congress, “whose pronouncements so often strangely parallel the Moscow line.” The editorial went on to reference an editorial in Ebony magazine that attempted to set the perspective straight

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about African American living conditions in Chicago after a devastating article in the magazine by Richard Wright. Agreeing that Chicago had its slums, Ebony editors said that the city also had blocks of fine African American apartments and homes. Adhering to the federal government’s line, Ebony, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, continued: “By all means we should shout loudly and belligerently about slums, but let us also mix our denunciations with praise for the advances in housing which we are making.”67 The petition did get a hearing abroad. Predictably, Pravda condemned “the intolerable slave-like situation” of African Americans.68 Forty-five thousand copies of the petition were translated into various languages and published in book form. Gerald Horne attributed the impact of the petition abroad to the sheer mass of “lynchings, executions, mutilations, rapes, and . . . discrimination” outlined in it, at a time when the United States was belaboring Communist states for their human rights abuses. The effect, according to Horne, was to “set U.S. foreign policy back on its heels.” Whether or not the petition had that much impact, foreigners (not Communists alone) were certainly scrutinizing U.S. racial affairs. From The Hague, a diplomat sent a lead editorial from the respected Algemeen Handelsblad about “the Negro problem,” judging its “positive tone and placement” exceptions to the usual acrimonious reactions.69 Stung into action, the U.S. government demanded the passport of one of the backers of the petition and tried to prevent the U.N. Human Rights Commission from airing the allegation of genocide. The USIA devoted a complete issue of its bimonthly bulletin to “The Negro in American Life,” which was shipped to eighty-five foreign posts. European editors seemed unimpressed with the booklet, “which avoided all mention of segregation, poll taxes, or lynching, [and] was completely overshadowed in the news by the contentions of the genocide petition.”70 In addition, the government subsidized trips abroad by black figures to reinforce its message that progress was being made in race relations. Few of these advocates had credentials as diplomats. One who did was Ralph Bunche, who would become U.N. undersecretary. Even the right-wing U.S. News was impressed by his presence, achievements, and demeanor, which made him “an outstanding authority on racial groups . . . [and] the first U.S. Negro to become a leading figure in world affairs.” That Bunche was “not aggressively race conscious” no doubt helped get him into the good graces of the magazine, but there was an additional reason for its regard: Bunche fitted a recurring cultural theme, a variation of the racial progress theme, by surmounting “more obstacles than beset the traditional Horatio Alger hero.” Even before he won the Nobel Prize, this “Grandson of a Slave” had achieved success.71

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Time—along with other publications—used Bunche as an example of how much Jim Crow cost the country. Truman had offered to appoint him as assistant secretary of state, then the highest position in the government ever offered one of his race, but he declined, giving as one reason segregation in Washington.72 The press mourned the loss of Bunche’s services. Time got wind of the story in 1949 and printed a caustic account of why Bunche turned Truman down. But it made the details redound to Bunche’s credit, because he refused to bow to Jim Crow, and acted in the interests of his family. Even though he would have occupied a high position in the government, his race would cause him to be barred from most restaurants, hotels, and clubs in Washington, and he had already gotten his fill of Jim Crow from years of living and working in Washington; he had found, for instance, that even though a public school was around the corner from his home, his two daughters had to attend an all-black school three miles away. Thus it was understandable, Time reported, that “able Ralph Bunche” refused the appointment, being unwilling to expose his family to it again. (Pravda copied the essential story lines laid down by the New York Post and Collier’s magazine.) Reporter magazine shifted the emphasis slightly but significantly: Bunche was not motivated solely by the interests of his family, but by the country’s as well. Having an assistant secretary of state who had to sneak “into hotels through the back door to call on high foreign officials,” who was ejected from restaurants, and went “home to the ghetto after work” would have subjected the government— not just Bunche himself—“to public humiliation.” The Washington Post put the same idea more colorfully. Within the State Department he would have been honored; outside it, “he would have had the status of a coolie.”73 One service that Bunche did provide was to shred the position of Governor James F. Byrnes that South Carolina’s public schools ought to be abandoned rather than desegregated. Bunche was not shocked that a governor of recalcitrant South Carolina would threaten this. But Byrnes had served as both a Supreme Court justice and as secretary of state, Bunche declared, and thus had to “know how costly are such undemocratic declarations and practices to . . . our international reputation for democracy. . . . Byrnes and South Carolina,” Bunche continued, “speak to the world for you and me.”74 Time preferred that Bunche, not Byrnes, speak to the world on America’s behalf. Another black Horatio Alger delivered one of the most powerful expressions of faith in and loyalty to America despite Jim Crow in 1951. Representative William L. Dawson of Chicago was born into poverty in Georgia but worked his way through the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After moving to Chicago, he interrupted his law studies to fight in France in World War I.75

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A major accomplishment of Dawson’s was helping to defeat legislation that would have allowed segregation to continue in the military. Dawson spoke eloquently of the Soviets using the subjugation of black Americans to turn people of color against the United States. “How long, how long, . . . gentlemen from the South, will you divide us Americans on account of color?” Dawson demanded, “Give me the test . . . to make any one a fullfledged American and by the living God, if it means death itself, I will pay it.”76 Listeners in the House, including some gentlemen of the South, were moved when the former lieutenant of U.S. Infantry described the scars he had acquired in fighting for America. This mark you see here on my forehead is the result of German mustard gas, and this left shoulder of mine is today a slip joint. . . . I served in a segregated outfit as a citizen trying to save this country. I would give up this life of mine to preserve this country and every American in it, white or black. Deny to me, if you will, all that American citizenship stands for. I will still fight for you, hoping that under the Constitution of the United States all these restrictions will be removed and that we will move before the world as one people, American people, joined in a democracy toward all the world.

As Dawson took his seat, “the House, including some southern Democrats, applauded.” Not present in the chamber but nonetheless stirred by the oration was a former captain of artillery in the Great War, who wrote Dawson that his words “will go down as one of the great historical documents of this age.”77 But Harry Truman was wrong: Dawson’s great speech faded into obscurity. Truman appointed a black woman lawyer, Edith Sampson, in 1950 to represent the United States at the U.N. General Assembly. His intention, Time believed, was to counter Soviet propaganda about U.S. racism. It failed to impress New Times, which jeered that the appointment could not conceal “the fact that lynch law holds sway in the United States, or hide the hard lot of the millions of Negroes.” Sampson responded tartly that she was not chosen “to represent . . . Negroes,” but all Americans. Sampson convinced Time of her ability by her handling of a challenge in India about racial conditions in her country. “I would rather be a Negro in America than a citizen in any other land,” she insisted. Squelched, her “heckler sat down,” reported Time. But a black journalist was more critical of Sampson’s view of the lot of black Americans and suggested that not all of the government information officers found these spokespersons effective. William

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Rutherford wrote in the Nation that, in a speech in Germany, Sampson declared the condition of African Americans as “wonderful.” “Negroes are happier in the United States . . . than they would be any place else in the world,” he quoted her as saying. He also quoted an information officer declaring, “This sort of cover-up does more harm than good. Why don’t they send us a serious, objective speaker?”78 But clearly the government believed that African Americans themselves would provide the strongest message of progress. Thus, black artists and athletes also became advocates. Newsweek praised the “deliberative tact” of the great contralto Marian Anderson. Facing questions about Jim Crow while overseas, she responded that “conditions have improved,” albeit slowly in some places, but there was a desire to move “in the right direction.” Newsweek endorsed her “middle-of-the-road course.”79 Monte Irvin, a star outfielder in the Negro League, took up politics after he made it to the major leagues. In 1951, Irvin ran as a Democrat for a seat in the New Jersey Assembly from a Republican county. Unable to campaign because of prior commitments, Irvin lost.80 The Soviets seized on his defeat to puncture American claims of “liberty and equality”; not only did Irvin lose the election, but he also became the target of threats. But Irvin helped Newsweek counter the Russian allegations. “I ran in a fair election,” he said, and one of his black opponents won a seat in the Assembly. Furthermore, he said, “public offices are available to many qualified Negroes.”81 So great were the promises and rewards of America that even the descendants of slaves rightly felt “grateful” that their ancestors had dragged their chains onto American shores. This sentiment was expressed by Charles Clinton Spaulding, “the President of the $35 million North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company,” who was born in a log cabin in North Carolina a decade after Emancipation. More importantly, it was Time that chose to quote his words. Euphemisms helped maintain the desired tenor. Spaulding’s ancestors “were transplanted” to the New World; the horrors of the Middle Passage, which would hardly support the thesis, were conspicuously absent. Nor did Time allude to what had made Spaulding’s fortune possible: White southerners refused to peddle insurance to blacks, making possible black enterprises that would. Instead, the magazine emphasized his success and his faith in capitalism that “survived the taunts” of blacks for cooperating with whites and the hatred of whites for achieving prosperity.82 While reporting anti-American sentiments from abroad in often painful detail, the U.S. press acted on the belief that readers expected criticism would be directed at critics of the country. Elliot E. Cohen explained the proper stance: The United States still has “gaps and evils,” but Americans need not “grovel in guilt. . . . Which society [other than America with] the

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same problem has had greater success in weaving widely different ‘ethnic’ groups” into a community?83 Thus America appeared in a favorable light when juxtaposed with other states with reputations stained by discrimination based on skin color. Australia, for example, banned almost all Asians under the White Australia policy dating back to the influx of Chinese into the new goldfields in the 1850s. The policy persisted until after World War II.84 U.S. journalists wrote scathingly about the White Australia immigration ban (but, with some exceptions, neglected similar, if less stringent restrictions on Asian immigration to America). Time relished exposing the idiocy of requiring applicants not only to prove their heritage was at least three-quarters white, but also that they had “to look white.” Eurasian John Trench-Thiedemann was barred even though the Australian authorities admitted his full brother, Duke. John’s mistake was that he swam “in the tropical sea, [until] burned almost black,” Duke explained mournfully.85 Yanks and Brits hurled barbs at each other as the seeds of a British racial crisis were germinating in the late 1940s. World War II had brought an influx of many thousands of black seamen, former servicemen, and war industry workers to Britain; many returned after the war because they were unable to find work in their homelands. The S.S. Empire Windrush docked with 492 West Indian passengers in 1948, triggering a migration that grew to 28,000 West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis, and other Commonwealth citizens entering Britain between 1948 and 1953.86 American journalists set out to demolish the “popular British boast that there is no color line for Britain’s sixty thousand Negroes.”87 The writers buttressed their case with the experiences of a theatrical company’s production of Porgy and Bess. In Europe those black Americans had had few brushes with racism, but during a long run in London they found doors closed to them. And discrimination hurt worse in Britain because it was unexpected, an actor said, whereas in the States, one was mentally prepared for “Whites only” signs. Time implied that blacks were better off in the more predictable (and openly biased) racial climate of America—not to mention greater opportunities for education, higher wages, and improved social status.88 African Americans at least knew where they stood in their country, Newsweek and U.S. News said. An immigrant drew the contrast: “With the Yanks you know where you stand. Here you don’t.” He continued, bitterly: “You can have what the Englishman don’t want. You can get the room he won’t live in, the job he won’t take, and the woman he throws out.” (So well did the quote fit the thematic needs of U.S. News that it was recycled and printed twice in the next decade. U.S. News found that some

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immigrants “prefer open discrimination to the treatment they’re getting from some English people.”89 There was nothing covert about South Africa’s intensifying racialism. Restrictions on those of African or Asian descent were tightened in 1948, marriages of Europeans and non-Europeans were banned in 1949, and a law prohibiting sexual relations between Europeans and Africans was extended to Europeans and coloreds (those of mixed blood) in 1950. The most repressive legislation designated residents as white, colored, or African; marked off separate living areas for each group, the goal being to remove nonwhites from white areas; and empowered the minister of justice to silence almost any critic outside the country’s parliament.90 Bad as America’s racial conditions might appear in isolation, they seemed far better in comparison. As the black American journalist William Brower put the case, America at its worst could not even “approach the persecution, the unbridled brutality, the utter despair inflicted upon the colored population” of South Africa. Similarly, the liberal New Republic advised that the United States was losing to South Africa the “grim distinction” of having the worst racial discrimination.91 And when the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down four years later, it appeared that the United States had indeed turned a corner in its racial relations.

Chapter 5

A Symbol Not Shattered

W

hen the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public education was inherently discriminatory—reversing the course of the law stretching back to the “separate but equal” test of Plessy v. Ferguson—it delivered to the federal government not only a tool of domestic national governance, but a major tool that represented a significant turning point in American race relations that was creating difficulties abroad for the United States.1 Segregation, after all, was a primary weapon in the Communists’ propaganda arsenal that was brought to bear to discredit the United States and its claims of color-blind equality. The U.S. Justice Department even filed amicus curiae briefs in Brown, arguing that “the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”2 Brown was widely reported abroad, no doubt due to the government propaganda machinery of the Communists and the United States, as well as the enormous private mass media of the latter, which included print, film, broadcasting, and related activities. The USIA and its overseas arm, the U.S. Information Service, flashed copies of the decision to USIA posts within minutes of the announcement. Historian Nicholas Cull wrote that, “Every VOA [Voice of America] language carried a commentary on the decision, and the wireless file provided daily features about the decision to fifty-six countries for the next two weeks.” Doubtless, the international wire services operated by American mass media interests, the coopera­ tive Associated Press and the for-profit operations United Press and International News Service, reached thousands of clients—newspapers 79

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and other print media, not to mention broadcast interests, and did it as fast or faster than did Washington’s propaganda agencies. U.S. diplomats informed Washington that the ruling elicited “enthusiasm in French West Africa,” for example, where school segregation had dominated the list of reasons behind the decline in the “prestige of the United States.” The West African Pilot, published in Lagos, Nigeria, suggested that the decision was of particular significance to the people of Africa. A municipal body in Brazil announced its “satisfaction” with Brown. And the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia foresaw the decision would “go a long way toward dissipating the validity of the Communist contention that Western concepts of democracy are hypocritical.” The outcome was also “widely reported” in South Africa, but since most whites there were racial separatists or adherents of apartheid, “their interest . . . would be very academic.” The few liberal whites and the more numerous South Africans of color were inclined “to read more of a lesson” into the judicial activism.3 The U.S. Information Service persuaded 581 Mumbai-area newspapers and 409 other Indian papers to publish material it supplied about the case, resulting in front-page coverage in all the daily press of India. (The agency also promoted Brown in films, exhibits, and at its local library.) AntiAmerican commentary about segregation was “almost completely absent” from the Mumbai area after the campaign began, it was claimed. But the Times of India “raked up various earlier adverse decisions and seemed to question U.S. sincerity in the matter.” Japanese papers translated at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo caught the historic dimensions of the ruling. Relying on the New York Times, which published ten pages of background and interpretive material about school segregation the day the decision was announced, Asahi, one of the three major Japanese dailies, foresaw enormous complications in effectuating the ruling, while another leading daily, Mainichi, thought Brown would be an asset to the United States as it urged democratic countries to unite in struggling against the Reds regardless of the dominant racial groups in their populations. Iraqi and Pakistani papers also covered the decision extensively.4 Domestically, Brown pushed journalists into writing more about African Americans and school segregation. As David Davies noted, “a few of the nation’s leading newspapers responded admirably to the challenge of covering desegregation, devoting considerable attention and resources to this complex and continuing story.” Significantly, the U.S. national press told Americans that Brown was not a strictly domestic concern; indeed, these media outlets were struck by its impact abroad. Even before the ruling was handed down, Time noted that in “many nations where U.S. prestige and leadership [was] damaged by the fact of U.S. segregation, the court’s

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action is awaited with intense interest.” Once it was entered, Time estimated Brown would affect twelve million schoolchildren in twenty-one U.S. states, but believed that the “international effect may be scarcely less important” as a reassertion of “the . . . principle that ‘all men are created equal.’”5 Atlantic Monthly exulted that the Communists had lost “one of their nastier accusations against us.” A Kenyan wrote in the Nation of “the growing world-wide sentiment against all forms of racial discrimination.” Christian Century printed the testimony of American missionaries that Asians and Africans believed “U.S. practices on race matters have been immoral and hypocritical,” but significantly predicted Brown would cleanse America’s “hands . . . [in] the court of world public opinion.”6 The New York Times gave the ruling front-page play, under the headline “Voice [of America] Speaks in Thirty-Four Languages to Flash Court Ruling to the World.” Many VOA broadcasts, the Times explained, would be beamed to Communist countries, where people knew only what they had been told by “twisted and perverted” accounts claiming the black American was “practically a slave.” Inside, the Times devoted a page to excerpts from newspaper reaction to the decision around the country. The Hartford Courant reminded its readers that Brown “may have an even deeper and more encouraging impact outside our borders,” especially in “South America, Africa and Asia.” In fact, it “may greatly influence our relations with dark-skinned peoples the world over,” opined the Minneapolis Tribune. The student newspaper at the University of Kentucky was even more direct and optimistic about the impact, calling the ruling “one of the hardest blows dealt against communistic propaganda in many years.”7 But in the press elsewhere, most notably the South, coverage of the decision was lacking. Time concluded in 1956 that southern newspapers for the most part were doing “a patchy, pussyfooting job of covering the region’s biggest running story since slavery.”8 For the Soviets, Brown created a problem. For a decade, they had clamored against America for segregation and racism. Now the high court had undermined that message. Izvestia, one of the Soviet Union’s two most influential papers along with Pravda, skirted this difficulty by acknowledging the ruling just enough to scoff at it as mere propaganda. Izvestia emphasized that the high court had delayed implementing the decision, pointed to pronouncements from such figures as James Byrnes, former Supreme Court justice, secretary of state, now governor of South Carolina, who vowed “life-long fidelity to the principles of racism”; made much of President Eisenhower’s unwillingness to speak openly in support of the ruling; then concluded, presciently, that “powerful American racists”

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would use tactics ranging from acts of state legislatures to acts of terror in order to prop up Jim Crow. The U.S. press might claim that Brown was a historic victory for democracy, Izvestia retorted, but “racism permeates the whole U.S. social system,” while rabid separatists occupied seats of power in government.9 Newsweek, though well aware of how fervently and how often Moscow seized upon segregation to condemn the United States to the world’s people, now judged “that symbol lies shattered.”10 It could not have been more wrong. Jim Crow was very much alive, particularly in public education, and for decades Communist wordsmiths would use that supposedly shattered symbol to batter the United States with words and visual images dispatched around the world. Still, Newsweek was not the only journal wallowing in optimism because of Brown. And there was actually some reason for hope, based on the smooth initial desegregation of schools in the nation’s capital. U.S. News, which made its headquarters in Washington and followed local affairs there closely, found that the reform had taken place without “even a fist fight” among pupils. Time likewise found “hardly a protest.” The calm was deceiving: Several weeks later schools were the scenes of “ugly demonstrations.” While Time urged authorities to take a firm hand with adults who encouraged children to misbehave, that strategy was unpromising where the really serious trouble awaited, in Dixie. State governments there were considering actions to defy the Supreme Court, even contemplating dismantling entire public school systems. Washington itself was experiencing the new and worrisome phenomenon of “white flight.” Four thousand whites expected to enroll were missing—an ominous sign to U.S. News, which fretted the capital was destined for a majority black population.11 Black Americans welcomed Brown joyously, but their optimism quickly receded, partly because of the campaign of massive governmental resistance in the South. Despite grand phrases about equality, the Supreme Court had not included in Brown any remedies for those who were denied their civil rights. Southern resistance was strengthened by the Supreme Court’s abstract standard announced the following year that segregation in public schools should be ended with “all deliberate speed” as well as by the lack of support for Brown from the White House. Chief Justice Earl Warren and some of his brethren regarded Eisenhower’s refusal to support their decision as the more decisive factor. Historian William H. Chafe thought both factors gave southern politicians maneuvering room to attempt to circumvent the outcome, and that Eisenhower’s silence and inaction allowed them to assume a posture of opposition to the court.12 Time, with an eye cocked to foreign scrutiny, hailed “all-deliberatespeed” as a flexible and practical way of carrying out “a social revolution

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through a form of legal evolution.” It could have more logically argued that justice delayed was justice denied.13 But that would have clashed with Time’s expectation that segregation would fall in good time. Defensively, Time drew a contrast several months later between the “agitators, conspirators, [and] men of violence” at the forefront of social movements in other countries, and the constitutional lawyer—Thurgood Marshall—who stood “at the vortex of the Negro issue in the U.S.” Yet what truly distinguished America, thought Time, was the Constitution’s strength and flexibility.14 In step with official resistance to desegregation in the South came “economic coercion, violence, . . . even murder”—directed at blacks who insisted on their rights or who refused to act with the servility Jim Crow demanded of them.15 The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 was among the latter. The ferocity of his murder did not differ greatly from the many lynchings since Reconstruction. But the killing stimulated expressions of disapproval inside and outside the country, most of which were motivated by his youth and the trivialness with which his offense would have been regarded except in Dixie. The fourteen-year-old Till lived in Chicago with his mother, who sent him in the summer of 1955 on an extended visit to relatives in Mississippi. Knowing what awaited him there, his mother tried to prepare her son to submit to racial humiliations. Chicago-born and -reared, however, he “‘didn’t know’ how to ‘be humble to white people,’” she said. This would lead to lethal violence. On August 24, Till and some friends drove to a small store operated by Roy Bryant and his wife, Carolyn. There was disagreement over what transpired. Carolyn Bryant testified that Till grabbed her and made a lewd remark; others thought he had wolf-whistled at her. Whether Till made a clumsy adolescent proposition, his actions were interpreted as violating rigid taboos against any act suggesting a sexual encounter between a black male and a white female.16 The incident came to the attention of Roy Bryant, who, with his halfbrother, J. W. Milam, abducted Till from the home of his great-uncle, Moses Wright; Till’s body, weighted with a huge fan, was dumped into the Tallahatchie River, from which, battered and decomposing, it was later recovered. Bryant and Milam admitted to the abduction but denied killing Till. They were indicted on murder charges. Initially public opinion in Mississippi ran against them because of the victim’s youth, but it soon shifted to hostility toward outsiders because of the infamy imputed to the state, and they were acquitted in a state trial court.17 So great was the indignation, according to the American Jewish Com­ mittee, “that ‘in some European quarters the Till case . . . temporarily offset the favorable impact” of Brown and other racial reforms. Hundreds of editorials in foreign papers, conservative to Communist, condemned the

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killing and denounced the exonerations. The State Department opined that the case “drew greater headlines in France than in the United States.” The Paris press “gave wide coverage to the Till case” and vociferously protested the outcome.18 Till’s mother helped fuel the international furor when she insisted on an open casket at her son’s funeral in Chicago. The NAACP’s Crisis and the black news magazine Jet published a ghastly photograph of a corpse scarcely recognizable as human. The Alabama writer William Bradford Huie paid Milam and Bryant fees for the rights to publish their story, in which they confessed (their acquittals made another trial on the charge impossible) to killing the youngster. Huie recalled that the story was “published in every major language,” and that “papers and publishers . . . in Italy and France” paid him record prices for rights to translate and publish the story.19 The Soviets converted the lynching into powerful propaganda. New Times weighed in with the comment that the killing was not an isolated occurrence, but “the third [recent] lynching outrage in Mississippi,” and that the judicial proceedings constituted a “travesty of justice.” (Actually, the judge and prosecutor won commendations for their conduct of the trial.) Weeks later, New Times, the better to discredit the United States in the eyes of the world, shifted its interpretation of which—Mississippi or Washington—should bear the responsibility for the atrocity from the former to the latter.20 The Till case gave the Soviets a riposte to President Eisenhower’s accusation that the Russians violated the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights by crushing the Hungarian revolt. “These accusations ring particularly false,” Pravda responded, “because the United States does not protect the elementary rights of man,” its example being Till’s lynching.21 Not for the last time had disparate events—one a lynching in Mississippi, the other the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising thousands of miles away—been linked in order to score a point on an adversary. For that matter, Newsweek used the comments of Till’s mother to parry a thrust of the Communists. Mrs. Mamie Bradley did it by expressing concern that the Communists might use her son’s death for anti–U.S. propaganda.22 U.S. publications kept readers abreast of the reactions to Till’s murder. Commonweal told of the “shame and revulsion” felt by “people of every race and color.” Nation cited the global publicity given the trial. Christian Century (and others) rebuked the jurors whose acquittal of Milam and Bryant helped convert “a local tragedy into an international calamity.”23 U.S. allies provided some of the heat. Newsweek told of the meeting of its correspondent with the attorney general of France, whose nation was then being castigated for its colonial war in Algeria. The attorney general, seeking to create a diversion, took out press clippings on U.S. racial incidents,

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including Till’s death. The French were never reluctant, commented the State Department, to make “invidious comparisons” between their racial record and that of the Americans.24 The Montgomery bus boycott eventually supplanted the Till lynching in the news. Despite the near-mythic status the boycott would achieve, a number of ironies attended it. Begun as a one-day protest, it grew into a boycott lasting more than a year, and the Montgomery Improvement Association that grew out of it lasted even longer. Its modest initial goal, to make riding on Jim Crow buses less arbitrary, soon became a confrontation with segregation itself; and finally, while it adopted a strategy of Gandhian nonviolence, the MIA won its victory in the courts, not through mass demonstrations.25 Yet Montgomery pointed the way to defeat segregation, even though whites greatly outnumbered black boycotters, and Gandhian nonviolence was the way to do it. It confirmed in public the great oratorical gifts of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who revived the spirit of rebellion in the black church and coupled its force to the civil religion of the Constitution. Protest was made not simply respectable, but a moral imperative, as Gandhi had done in the struggle with the Raj, and civil rights campaigns became crusades more than political movements, demonstrating “King’s genius for imparting . . . a moral quality,” which would be important domestically and internationally.26 Coverage of the boycott started out as a local story. E. D. Nixon, a black union official and civil rights leader, leaked the story that blacks had called a meeting to plan a one-day boycott to Joe Azbell, a white city editor for the Montgomery Advertiser, hoping the story would alert many black residents who had not yet learned of it.27 The Advertiser story ran on page one. But its coverage of the story in the days following was full of errors due to sloppiness and years of neglecting the black community. As Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff ably write in The Race Beat, “when the boycott took root and spread, [the Advertiser’s] reporters had no idea what to do, where to go, or who to see.”28 The boycott remained a local story for the most part for the first month. The New York Times and Washington Post did run short, inside-page articles about it, but they were merely Associated Press and United Press dispatches. Time magazine was the first of the major publications with primarily white readers to send in a staff writer. Six weeks after the boycott began, Time’s first article on it appeared. But the Times, Post, and Newsweek failed to see it as a national story until a grand jury returned indictments on February 21 against King and 115 others for their role in the boycott. At that point, all three publications sent their own reporters to Montgomery, and the story began to receive national attention. Following on the heels of

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the national media came the international press. Of course, given that even the Times, with its great resources, relied on the wire services while the boycott was developing into a major story, it is not surprising that foreign reporters showed up in Montgomery belatedly after learning of the boycott from the U.S. press system generally, the news agencies specifically.29 The U.S. press reminded Americans of foreign interest in the events unfolding in the Alabama capital. Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News all mentioned the ad hoc international press corps present in Montgomery. The New York Times recorded the presence of “more than a score of newsmen from India, France, and England,” reflecting the perceived importance of the story for international audiences. For once the most colorful report ran in the sober-sided U.S. News. It was written by Grover C. Hall Jr., the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, who mentioned half-humorously, serving “as duenna and Indian guide to more than one hundred reporters of the international press,” who availed themselves of the hospitality U.S. newspapers customarily extended to out-of-towners covering a local news event.30 The Montgomery story illustrated some of the quirks of civil rights reportage. Most foreign journalists in America were based in Washington or New York City, where some major racial stories originated. But many others occurred in state capitals such as Montgomery that were hundreds, even thousands, of miles off the beaten path of national and international journalism. In fact, major racial stories brewed up in small towns such as Columbia and Clinton, Tennessee; Money, Philadelphia, and Oxford, Mississippi; and Anniston and Selma, Alabama—none of which was large enough for a wire service bureau. When racial stories erupted in these places, local stringers or sources alerted the wire services (and larger newspapers). An initial wire service dispatch often added little to a hurried rewrite of the stringer’s story, which might itself be based on local newspaper accounts. The dispatch would be fleshed out with additional details chased down by telephone calls or by writers rushed to the scene. What made the difference in whether a racial story made it onto the national or international circuits was often whether it was covered on the lower rungs of journalism, not whether the initial coverage was favorable. A hostile report could be easily recast by the wire services to serve clients of differing political or geographical perspectives. A story such as the Advertiser’s was fair game to be redone and sent to print and broadcast clients. If ignored by the local press or agency bureaus, however, the event might remain unknown even in the immediate area—as was the boycott, before the Advertiser printed its front-page story. There were numerous reasons the Advertiser (and other local, whiteowned papers) might report the boycott or make it possible for it to be

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reported: adherence to a professional ethic (newspapers exist to report news, not to ignore it); to ward off competition from a rival paper bent on encroaching on circulation or advertising;31 to maintain public order by alerting readers to a challenge to it without necessarily sympathizing with it (as in desegregation); or by following journalistic customs such as providing working space to out-of-town journalists in town to cover a story. Hall of the Advertiser, for one, objected sarcastically to the tenor of the favorable reporting of many of the journalists to whom he played host: The “Harriet Stowe press of the Northern U.S., Europe, and Asia has rapturously consigned Dr. King and his pedestrian host to the ages as a latter-day Xenophon and the Ten Thousand.” Nevertheless, he provided services that made the out-of-towners’ task easier, perhaps even possible to accomplish.32 Hall was not the first nor last to rhetorically counterattack critics of southern folkways. Representative L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina did so as well. Significantly, Rivers did not deny directly the thesis that “there is joy in Russia when information like this is broadcast to the world.” He did attempt, however, to weaken such claims. To do so, Rivers introduced a cutting from the Charleston (South Carolina) News and Courier, a segregationist mouthpiece, about the “raping of a white girl by seven Negro soldiers in Bamberg, Germany.” That and similar crimes, Rivers insisted, cost the United States “more good will” in Europe “than all the [racial] incidents in America combined.” Senator Strom Thurmond of the same state turned to the same paper to expose the “fallacies” of the argument that Jim Crow “inspired much anti-American propaganda overseas.” Actually, the News and Courier averred, more or less correctly, much of the information came from American sources. Later Thurmond blamed the USIA (quoting the Washington Evening Star) for the belief overseas that America treated its citizens of color shabbily. The USIA, Thurmond added, had specifically failed “to explain how well off American Negroes are comparatively”—indeed, that they “live in far greater luxury than many of the foreigners who are feeling so sorry for them.” It was a variation of the racial progress theme—but it was used for a purpose opposite to what Washington had in mind.33 The Nation subscribed to the liberal position. Two months into the boycott, Carey McWilliams wrote acidly that white southerners seem “incapable of imagining how [racial segregation] looks to the world.” It looked to him that “the ‘white’ South stares incredulously at the Negro” for rebelling nonviolently against Jim Crow; “the nation stares incredulously at the South” for endeavoring to quell a movement that was at the core of what America was about, “and the world stares incredulously at America.” Eight months later, as the boycotters had victory in their grasp after a favorable

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ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Christian Century averred that “for the past year the eyes of the world have been” fixed on the struggle “to win equal rights.” The nation would benefit, it continued, when the world’s people of color were convinced the United States was trying to achieve social justice for all its people.34 The New York Times put racial conditions in the South and border states in a Cold War context. The U.S. “reputation for treat[ing] our Negroes badly,” it explained, was a special impediment in “former colonial areas where competition between democracy and communism is most acute.”35 King himself sounded a similar note in the pages of U.S. News. The struggle was not limited to Montgomery, he said. More than 1.6 billion of the world’s population were people of color who “have lived under the pressing yoke of colonialism and imperialism.” Once free, “they are determined not to follow any nation that exploits and oppresses any of its citizens.” King warned of the danger of waking up and finding “the uncommitted peoples of the world [ruled by] a communistic ideology.”36 Great distances did not isolate the United States from the world. New Zealanders were about as distant from Montgomery as it was possible to be. Yet news agency dispatches and stories filed by New Zealand journalists (more from the former, no doubt, than the latter) provided “the widest publicity . . . to race problems in the United States.” A U.S. diplomat was struck by “sensational columnists” such as Patrick O’Donovan of the Evening Post of Wellington, who reported a speech in Montgomery during which Senator James Eastland of Mississippi demanded that racial separation be maintained. But Eastland’s tirade proved insufficiently strident to arouse bored listeners, who “wanted something stronger,” an indication of “the depth—and the danger—of southern resentment.”37 The influence of Gandhian nonviolence on the boycott movement heightened Indian interest in it and its leaders.38 U.S. Vice Consul Ben­ jamin A. Fleck sent to Washington a front-page article from the Hindu, which caught the significance of Gandhian nonviolence in the boycott but erred in ascribing the leadership position not to King but to the man who became his chief deputy, Ralph David Abernathy. “The theme of the passive resistance programme, which was adopted yesterday at a mass meeting, was almost the same as Gandhiji’s,” and an exhortation made by Abernathy, who was leading “the present Negro satyagrahis had a Gandhian ring about it.”39 The English-language press of Mumbai carried almost daily stories about the segregation of blacks. On February 24, 1956, an article from Montgomery reported the arrests of the black leaders of the MIA, followed the next day by a story about New York ministers who offered prayers in support of the movement. The U.S. consul general brought these and

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similar items to the attention of Washington as “further evidence, if any is needed, of the intense preoccupation of Indians with anything suggesting racial discrimination anywhere in the world.” Even a “notoriously pro-Soviet and anti-American paper” in Mumbai “confined itself to a restrained expression of hope that developments in Montgomery would result in right triumphing over might.” The restraint was unusual: “the Indian press is only too ready to belabor the shortcomings of the American people” when Indian sentiments were offended. The consulate took what comfort was available from the willingness of Indians to grant Americans the benefit of the doubt about their striving to erase the color line.40 Even organs in mainland China printed material on the boycott. Tientsin’s Ta Kung Pao, a leading provincial daily, published an early commentary, “Stop Criminal Racial Discrimination,” decrying the hypocrisy about “the ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ which the U.S. ruling clique likes to boast about.” Perhaps the most striking report in the Soviet press was written by an American contributor, Eslanda Goode Robeson. That she quoted King’s characterization of segregation as an evil was no surprise; what was unexpected was that a Soviet journal would permit her to characterize the boycott as reformist rather than revolutionary, without expressing scorn for those deluded souls trudging along the false path of reform.41 The boycott helped revive the press theme that America and Americans brought inspiration and assistance to the cause of freedom and human rights, especially in Africa and Asia. No doubt this was at least partially true, but there was another consideration. Showing black Americans inspiring the oppressed of other nations put America in a more favorable light than reporting that its citizens had been forced to rebel against a racist system in a country that professed devotion to freedom, justice, and equality. Even U.S. News, no friend of the black cause, nevertheless promoted the idea that America (in this case African Americans) inspired the world. (A later story said Africans knew of what transpired in Montgomery and “are using the same weapon here.”) The less conservative Time agreed that the South Africans emulated the “scrupulous spirit of nonviolence” exhibited in Montgomery and cited U.S. bus boycotts (without naming the MIA) in a story about South Africa.42 U.S. News did allow, to be sure, that the strategy of “the boycott is not new to South Africa, [but] . . . has been tried by Negro natives and mulattos.” That was a decided understatement: It was in South Africa that Gandhi began turning from the law that was his profession to the nonviolent protest that became his calling. The theme left the impression that protests in South Africa were not native to it but were inspired by the events in Alabama. Actually, years before the Montgomery movement started,

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South African police arrested more than eight thousand persons for acts of civil disobedience.43 Educating African students was something else the U.S. press wanted credited to America. Time established that Hastings Banda, the leader of the Nyasaland African Congress (Nyasaland later became Malawi) was educated at the University of Chicago. In 1954, Time celebrated Lincoln University in Pennsylvania for its international influence, based upon alumni from the Virgin Islands, Kenya, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and so on. Time emphasized two especially prominent graduates: Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nationalist leader of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast (later Ghana).44 Sometimes foreign friends of America made the case for it when the theme of racial progress resurfaced. The British writer Rebecca West disputed “knaves and dupes” who made much of lynching but ignored efforts by Americans to end it. Newsweek ran an appreciation of the analysis of Sir William John Haley, the editor of the Times (London), that black Americans were gaining political and economic status; he also predicted segregation’s demise.45 Time was encouraged to find racial barriers tumbling  in medicine. Black doctors were being trained in 1954 at eleven of twenty-six formerly whites-only medical schools in the South; graduates of the two black medical schools, Howard and Meharry, were receiving internships at hospitals of their choice rather than being limited to segregated hospitals; and, “in sharp contrast” to a Washington meeting twenty-two years before, delegates to the black National Medical Association were welcomed in the best hotels and restaurants of the nation’s capital. At another medical meeting, attended by hundreds of black and white American physicians at the black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, participants ignored segregation and “lived in the same guest houses, ate at the same tables,” and attended the same sessions to hear the professional papers. Visiting newsmen even showed up in Fayetteville, Tennessee, to cover white doctors’ election of a black colleague, Dr. L. M. Donalson, as president of the county medical society. The locals “were astonished”—not by the election but by the wide attention paid to it; they regarded his elevation, along with an earlier decision to name the black hospital for him, as “the rightful thing to happen to a man of proven ability.”46 No less compelling was the favorable testimony of enemies, such as Russians who had glimpsed at least some of the truth of American race relations, Newsweek informed readers. These “solidly indoctrinated Soviet bureaucrats” were impressed by integration in a first-grade classroom in Kentucky. “‘Look how smoothly this goes,’” said one Russian. “‘It bodes well for this country’s future,’ said another.”47

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But foreigners also heaped disapprobation upon America for the color line, which the U.S. press returned in full measure—as when Time denounced Arab and African states for excessive eagerness to “declaim against colonialism and race discrimination.”48 Foreigners fared better when they acknowledged steps taken to eradicate white supremacy instead of how much remained to be done. Two French writers, Pierre and Renée Gosset, wrote candidly of white supremacy in the South of 1953 but also foresaw a time when “there will be no more ‘Negro problem’ in the United States.” They also got into the good graces of American journalists by listing the failings of their own countrymen. One passage described a white Mississippi editor who delivered a “litany about the lazy nigger,” the “thieving nigger,” and so on, but their inclusion of such attitudes was made less objectionable because the Gossets mentioned similar attitudes held by “old-time French planters in North Africa.”49 Even severe criticism from abroad could receive a respectful hearing. In one case, a white parish near New Orleans was rebuked for refusing to accept a black priest. Newsweek was impressed by the wrath of the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, seen by many as the semiofficial “voice of the Pope.” L’Osservatore denounced the parishioners’ refusal to accept a black priest as deserving the “invocation of Christ for His crucifiers: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”50 America’s good was crowned with brotherhood in some tales. Time related the experiences of a black family, the Kerchevals of South Dakota. After two decades of ranching, a fire destroyed their cabin, and it seemed “the Kerchevals were licked,” but their neighbors stepped in with offers of temporary quarters complete with food, clothing, and made-up beds, and showed up to construct a new home. Time offered their conduct as worthy of emulation by their countrymen. “He’s been looking for an excuse to stay—now he’s got it,” Mrs. Kercheval said of her husband. His comment elaborated on that theme: “I’ll have to stay here the rest of my life to show them my appreciation.”51 Life, for its part, was struck by the dawning enlightenment demonstrated by some white southerners after their encounter with a black African, who came to enroll in a black college in Tennessee. A slur, “Who’s that nigger?” greeted the Nigerian Geoffrey Baba Ie Onuoha when he disembarked from the plane. Despite the inauspicious beginning, the gap separating races, religions, and cultures was bridged, and the “all-white, all-Protestant community in Tennessee [held] out its hand to a Negro Catholic from Nigeria.”52 Life doubtless would have welcomed more of the same from other Americans.

Chapter 6

Reverberating Symbols

T

wo events charged with intense symbolism came to dominate the global news system at the opening of Eisenhower’s second term in 1957: the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Unrelated in almost all respects, Little Rock and Sputnik nevertheless reverberated against each other as powerful symbols, partly because one came on the heels of the other (Little Rock in September and October, Sputnik in early October), and partly due to the damage they inflicted on America’s international stature. Little Rock, to which U.S. troops  were sent to restore order and help compel obedience to a federal court order, was the most serious confrontation between national and state authority since Reconstruction. Moreover, it unfolded before a world community already censorious of white racism in America. Sputnik also shattered American complacency in and the world’s awe of U.S. technological prowess. Another blow soon followed the first. Less than a month later, Sputnik II was launched, the impact of which was increased by the failures that dogged the U.S. space program into 1958. Each side attempted to put its own propaganda spin on the events. But the United States was at a disadvantage: Little Rock was not simply a legal case debated in the hushed atmosphere of the federal judiciary, but a violent encounter in the streets during which mobs screamed for the blood of black students. A further handicap was that it was all but impossible for the United States to disparage the Soviet achievement, which represented the fulfillment of a dream of humanity. Yet so pressing was the perceived necessity to divert attention from Soviet successes in space, American officials even entertained a proposal to explode an atomic bomb on the moon.1 92

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It also caused the USIA to step up its public opinion polling to measure the effectiveness of its propaganda, although one did not need poll results to know the effects of Sputnik and Little Rock. The world’s peoples could not miss the contrast between vicious racism on the one hand and great scientific progress on the other. Vicariously they witnessed black children harried by white mobs or surrounded by soldiers either barring them from school or holding their tormentors at bay with bayonets. To the people of the world, the Russians extended an invitation to look, figuratively, to the heavens, distributing schedules when Sputnik could be glimpsed scudding above various cities. The world press helped the process along. Japan’s Asahi, for instance, advised readers when the “Red Star” could be seen from Tokyo and vicinity. And echoes of the Cold War were heard even in seemingly innocuous announcements, such as one about Sputnik passing in orbit above both Little Rock and the Indonesian city of Bandung, the latter being the site of the 1955 conference of nonaligned Asian and African states courted by capitalist and communist powers alike. The Soviets even sent a copy of Sputnik on a propaganda tour of Latin America with the Moscow Circus.2 Derision appeared in some quarters of the American press (Newsweek, for one, jeered about “Nikita Khrushchev’s tub-thumping about missiles, rockets, and Sputniks”), but there was no denying the magnitude of the achievement. Nor, Newsweek conceded, could it be disputed that “Moscow’s . . . gains in the Afro-Asian countries are impressive.” Millions of people there regarded Sputnik as a “triumph of the ‘have-nots’ over the ‘haves,’” that beckoned poorer nations to take the Soviet Union’s “short cut to greatness”—hardly what Washington desired. The future might hold even worse news: The socialist organ Pedoman of Indonesia predicted the Russians would beat the Americans to the moon and would “make a Red moon out of it.”3 Whatever the interpretation, Little Rock and Sputnik were closely followed. U.S. Consul General David M. Maynard quipped that the press of Genoa, “like spectators at a tennis match, alternat[ed] between Washington and Moscow datelines.”4 So did much of the global press. And the world media had already trotted out numerous embarrassing stories about racial outrages that bore American datelines. There was, for instance, coverage of Autherine Lucy’s breaking the color barrier at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1956. A mob pursued her after class, hurling eggs and stones, smashing the windows of the vehicle in which she rode, and chanting: “Lynch the nigger!” Lucy was suspended and then expelled after trustees learned that her NAACP lawyers had accused them of conspiring with the mob. The university continued to exclude black students into the 1960s.5

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Lucy’s appeal as a heroine heightened the international interest about her brief appearance on the campus. She was modest (“God knows I didn’t intend to cause all this violence and agitation. . . . I merely wanted an education”) but determined (She pledged to keep “fighting until I get one”). Impressed, the University of Copenhagen offered her a scholarship, which she declined. Sixty journalists from outside the South, including some foreign correspondents, were present in Tuscaloosa to help spread her story. But what the Christian Science Monitor identified as the “amazingly farreaching impact” probably owed more to the wire services that undoubtedly produced most of the accounts filling newspapers in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world.6 The Bulletin of Middletown, Connecticut, taught a related lesson to readers: Red “propaganda mills” were out to demonstrate that “a nation which tolerates second-class citizenship is hardly fit to give moral guidance” to a billion Asians and Africans.7 But Communists were not solely responsible for the disapproving comments. Lucy’s plight shocked newspapers in Egypt, Lebanon, India, Ceylon, Cambodia, and others.8 Like young Till’s lynching, her ordeal even briefly eclipsed the positive effects of Brown v. Board of Education abroad. Providing a foretaste of Little Rock was a desegregation crisis in Clinton, Tennessee. The trouble began after a federal judge ordered twelve black children to be admitted to Clinton’s high school. Leading the opposition was John Kasper, a segregationist from Washington, D.C. Tennessee’s governor, Frank Clement, quelled the mobs by sending in six hundred National Guardsmen, ten tanks, and a contingent of state police to restore peace. The school was closed after further incidents but was reopened after those who provoked the violence were arrested.9 Like a number of sleepy southern towns that would become internationally recognized datelines, Clinton was too small to have a daily newspaper. But it was only a half-hour drive or so from Knoxville, which had two metro dailies, and the Associated Press and United Press were on hand to staff the Clinton desegregation story.10 Reporters who regularly covered the towns and cities of Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi where these racial incidents over integration occurred faced pressure from the locals to ignore the story. As one television station manager in Jackson, Mississippi, said to the United Press bureau chief, “What do you mean, carrying all this stuff and glorifying the Negro?” The UP bureau chiefs in the South had less pressure on them than did their AP counterparts to conform to segregationist ideology and ignore the civil rights story. UP (which became UPI after merging with International News Service) was a privately owned company that paid stringers to write stories its reporters could not get to. AP, on the other

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hand, was owned by its member papers and was therefore more duty bound to deliver what its members considered “news.” And AP relied on its members to turn over their local stories to the wire. Thus, “if a southern city newspaper chose to not cover a civil rights event, as was often the case, AP likely wouldn’t have it unless it sent one of its staffers,” as was the case in Clinton.11 Photographs of civil rights events served as powerful indictments of U.S. racism. Foreign distribution of photographs via radio by the AP and UP to Latin America began in the early 1950s and to Europe and the Far East not long thereafter. And photographs tended to be widely distributed among news organizations. Thus even pictures from Clinton, such as one showing “a bemused Clintonian staring incredulously at a fifty-ton army tank” parked in a tree-shaded lane, appeared in newspapers around the world. The leading foreign picture magazine, Paris-Match, put together a photo spread illustrating the atmosphere of “la guerre civile”; it included shots of a sneering white youth hurling an object into a car with a black passenger; a black figure hanging in effigy, as if lynched; and National Guardsmen deploying tanks and brandishing bayonets to curb the violence.12 From Calcutta, a U.S. consul advised Washington that the “Communist Press Makes Hay with Clinton Race Riots.” Inflammatory headlines, such as “Ghastly Racial Discrimination in the United States,” ran with Reuters dispatches. From Ankara, the U.S. embassy forwarded the disheartening news that America’s reputation as a champion of human rights had been besmirched. Red papers in Sweden “gloated over each dramatized report.” Similar items ran in the non-Communist press but included some less damaging elements.13 Aware of foreign sentiments, Time reassured millions of readers, at home and abroad, that the troublemakers were being dealt with firmly. It showered contempt on Kasper—“a preening cock . . . a screwball without a cause”—while praising the Tennesseans who had dealt decisively with him and his kind. Time extolled the rectitude of federal judge Robert Taylor, “who sternly slapped the racial agitators with criminal charges of contempt of court”; the passion for justice of federal prosecutor John C. Crawford, who “demanded a conviction to save this honorable court” from defiance of its lawful authority; and the sense of civitas and the streak of independence exhibited by the jury, which convicted Kasper and six others, then, “as if to prove that it weighed evidence and not passions, . . . acquitted the remaining four defendants.” The Christian Science Monitor found others’ conduct worthy of praise and emulation. Three whites (one of whom was later beaten severely) escorted black students through a riotous crowd and into the school, believing, whatever their view of integration, that the law gave these black children the “right to go unmolested”

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to white schools. The Monitor also hailed, as a victory for “the democratic way,” the electoral defeat of a mayoral candidate whom segregationists had supported.14 The Tennesseans had restored law and order; meanwhile, Texans bowed to the rabble. Governor Allan Shivers had Texas Rangers remove the black pupils whose enrollment in Texarkana and Mansfield schools met with resistance. President Eisenhower apparently sanctioned Shivers’s action, which had the effect of resegregating the schools.15 A graver crisis than that in Clinton presented itself in Little Rock, where nine black students were set to enter Central High School. As of Labor Day, the day before school was to start, everything appeared calm. The AP bureau chief in Little Rock, the New York Times national editors, and NBC’s Reuven Frank, producer of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, all expected the following day to be uneventful and turned their attention to Tennessee, where they figured the story would be Clinton, one year later. But that evening the AP sent out an urgent message. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had requested time to speak on statewide television at 10:15 p.m. In his speech, Faubus declared, “It is my opinion—yes, even a conviction—that it will not be possible to restore or to maintain order and protect the lives and property of the citizens if forcible integration is carried out tomorrow in the schools of this community.” Despite a court order obtained the next day requiring integration of the school, Faubus refused to back down.16 Crowds gathered in front of the school awaiting the black students on September 4, 1957. At Faubus’s request, National Guardsmen stood at the ready to maintain segregation. Elizabeth Eckford, a fifteen-year-old black student, was the first to arrive. Her family did not have a telephone and did not get the message that the black students were to meet and go to the school together. Thus, Eckford walked alone past the crowd hurling epithets and taunts, then had her entrance blocked by the National Guard. Television cameras broadcast scenes of the angry mob and the stoic young girl into American homes that evening. Suddenly, Little Rock was the story, one that was made even more intense by reporters on the scene who urged the crowds on because it made for better TV.17 Disagreeing privately with the Brown ruling and reluctant to intervene, Eisenhower moved slowly. As public concern about Little Rock mounted, he met with Faubus in Rhode Island on September 14, ten days after the incident began, and left the meeting with the erroneous impression that Faubus had agreed to obey the court order. Their way seemingly clear, the black children managed to get past the crowds and into Central High. But the situation spiraled out of control in short order; hundreds of rioters went “running wild, crashing through police barriers” to get at the black pupils. Some policemen even joined the mob, but

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a handful of them remained faithful to their duty and saved the children from harm.18 With mobs in command in Little Rock, Eisenhower at last acted— impelled by his sense of duty to see the court ruling enforced; infuriated that Faubus had broken his word to obey the court order; and free of the political factors that perhaps had stayed his hand in 1956, a presidential election year, when the Texas Rangers removed the youngsters from the schools. Certainly he knew the Soviets and the Egyptians were using the turmoil to paint America as racist. Secretary of State Dulles had opined to Attorney General Brownell that the effect of Little Rock “in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians” (the Red Army had crushed a Hungarian rebellion in 1956). On September 24, Eisenhower ordered in elements of the 101st Airborne Division, which restored calm, and summoned elements of the Arkansas National Guard into federal service.19 Only five out-of-town reporters had been in Little Rock when Faubus first called out the Guard, but four weeks later there were 225, including reporters for three London newspapers. The city was “transformed into a kind of giant press room,” wrote NBC reporter John Chancellor. For the first few days, most national and regional media outlets relied on the wire services. As Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff noted: A week after school opened, 67 percent of the newspapers in the North and 68 percent of the newspapers in the South were giving the events in Little Rock front-page headlines of five or more columns, and virtually all were running two or three related sidebars on the front page each day. Many were carrying two photographs on the front, and some devoted an entire page to photos.20

Although television crews did cover Little Rock, the medium was responsible for relatively little of the international response, especially in Asia and Africa, where TV systems were few and rare. Television was further handicapped by its laggardly pace in transporting film and video­ taped images overseas. NBC’s local affiliate in Little Rock, for example, did not have the technology to get film to New York. Chancellor, the NBC reporter, had to fly from Little Rock to Oklahoma City each day at 3 p.m. to have the film edited and transmitted to New York. Not until the early 1960s would earth-orbiting satellites flash pictures across the oceans electronically; the film now had to be transported aboard propeller (and later jet) aircraft.21 Yet there were potential audiences even where television did not exist or was a curiosity. Newsreels played to enormous audiences. Just one of the

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Big Five U.S. newsreels, Fox International Movietone, was shown in fortyseven countries and in more than a dozen languages to a global audience estimated, in 1946, at two hundred million viewers per week (no doubt to considerably more in 1957). Newsreels bore “sensational pictures of the events in Little Rock” to French West Africa, where a U.S. consular officer in Dakar welcomed its “remarkably restrained” French commentary.22 But newsreels were moved across oceans at glacial rather than electronic speed. Still press pictures, on the other hand, as noted, sped “swiftly to any quarter of the globe” via radio or cable. Scenes they captured—such as white teenagers barring black pupils from high school—represented “a gift to the dark satanic mills of Communist propaganda” that America “could not counteract.” One writer declared, “the news picture has become more decisive for the American image in the world than any other communication item.” Secretary Dulles, responding to a reporter’s question at a news conference, noted with evident understatement, “As I was looking at some of the pictures in the paper this morning, I felt those pictures would not be helpful to the influence of the United States abroad.”23 To ensure such photos would be detrimental to America’s influence, Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communist League Truth) devoted a full page to articles and pictures. It amplified the power of the images by juxtaposing shots of Vice President Richard Nixon embracing an African leader (Nixon then was on a tour of Africa) with shots of young whites harassing black pupils and the National Guard barring a black girl from school. The New York Times also published other photographs that made for a compelling contrast, one that Izvestia underscored. At the opening of the Russian school year, students were shown presenting flowers to their teachers; the Times printed “photographs from Little Rock” of guards holding back Negro students and “white hooligans taunting” them. (Journalists in Indonesia, Mozambique, Libya, and Tanganyika, were struck by the same contrast.) In “illiterate Africa and Asia,” Newsweek later lamented, photos from Little Rock depicted “the Negro’s role in America” as little changed since the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.24 The Associated Press put some pictures from Clinton and Little Rock on the wires. While New York Times staffers wrote most of the text accounts of those crises, picture after picture that appeared in the Times bore the credit line: “Associated Press Wirephoto.” If the Times had to rely on the AP for its pictures, foreign papers, oceans away and with fewer resources, certainly did as well. Even the Washington Post relied on the wire services for stories and photos.25 Communist propagandists denounced American racism, past and present, at home and abroad, and argued that Russians were of superior morality since they did not deny blacks life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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Izvestia collected some of those thematic elements in a scathing article about Klansmen “organizing a savage hunt for Negro children,” who wished only to attend classes with whites. More inflammatory was the Red claim that government forces, not thugs, were responsible for the racial violence and the denial of black rights. It was part of a counterattack to U.S. propaganda in which Izvestia commented sarcastically that Washington had “the audacity to talk of ‘democracy’” and pose as the “‘champion’” of the rights of Hungarians while subjugating African Americans.26 Like Time, Russian propagandists skillfully superimposed human faces on the news. One face no doubt chosen to shock Third World sensibilities was one Charles Van Fleet, who was identified as an American living in Ethiopia and who, according to Literaturnaya Gazeta, “gave vent to his racist soul” and “slapped, bashed, mashed, and smacked” his Ethiopian servant Abebe Besha, just as, supposedly, he yearned to do to all Ethiopians. His brutality was ascribed to Van Fleet’s background as a policeman in the United States, where he had honed his skills by beating “‘colored’ people.” Literaturnaya Gazeta interjected material intended to bring home to people of color the full horror of the events in distant Arkansas. Hauled into court in Ethiopia for his misdeeds, Van Fleet reacted with telling indignation, understandably so, Literaturnaya Gazeta said slyly. After all, his countrymen in Little Rock had assaulted Americans of color, and thereby had earned not punishment, but the gratitude of the Arkansas governor. Since his latest offense happened in Ethiopia, however, the victim Besha was not sentenced to hard labor, as the newspaper contended certainly would have been his fate had he resided in Arkansas. “Ethiopia,” the gazette finished on a note at once triumphant and sarcastic, “is not Little Rock.” (Implicitly, the periodical advised Ethiopians to keep Americans and their vile practices out of the country.)27 Other Communist organs were as caustic. Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), China’s largest paper with a circulation of 800,000 and the official organ of the Central Committee, accused Washington of instigating and encouraging “the violence of the racists.” Its evidence was the federalizing of Arkansas National Guard units that it claimed had attacked black school children; the claim was wrong, but from Beijing’s perspective, more importantly, it produced the desired effect—making it appear the U.S. government was complicit in the assaults. Renmin Ribao almost sputtered with outrage because Washington had not acted with alacrity in halting the riots; Eisenhower did not “denounce racial discrimination as such”; and putting federal forces into the field was not “intended to solve the question of racial discrimination.” A ferocious cartoon printed by Il Paese of Rome even depicted the Statue of Liberty garbed in KKK robes and holding aloft not a torch but the burning body of a black child.28

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The administration took steps to blunt the Communists’ propaganda attacks and to gain maximum benefits from its own. Eisenhower delivered an address about Little Rock on domestic television that the administration caused to be “translated into forty-three languages,” while the Voice of America broadcast details of the 101st’s efforts. Dulles cabled a comparison for U.S. diplomats to use at their discretion: While America acted “to ensure the education of [black] children,” Moscow dispatched the Red Army to crush freedom in Hungary.29 America’s problems with foreign public opinion were not due solely to Moscow and Beijing. Had Communist presses or radio fallen silent, news would have moved from Little Rock through the global news system no less swiftly, possibly with similar impact. The Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service sent text and photos abroad via cable or radio. Reuters and Agence France Presse contributed to the news flow as well, earning a U.S. diplomat’s snide comment that they had exhibited their usual “decided propensity for playing up the sensational” from racial hot spots.30 The non-Communist press tended to agree, by statement and practice, that Little Rock was not merely an American affair. Macleans of Canada explained that hundreds of millions of nonwhites, aligned with neither side in the Cold War, judged whites by how they treated people of color. By that standard, it concluded, Governor Faubus harmed Canada, Britain, and Western Europe almost as much as his own land. The Swiss, too, worried about the “incalculable harm done to [the] occidental position throughout [the] non-European world.”31 The debate was not limited to the press. Particularly unsettling, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike of Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) likened the United States to South Africa because both disregarded human rights, a line that U.S. diplomats and information officers worked assiduously to dispute. Worse still, this view coincided “with popular Ceylonese impressions.” The discourse on Little Rock even made it to dusty villages in French Tropical Africa.32 The tenor of foreign reports and commentary varied depending on the country or province. U.S. diplomats found relatively unemotional handling of Little Rock in Bern, but also negative impressions elsewhere. USIA surveys conducted in major Western European cities found that public opinion of the U.S. was adversely affected by Little Rock, although interpretations moderated over time. Geneva advised that “the sharp edge seems to be wearing off a story which had cut us badly,” and Belgian papers lessened their critical posture by October; while still excoriating racism, at least they did not indict all Americans as guilty of it.33 In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the news from Little Rock received

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prominent play. In the British colony of Kenya, for instance, the news was “consistently front-paged,” often across four or five columns. The United States also had problems with the colonial masters of sub-Saharan Africa, not just Communists. The Portuguese overlords in Mozambique decried (in Noticias) “the democratic pretensions of the United States.” The harmony between the races prevailing in Mozambique was superior (Noticias claimed) to race discord in America. “High Government officials” sanctioned that line, apparently out of deep resentment that Washington lined up with the native population instead of the white colonists, U.S. Consul General R. Smith Simpson reported. In sum, Little Rock was “a very serious blow” to America’s standing in Africa.34 The damage was less serious in Japan, the most important U.S. ally in Asia. But what its leading papers said got the attention of the embassy in Tokyo and, no doubt, Washington. Mainichi pronounced the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection a “dead letter” in the South and, not surprisingly, made pointed references to the disparity between American principles and American practices. As Warren Cohen and Nancy Tucker put it, “The United States asked the world to adhere to a very high standard of behavior and proclaimed itself a model to the international community in the wake of World War II.” When Americans themselves failed to live up to that high standard, “the people of the world, and particularly those in Asia whose struggles with colonialism, imperialism, and inequality continued,” were angered by “what appeared to be hypocritical principles and policies.”35 A Yomiuri writer wrote of his “strong shock” at seeing a sign, “White Men Only,” posted at the Dallas airport. Even after the present exigency ended, he predicted, “the Negro problem will probably continue to smolder.” Similarly, Asahi predicted worse problems to come because white attitudes in Arkansas were not as deeply rooted nor as severe as those in the Deep South. Sankei-Jiji brought the meaning of Little Rock home to readers by recounting the “bitter experiences” of expatriate Japanese caught in “expulsion agitations” earlier in American history. Time made a like point: The Japanese were apprehensive they might suffer the same indignities as blacks. “If Americans regard Negroes as inferior,” mused a “conservativeminded” Japanese man, “how do they really regard Asians?”36 With the military intervention now the turning point, legislative bodies in Ecuador and the Brazilian state of Bahia praised Eisenhower’s decision to intervene in Little Rock. A Costa Rican Communist leader, Manuel Moral Valverde, even hailed it as daring.37 The deployment of troops in Little Rock all but eviscerated non-Communist propaganda insinuating that the national government instigated or tolerated racial discrimination. Little Rock and other segregation incidents

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had long battered America’s image in India, a USIS analysis noted in 1958, but now most of India’s press regarded “the strong stand” of the government as evidence of a genuine determination to wipe out racial inequity. A Dutch paper colorfully reminded readers of the debt of honor owed the 101st and the general who once sent it parachuting into battle: “Eisenhower’s airborne troops” again bore democracy’s banner, just as they had done during the Second World War in Europe.38 Still, Eisenhower’s belated handling of the crisis created dissatisfaction. A “small majority” of the Dutch press “lamented” his slowness. Once he acted decisively, however, they praised him. The Welsh favored integration so greatly that had Eisenhower not acted, they would have taken a position adverse to Washington.39 The deployment of the soldiers even helped refocus the morality theme. While unhappy about Eisenhower’s procrastination, Tageblatt, a Socialist organ in Luxembourg, credited him with saving “the soul of a country,” while Tokyo Times hailed the military operation “as proof that the conscience of America is still alive.” An uncommonly thoughtful story in the Sunday News of Dar es Salaam (in what became Tanzania) located the significance of Little Rock in “an age-old problem which is being tackled by democratic processes.” From Rio de Janeiro came welcome news: “Even unfriendly papers stress” that Eisenhower’s action was intended to enforce desegregation.40 Nevertheless, there were some bitterly worded commentaries. Tripoli’s el-Raid railed against Americans as hypocrites who oppressed blacks while boasting they stood for “the advancement of humanity” without regard to race. Suluh Indonesia requested U.S. envoys convey to Americans the disgust that Indonesians felt for their actions; in a cutting aside, Suluh Indonesia invited American racists to come to Indonesia and other Asian lands to be schooled in tolerance.41 The American press provided their readers details of the “shock waves”—Time’s phrase—emanating from Little Rock about which few Americans had alternative sources of information. The New York Times opened its roundup with the Vatican’s semiofficial L’Osservatore Romano, which advocated stripping racists of political rights and forbidding them to run for office as punishment for violating the American Constitution, which “exalts” equality.42 The Christian Science Monitor warned that bigotry would exact a cost in the Cold War. Moscow’s media were undermining “U.S. prestige and foreign relations” in Asia, Africa, and North America.43 Time sketched the disturbing scene of millions of Asians witnessing “dark-skinned American children” barred from schools by armed white soldiers. Time also made telling use of a Red barb honed to the point it could be expected to make Americans wince. After a dark-skinned

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Ceylonese delegate denounced the Russians for crushing the Hungarian revolt, a Soviet diplomat retorted: “Something worse could happen to you if you go to Little Rock.”44 Newsweek, far from the only U.S. publication to concede Little Rock was a Red propaganda coup, backed up that point with Pravda’s riposte to Secretary Dulles, who insisted that U.S. foreign policy was based on moral and religious principles. “The reports and pictures from Little Rock,” Pravda shot back, “show graphically that Dulles’s precious morals are . . . bespattered with innocent blood.” The situation was sufficiently grave that the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a noted opponent of desegregation, appealed for civility lest disunity play into Red hands.45 U.S. News followed a modified states’ rights theme in most of its Little Rock reportage. As a conservative creature of Washington, however, it could not ignore the Eisenhower administration’s alarm about damage to America’s prestige. So it put the best face it could on the situation: Japan’s “race-touchy press” was less sensitive than expected; Indian newspapers believed desegregation would succeed; French papers were unusually sympathetic, since France was having “racial troubles of its own in Algeria”; German editors were preoccupied with a national election, while British newspapers were “keeping calm about U.S. troubles, and some are optimistic.” The worst situation was in Italy, U.S. News thought; there the press implied that segregated schools existed across the nation. Newsweek also located some sympathetic press items in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, India, and Japan.46 Newsweek and Time—but not the right-wing U.S. News—seconded statements that Faubus “gave aid and comfort” to the Reds.”47 These were strong words when McCarthyism (though not Joe McCarthy himself) remained a force in American society. Time, which had no master in the arts of invective, also sketched Faubus as a political opportunist and (probably worse to its middle-class readers) a boor and a bumpkin. Faubus came off as an ill-mannered glutton who wolfed down a concoction that went “dribbling down his chin,” whereupon he turned to a guest and belched. After shoving its blade in to the hilt, Time snapped it off in Orval Faubus.48 The U.S. press did not claim that racism did not exist—it could scarcely do so given the thrust of its own reportage. Yet Time did give voice to the attitudes of readers, who could be expected to object that foreign journalists exaggerated the difficulties, ignored evidence favorable to America, or opted for stereotypes over facts. Supposedly, a British journalist had tipped off Time about some of the stereotypes held by his editor who phoned from Fleet Street demanding a “graphic description.” According to Time, the reporter replied incredulously: “You want me to report that the streets are cobbled, characters sit around singing Dixie, and Governor

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Faubus rides through the city in a top hat?” The editor replied eagerly: “Yes, yes! File it!”49 American journalists inevitably cast about for signs of progress on the racial front. Newsweek found an indicator that Little Rock’s troubles would cease, based upon what had transpired in Clinton, Tennessee. Once racked by turmoil, Clinton was now tranquil. A dozen white students who had quit to protest the presence of black students had returned to classes, and six of their elders, convicted of violating a court order forbidding interference with desegregation, had expressed remorse. Time had a related message: Clinton High School had opened calmly with eight black students enrolled, a result it attributed to the fact that “the trouble-making minority [had been] squelched.” U.S. News also located similar indicators. Once it had emphasized Clintonians’ unhappiness with desegregation, their desire to avert a commotion, and their fear that more difficulties were coming. As the situation in Little Rock worsened, however, the right-wing U.S. News borrowed “the real lesson” of Clinton from (a strange bedfellow) Britain’s left-wing Manchester Guardian. It was that “Negro children are sitting in the same classrooms as whites” in Clinton and elsewhere in the South.50 The press provided the government other assistance in publicizing racial progress. Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell attached his byline to an article that Reader’s Digest printed. The magazine was an ideal vehicle for international propaganda: The magazine hawked seventeen foreign editions, from Arabic to Swedish, in 1957. The article had the hallmarks of being designed primarily for consumption by foreigners, being rushed into print when racial commotion had “overshadowed” dramatic betterment in the wages, health, education, and political standing of black citizens. Millions of them were prospering, giving the lie, according to the magazine’s piece, to the “picture the Communists circulate of cotton-picking slavery and lynchings.” Mitchell also accused the Reds of ignoring such political and social gains as desegregation of the military and reinforced his thesis with the judgments of a Pakistani and a Ugandan that U.S. racial problems were not as grim as portrayed overseas.51 The American press returned fire, as it were, to foreigners who castigated U.S. failings in human rights but ignored or glossed over their own similar failings. A headline in the Wall Street Journal bayed after these “Critics in Glass Houses”: “Whenever there is a case of real or alleged racial prejudice or discrimination in the United States,” it said, “a mighty outcry goes up from the . . . Paris Left Bank to the outer reaches of India, Ceylon, and Indonesia,” while Moscow proclaims that “Americans are reactionary bigots.” While disavowing any intention to condone racial antagonism or discrimination, the Journal implied that racism was reprehensible more for degree than kind: when the United States is compared side-by-side with

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other societies, America does not come off as appearing as badly in terms of racism as “its more malicious and ignorant critics like to represent.”52 The Indians, with long and bitter experience with colonialism and race during the Raj, were among the most persistent critics of U.S. Jim Crow. Inevitably, the Journal (and others in the U.S. press) advised Indians sharply to consult the “parable of the mote and the beam” before lecturing Americans. The reason was the inferior status assigned to Untouchables. The news magazines, representing a distinct left-to-right ideological range, were themselves among the most persistent critics of India’s failure to put an end to that caste, and, of course, they published articles in 1957 damning Indians as hypocrites for attacking the United States for Little Rock while treating the Untouchables shabbily. “Untouchability still pollutes India,” Newsweek pointed out, despite having been abolished officially in 1947 and in spite of a law making it a crime to persecute them. Newsweek and U.S. News made much of a caste war in which scores of people died and more than a hundred were injured. Newsweek put the scale of violence to use in order to rebut if not refute the claim of a Calcutta newspaper that caste injustice was “comparable to nasty things” occurring in the U.S. South: Dixie actually had fewer deaths and injuries. Similarly, U.S. News insisted India’s problem with segregation was not only much larger than its counterpart in America, but also caused more trouble. It even found oblique support for its position from Prime Minister Nehru, who denounced Indian attitudes toward caste as “primitive and foolish.”53 Prejudice was entrenched in Japan as well. The pariahs included seven hundred thousand Koreans conscripted for forced labor during World War II. Extralegal obstacles barred them from citizenship after the war, even though they had lived in Japan for decades and embraced its language and culture. Edwin O. Reischauer traced the hostility toward them to the belief that marrying someone of Korean or Chinese heritage, or other outcasts, “would sully” the purity of Japanese blood.54 Time objected to the Japanese press playing up “the news from Arkansas.” To its credit (which Time acknowledged), the giant daily Asahi issued the pointed reminder to readers that “Japan was in no position to throw rocks” at the United States given the inferior status of the country’s “three million [outcast] eta.” The shame of being eta was so intense that suicide or murder could result if one’s origins came to light.55 Likewise, the U.S. press fired off return volleys at the British, who had sniped freely at America’s color bar. Rioting in Nottingham and the Notting Hill district of London that was precipitated when whites attacked West Indians gave rise to this symbolic reprisal.56 The motivation behind the counterattack emerges from this statement of Newsweek: “Those Britishers who long looked [critically] on America’s racial troubles . . . got a rude

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jolt last week.” Time and U.S. News offered, as an example of the jolt, a cartoon from a London newspaper. A figure labeled “South Africa” and “Apartheid” draped an arm about Governor Faubus, as a white man with a club attacked a black man armed with a knife. The caption declared: “Now, perhaps, the English will stop giving us that ‘more anti-color bar than thou’ stuff.” But, U.S. News (and others) contended, Britain’s racial climate was worse than America’s.57 Time sketched scenes of British bigotry that were at least as ugly as those seen in America. A teenager snarled, “I reckon Little Rock learned us a lesson.” An older, self-described “niggerhater,” ranted: “We’ve got to keep the blacks down or they’ll take over.”58 Still, as institutions devoted to public order, Newsweek and Time were almost forced to praise British authorities when they punished troublemakers. The newsmagazines quoted at unusual length the peroration from the bench of Mr. Justice Salmon, perhaps wishing his remarks would be repeated in similar circumstances across the Atlantic: “As far as the law is concerned, you are entitled to think what you like, however foul your thoughts; to feel what you like, however brutal and debased your emotions; to say what you like, provided you do not infringe the rights of others or imperil the Queen’s peace. But once you translate your dark thoughts into savage acts such as these, the law will be swift to punish you, the guilty, and to protect your victims.” Swift and severe justice followed—incarceration for four years. To Time’s satisfaction, two defendants “were so shaken they had to be helped . . . to their cells.” Order did return to Notting Hill, but peace proved elusive: Racial clashes erupted again the next year, and in the future, the U.S. press would return fire again when the British sent more barbs arching at America.59 The American press sometimes went baying after racialism and colonialism in African states such as Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe).60 Yet South Africa was the favored target, which was no surprise, given the “malicious satisfaction” the Afrikaans press took from the Yanks’ racial woes.61 American journalists took no little satisfaction from contrasts drawn between the land of apartheid and the land of the free. “In South Africa,” observed Newsweek, the prime minister presided over a system that condemned South Africa’s eleven million natives to “perpetual isolation.” In vivid contrast, African Americans had come far since slavery and did not suffer oppression on a mass scale like South Africa’s.62 Oddly, the right-wing U.S. News printed some of the most compelling of these contrasts, compiling a list of South African restrictions to distinguish the two societies. Some of the rules would have seemed outlandish even in the Jim Crow South, such as moving without permission from a district, drinking liquor, joining a union or holding skilled jobs, and traveling without identity cards. (Perhaps out of excessive zeal, the magazine

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also listed other activities verboten in South Africa that were at one time or another banned in the American South, such as attending white schools; sitting with whites in buses or railway cars; using whites-only benches in stations, parks, and public gardens; and patronizing theaters, hotels, or restaurants restricted to whites.)63 Of course, Jim Crow laws and customs still in force in America continued to generate international attention and incidents. One came about for want of a glass of orange juice, which was what a café in Delaware refused to serve Finance Minister Gbedemah of the newly independent African nation of Ghana. The snub caused mortification in the Eisenhower administration. The president intervened personally and smoothed over the humiliation by apologizing and hosting a White House breakfast for Gbedemah. Indeed, Eisenhower responded more strongly to the incident than did Ghana’s Prime Minister Nkrumah, who had experienced much worse as a student in the United States, and “was much annoyed” that his minister had created a commotion; Nkrumah assured American ambassador Flake that the incident would not create difficulties between their countries. Despite Nkrumah’s assurances, the president had good reason to clean up the mess created for him by Jim Crow. For one thing, the United States was trying to persuade Ghana to delay an exchange of diplomatic missions with the Soviet Union. For another, there was the consideration of public opinion in Africa. Flake himself cautioned that the incident might have repercussions on the West Coast of Africa, where the affront to a principal minister of the new government of Ghana had been put on the wires by Reuters and other news agencies.64 There would be more—sometimes worse—diplomatic incidents in the future, and not all of them would take place on American soil.

Chapter 7

The Scrutiny of Asia

I

n May 1957, Maka Sakai, a Japanese housewife, was scavenging for brass on a military firing range on which an American soldier, William S. Girard, had been ordered to guard equipment. Girard fired an empty shell casing from a grenade launcher at her, fatally striking her in the back. “What . . . infuriated [the] Japanese,” the U.S. ambassador learned, “was that she had been deliberately enticed” to come forward to collect the casings, and had been ridiculed, then shot.1 With a million Americans under arms overseas, friction between GIs and foreigners was inevitable. No one could have been more aware of this than President Eisenhower, who had struggled with the problem as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. As the president informed Secretary of State Dulles in May 1957, “prompt and radical steps” were needed to reduce the number of servicemen abroad, lest their mere presence spawn anti-American sentiments.2 The Girard incident inflamed public opinion in Japan and had effects across Asia because of the interplay of race, extraterritoriality, and the lingering psychological effects of European colonialism in Asia. Japan was free of the scourge of extraterritoriality during the twentieth century until its defeat and occupation. Japanese sovereignty was restored in 1952, but because U.S. forces were still stationed there, the U.S. Army continued to exercise jurisdiction over American soldiers who committed offenses while on duty. In the Girard case, however, the Japanese claimed they had the right to try him because he could not have been carrying out his duty when he killed the woman. Initially, a U.S.-Japan commission awarded jurisdiction of the Girard case to the Japanese, but Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson overruled it, thus precipitating a crisis. Dulles advised Eisenhower bleakly that unless the United States handed Girard over to the Japanese, 108

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“we might as well write Japan off” as an ally. The pessimistic Eisenhower replied that “public and Congressional opinion” might force the government to do so in any event because of the objections raised against giving Japan jurisdiction over an American soldier. (Eisenhower and Dulles may have overestimated the gravity of the situation. As John Lewis Gaddis observed generally, however, “statesmen operate on the basis of what they believe at the time, not what historians may conclude decades later.”)3 Certainly, the potential for losing the alliance effectively forced Eisenhower to act to defuse that worst-case possibility. Part of that scenario was what the case signified for U.S. troops stationed abroad. Months before the housewife was killed, Frank C. Nash was appointed to oversee a secret study of problems confronting the United States at its overseas bases. Japan was as important to the United States as was West Germany. Japan had an important strategic location, along with tactical and logistics bases and an industrial capacity unmatched in the East. Even if alternatives to the bases could be found, the commission judged, “we could not permit the Japanese industrial reservoir and military potential to be used against us.” Bases outside Japan also were at stake. U.S. Ambassador MacArthur opined that the case had “the most grave and far-reaching implications” for installations in the Philippines; Manila was watching the Girard case, and MacArthur predicted its outcome would affect negotiations over bases there as well.4 Despite his earlier misgivings, Eisenhower now ordered Girard re­manded to the Japanese for trial, a decision the Supreme Court upheld; the administration rode out the political storm with support from Congress and some assistance from the U.S. press. A Japanese court convicted Girard but imposed a three-year suspended sentence. Relieved, Dulles commended its action as a “credit . . . to the Japanese system of justice.”5 The Big Three Japanese dailies, Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri, covered the case, including the factor of racism. Statements that Girard treated the victim “as if he were feeding ‘a dog or a cat’ and then killed her” (Mainichi’s phrase) heightened the feelings among the Japanese that they were being treated as inferior; Japan’s press also legitimated expressions of resentment against U.S. servicemen stationed in Japan and of the scorn of the United States that, said Mainichi, belittled Japanese lives.6 The press in many of the Asian countries focused on the issue of sovereignty, often coupling it to the inflammatory issue of extraterritoriality. The Times of India declared that if U.S. personnel were not subject to the law of “a country that is sovereign and independent,” they should be withdrawn. It also rejected as “offensive” the belief of some Americans that Japanese jurists would impose overly harsh penalties. “Tokyo,” the Indian

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newspaper continued, not only had the right to insist on trying Girard but should receive “an unconditional apology” from Washington.7 A vocal segment of the U.S. press objected, however, that Girard was being sacrificed out of expediency. A New York Daily News headline issued the mock command: “To the Wolves, Soldier!” The Saturday Evening Post conceded grudgingly that status-of-forces agreements would have to be honored but thought Girard should be court-martialed “for offenses committed while on duty.”8 The Eisenhower administration did receive some assistance from the U.S. press in the case. The liberal New Republic and Life shared an analogy from U.S. history with Americans who objected to having an American G.I. tried by a foreign power. They were asked to view the situation through the lens of an episode of great symbolic power in American culture: the Boston Massacre. That clash occurred in 1774 after a mob taunted British soldiers on guard duty, who fired on the tormentors; three civilians were killed and eight others were wounded, two fatally. Tried by a colonial jury, all but two of the Redcoats were acquitted (and they received light sentences). “But this was the last chance that American juries had to prove their good faith,” Helen Hill Miller explained in the New Republic, because Parliament enacted a statute “giving British troops on occupation duty immunity from trial by local courts.” This action helped separate the colonies from Britain, she wrote, the implication being that something similar might happen to America’s critical alliance with Japan.9 U.S. News, which published some of the most informative and dispassionate reports of the controversy, asked readers to take into account Japanese antipathy to being treated as ciphers. As a law professor commented, “No American would have shot at a Caucasian housewife for picking up shells.” U.S. News assembled statistics to refute the notion that it would be inhumane to turn Girard over to the Japanese. Actually, it said, they had “leaned over backward” to be fair to accused GIs: Of 14,403 cases over which the Japanese could have exercised jurisdiction, only 435 U.S. servicemen were tried, and just eighty-nine were convicted.10 The potentially grave effects on the defensive posture were injected into the controversy by the U.S. press. As the Saturday Evening Post maintained, the shot fired by Girard threatened to “topple America’s network of military treaties governing hundreds of thousands of other Girards stationed in forty-two countries.”11 As it turned out, Girard was not the only U.S. soldier to fire a shot that created a crisis atmosphere. Master Sergeant Robert G. Reynolds shot to death a Taiwanese national, Liu Tzu-jan, who, Reynolds claimed, was peeping into a window at his nude wife. Reynolds particularly fueled the anger of the Taiwanese because he chased after the man before firing a

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second and fatal shot. The Chinese prosecutor held that the “killing ‘was done with malice’”—not in “self-defense.”12 But under the doctrine of extraterritoriality, Chinese courts had been deprived of the power, beginning in the nineteenth century, to try Westerners accused of committing crimes on Chinese soil. That affront lingered as a powerful reminder of colonialism and the humiliations imposed upon China since 1842. As historian Eileen Scully has written, “unlike the more familiar ‘diplomatic immunity’ shielding diplomatic personnel stationed abroad from local law enforcement, [extraterritoriality] was portable, transferable, almost irrevocable, and buttressed—not by reciprocity and custom—but by gunboats and coercive treaties.” Eradicating extraterritoriality became a prime objective of Asians “determined to rid themselves of inferior or colonial status.”13 No status-of-forces agreement being in effect in Taiwan, only the U.S. Army could try Reynolds and did so over the objection of Taiwanese president Chiang Kai-shek that such a proceeding on Chinese soil would remind “everyone of extraterritoriality.” When the military court acquitted Reynolds of voluntary manslaughter in May 1957, mobs wrecked the U.S. embassy, injuring nine Americans; police killed six rioters and made one hundred fifty arrests.14 Communist China took advantage of the anti-American sentiments expressed by the Taiwanese as evidence that the U.S. “occupied” Taiwan and that the Taiwanese despised both Americans and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government. Beijing published at least eighty-four items related to the killing.15 Renmin Rinbao spat invective at “the murderer Reynolds” and the “U.S. imperialists.” Xinhua News Agency claimed the killing was part of a pattern of attempted rape, arson, insults to Taiwanese women, and the deaths of or injuries to fifteen hundred people caused by “speeding U.S. military cars.” The GIs escaped punishment, Xinhua explained, “because they enjoy extraterritoriality.”16 Hostile and negative reactions emanated from some nonaligned states. Cairo’s al-Tahrir warned Tunisia not to accept aid from the United States lest it become subservient to the Yankees; evidently fearing this development, the “middle-of-the-road daily” Satirapharp of Bangkok cautioned Thais to “not let too many Americans” into the country. Korean Republic muttered about GIs’ having “an attitude of superiority.”17 The press of Asia printed other scathing comments about American insensitivity, some of which were reprinted by American publications. While colonialism was nearly dead in Asia, the Times of Indonesia noted, America was discriminating by skin color.18 Newsweek simplified for readers the linkage between racism and extraterritoriality by reviving “an old couplet” from Asians’ colonial experience: “White man shoot yellow man, nothing done. Yellow man shoot

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white man, he get hung.” U.S. News was not prepared to go that far, but it frowned on unthinking Americans, who exacerbated the situation on Taiwan after the acquittal of Reynolds. His acquittal brought tears to the eyes of some Chinese, who viewed it as proof Americans regarded Asian lives as cheap.19 Surveying world press reaction, Time found few sentiments favorable to the United States. Common were comments such as Japan’s Hokkaido Shimbun, which attributed the rioting to “American racial prejudice and superiority.”20 The United States needed a counterbalance to these sentiments. As it happened, Dalip Singh Saund, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in India, took on the task. He was not the first Asian American to challenge unflattering views of America, but few were as effective as Saund.21 After emigrating from India, Saund received a master’s and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. But he was blocked from becoming a citizen until Congress passed legislation in 1946 clearing the way for natives of India to do so. Later, Saund was elected to a judgeship, then to Congress. The odds against him in his race for Congress were especially long: He was a Democrat in a Republican district; his opponent, the famed aviator Jacqueline Cochran Odlum, counted President Eisenhower as a friend, and her husband was wealthy. A further handicap was that the district had a long history of hostility to Asians. But Saund converted liability into an asset: Significantly, if elected (he promised) he would travel to Asia as “a living example of American democracy in action,” rebutting Red propaganda about “prejudice and discrimination” against Asians in America.22 Time covered the campaign extensively, and afterwards focused on Saund’s promise. So did numerous other papers and magazines. The New York Times, for instance, profiled him as a “Sikh in Congress.”23 The Eisenhower administration showered extraordinary attention on a freshman Democratic representative who had not even taken the oath of office. At Eisenhower’s invitation Saund and his wife attended a luncheon in Washington in honor of India’s Prime Minister Nehru, and Secretary Dulles asked Saund to become a U.S. delegate at a regional seminar on Communist subversion. U.S. propagandists featured him in “extensive newsreel pictures and taped radio interviews” that were distributed internationally, especially in India. A thousand theaters in Japan showed a newsreel of him.24 Saund also addressed India’s Parliament, a distinction usually limited to visiting heads of state. Saund enjoyed substantial (and generally favorable) press coverage in India. Newspapers printed in English, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi ran 744 column inches about him and his visit to Calcutta. His consistent message was that, despite examples of past bigotry, Americans were “now

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ready to accept the Asian people as their equals in every respect.” Reader’s Digest exulted that his simple message “spiked volumes of Soviet propaganda.” And what he said was almost impossible to rebut: “I was elected by the people in a free election.”25 But Saund could do little to defuse an issue that was then resonating in Asia. It was the status of Hawaii, where race, the Cold War, and the scrutiny of Asia were threaded through the campaign to win statehood. Race and colonialism had been mingled almost from the beginning of the American presence in the islands. Puritan missionaries arrived in 1820, and within three decades Americans dominated Hawaii’s business enterprises, politics, and government; Hawaii became, in effect, an U.S. protectorate. It became a possession after Queen Liliuokalani (and the monarchy itself) was deposed by a bloodless coup d’état in 1893. The coup was made possible by the U.S. minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, who arranged for the USS Boston to land a 162-member unit, armed with cannons, that blocked the Hawaiian government from counterattacking and shattering the coup. “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe,” Stevens exulted, “and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”26 Washington was initially unwilling to pluck the pear because of antiimperialist sentiments of Americans, economics, and hostility toward a multiracial society. The United States declined to annex the islands in 1893 and 1897. But in 1898 it did so.27 Hawaii posed an unresolved question, Roger Bell wrote, about “equality under the nation’s Constitution for a noncontiguous area with an essentially nonwhite population.” (By 1920, the population was just 20 percent white.)28 Pressure for statehood started as early as 1903 but began building after World War II. President Truman advocated statehood, and surveys indicated that most Americans favored it, but race and politics combined to block the change in status. Republicans wanted statehood for Republican Hawaii, Democrats for Democratic Alaska. In State of the Union messages in 1953, 1954, and 1955, Eisenhower urged statehood for Hawaii but was not enthused about the same for Alaska. The opponents managed to block the issue between 1950 and 1958.29 The Soviets used Hawaii to impugn the United States as a colonial oppressor (New Times even identified the annexation of the islands as the turning point of America’s evolution into a colonial power). In 1954, the Soviets portrayed Hawaiians as pawns “exploited by American Big Business,” who scratched out a meager existence on marginal land. Yet there was a difficulty. Inasmuch as capitalists were raking in immense profits and saw no reason to bestow any rights on Hawaiians (or Alaskans for that matter), why “this move to give . . . state status?” Politics, New Times answered: Republicans hoped to swell their ranks in Congress with

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Hawaiians, Democrats with Alaskans, an analysis little different from what the domestic press printed.30 But this sort of line was unlikely to stimulate anticolonial ire in Asia, so New Times modified it: “America’s colonial populations are being used as pawns by . . . the two parties.”31 Moscow’s ponderous journal International Affairs raised the specter of genocide. The subject required deft handling. It described the native population as “also decreasing,” a change that could have been small or huge. But the phrase followed on the heels of another to the effect that only fifty-three thousand remained of the one million population of the New Hebrides, a “twenty-fold catastrophic decrease.” The implication was that the Hawaiians perished in similar numbers as a result of genocide.32 Three major themes were interwoven in U.S. press coverage of statehood. One was whether an alien, multiracial culture should be allowed to enter the Union with equality to other states (as opposed to being a possession). A second theme, national security, was inevitable, considering Hawaii’s strategic location, the Red witch-hunting climate of the times, and the Cold War. Closely tied to this theme was the issue of how Asia would react if the United States refused to accept multiracial Hawaii as a state. Proponents of statehood were forced to confront the not uncommon opinion among Americans that race and culture excluded Hawaiians from being considered Americans. Time sketched the “dog-eared picture” of Hawaii held by mainlanders: it was “the home of hula dancers, ukulele players, and dark-skinned surf riders; the stage for potential treason by “the inscrutable Oriental-American”; the site of the strategic bastion of Pearl Harbor; the possession of the five corporations that controlled the islands’ economy. And those attitudes were not held only by the canaille. Nicholas Murray Butler, president emeritus of Columbia University, argued that “in population, in language, and in economic life (Hawaii) is distinctly a foreign land”; thus Hawaiians could never truly be Americans.33 The press addressed the notion that Hawaii was an alien entity. Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor dismissed culture (and, implicitly, race) as a consideration. “Hula dances, floral leis, and surfboards” were props for tourists, he wrote, no more signaling an alien society “than do Indian rain dances in New Mexico.” Others argued that the exotica of the islands should not be allowed to obscure the essentially American attributes of the population. Newsweek salted that lesson with examples mingling the familiar and the exotic: the “drive-in where slangy JapaneseAmerican carhops rush double-rich chocomalts to your car”; offices in which “brown-skinned hula maidens” do shorthand; and classrooms where “brown-skinned kids in jeans and Hopalong Cassidy shirts” recite homilies about “our Pilgrim forefathers.” Time found a Pacific parallel to Ellis Island. After laboring for a few years on farms, Asian migrants

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drifted off to the cities, where they “would scrimp and save to start small businesses and get their youngsters through school.” Education made Hawaiians “as American as a boy from Virginia or Maine or Wisconsin.” But the Hawaiians yearned for the official stamp of statehood, as one said, “to make us feel like real Americans.” Even the right-wing U.S. News, doubtless aware of the Republican Party’s desire to add Hawaiians to their ranks in Congress, coached mainlanders in 1959 that Honolulu was “as American as Brooklyn or Sacramento.”34 As the author of Tales of the South Pacific and Sayonara, the novelist James A. Michener probably was regarded an authority on the East by many of his countrymen. His sense of audience was evident when he anticipated and parried questions about the islands’ culture. “Young people in Hawaii speak only English,” Michener wrote in Reader’s Digest. “They go to American schools,” and “the cultural pattern of the islands is increasingly American.” Even the distance between Hawaii and America, it seemed, was shrinking. Michener wrote of having “breakfast in New York, lunch in San Francisco, and cocktails in Hawaii.” And once jetliners went in service, he advised, “you’ll have an early lunch in New York and dinner in Hawaii.”35 Newsweek conceded “a few” Americans “still consider the islands a foreign country.” (If there were only a few, there would have been little need to linger over them.) With those objectors in mind, it superimposed an Asian face on a powerful American myth. The face was that of an old Korean woman, once “‘a picture bride,’ [who] bore six children, was widowed and left in $5,000 debt.” Through thrift and industry, she sent her three daughters through college and accumulated real estate worth $100,000. Her story, Newsweek continued, “is one that would count heavily with the people of Asia.” It counted no less, very likely, with Americans for whom the success-through-striving myth was malleable enough to include a Horatia Alger born in Asia.36 The U.S. press mounted spirited defenses of Hawaiians as “real Ameri­ cans” in response to racist detractors. The Washington Post took exception to the “crude comment” of Representative Howard Smith that statehood would make “the vote of one Chinaman in Hawaii . . . worth as much as . . . thirty-one citizens of New York” in the election of senators. The paper welcomed the indignant reply of Joseph R. Farrington, Hawaii’s delegate to Congress: “No Chinamen vote in Hawaii. Those who vote are all American citizens, and we in Hawaii resent references to the people of Chinese ancestry in those terms.”37 Time and Newsweek revived tales of the valor of the predominantly nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated American unit of its size in World War II, as a rebuke to Senator Tom Connally of

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Texas. Connally had snorted during a debate in 1952 that he was “a better American than a great many people who live in Hawaii,” and that most Hawaiians “are not of American ancestry.” Hawaiians sent a delegation “to make Connally eat his words”; it was warmly welcomed in Austin by the Texas 36th Division, which had not forgotten that its “lost battalion,” encircled by German troops in 1944, was rescued by soldiers of the 442nd, most of them Japanese Americans born in Hawaii. “Neither Texas nor Hawaii,” Newsweek announced firmly, “seemed disposed to let Connally forget what he had said.” It was Time, however, that delivered the most deflating retort. “At the time” of their rescue, Time said, affecting a laconic drawl, “none of the Texans made inquiries about the Hawaiians’ ancestry.”38 Michener buttressed the great battle record of the nisei with telling statistics: Hawaiians of Japanese ancestry suffered 3,146 battle wounds, received 18,143 individual decorations, and the territory had “four and a half times more men killed in action than any state in the Union.” But statistics demanded a human face, one such as “one-armed Danny Inouye” (as Time later described him) the Japanese American who would represent Hawaii in the U.S. House and Senate. Fighting in Italy, Inouye won a battlefield commission, a Distinguished Service Cross (upgraded to a Medal of Honor in 2000), and fourteen other decorations. Shot in the stomach while wiping out a machine-gun nest, his right arm shattered by a grenade, he still insisted on commanding the assault until it took its objective.39 Inouye’s face was Asian, and it was one to look up to. Even the Red witch-hunting hysteria was used to polish Hawaiians’ civic credentials. After a jury of Hawaiians convicted seven persons of “Communist plotting to overthrow the government,” Time included statements that were redundant and awkwardly phrased—editorial sins usually banished from its polished prose. Time kept them in to emphasize that Hawaiians of different races—but one nationality, Americans all—did their civic duty: The “jury of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian strains took only sixteen hours to arrive at a guilty verdict.”40 To those who still doubted Hawaiians’ loyalty, the press used a quote from an FBI agent to the effect that “no sabotage or fifth column activity was committed in Hawaii before, during, or after” Pearl Harbor.41 Some conservatives thundered that Communists or radicals had a death grip on the Hawaiian economy. Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler was featured in the Dallas Morning News in an attack on longshoremen’s union leader Harry Bridges, whose members staged a crippling strike in 1949. Bridges, Butler charged, was “the unseen Communist dictator” of Hawaii.42 Neither Newsweek nor Time carried any brief for Bridges or his turbulent union. But they ridiculed the idea that the existence of Bridges justified denial of statehood. Time pointed out that California “also has Harry Bridges, labor

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unrest, and a Communist menace, [but] no one has yet suggested expelling California from the Union.” It also demolished the position taken by Representative John Pillion that statehood would “deliver the Hawaiian state government to the Communist Party.” Time answered with more statistics: the FBI listed thirty-six known Communists in Hawaii in 1951, but Pillion’s home state of New York had more than twenty thousand.43 Hawaii was no racial paradise, although bigotry was alien to the original stock. White sugar planters struggling to preserve their domination injected racism into the society of diverse races.44 As presented in the national press, Hawaii was relatively free of the stench of racialism. Michener, for instance, maintained, “Hawaii, more than any other place in the world, is trying to lick this difficult problem.” Time and Newsweek agreed: Hawaiians were better at practicing what Americans preached.45 These portrayals went hand-in-glove with the challenge raised by the Cold War: America needed to impress a skeptical world by opening its arms to a multiracial society characterized by racial harmony. The islanders invoked the scrutiny of Asia in support of their campaign for statehood—as did the press that supported this goal. American Mercury argued as early as 1946 that Asians would see Hawaii’s admission as a demonstration of the nation’s striving for freedom and equality. A nisei quoted by Newsweek pointed to the advantages America would realize from giving Hawaii statehood. The Japanese “couldn’t get over” seeing him, with his Japanese face, with parents born in Japan, wearing his U.S. Army officer’s uniform as he served in the occupation, the man said, and would be even more impressed if Hawaii became a state. Collier’s justified statehood as a way to win “a major and bloodless victory” over the Russians.46 And if statehood were denied the islanders? Then, Christian Century responded, the Voice of America could preach endlessly about America’s devotion to “world equality and justice” but elicit only “a sardonic ‘Sez you.’”47 Changes in politics—and in the politics of race—helped clear the way to statehood. The changes started with the 1956 presidential election, when Eisenhower failed to carry either the House or the Senate for his party. In later elections the Democrats piled up huge majorities, reducing the power of the southerners in Congress to control civil rights and eroding the importance of Hawaii’s and Alaska’s votes. After decades of delays, Congress acted with alacrity. In 1959, the statehood bill swept through both houses, Hawaiians voted for statehood 132,938 to 7,854, and the president formally proclaimed Hawaii’s new status.48 Americans still uneasy about the multiracial population were offered reassurances. The New York Times explained that Hawaii created “a new version

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of the American people,” then continued: “For what are the American people but a mingling of most European races and of some oriental races, bound together by a common language and by common traditions rather than by racial origin?” Time was charmed by the islands’ exuberant celebration of statehood—complete with hula dancers, popping corks, and girls kissing strangers; throughout echoed a salutation—“Hello, citizen”—of such touching simplicity as to depreciate the blasé civitas of the mainlanders. Newsweek substituted haole for citizen. “Now we are all haoles,” a Hawaiian insisted. “It was a little joke with a deep meaning,” Newsweek explained. “Haole is the island word for white man.” Finally, they began to feel themselves “on an equal footing with the haoles.” The experience described was Hawaiian, but Newsweek enlarged its meaning by making it part of a powerful myth. Principal Miya Y. Tanaka summoned her fifteen hundred elementary school pupils to learn the meaning of what had happened. “And now,” she assured them presciently, “someday one of you may be President.”49 The new state continued to be a powerful Cold War symbol. Radio Moscow recorded Eisenhower’s proclamation factually, but it interjected a line intended to arouse distrust of America. “Almost all productive land,” the broadcast said, “belongs to American monopolies which cruelly exploit the labor of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos.” The Soviets later glossed over some inconvenient facts: Hawaii had entered the Union as an equal, and its delegation did include the first U.S. senator of Asian heritage. Instead, they revived an issue dating back to missionary days, the destruction of native Hawaiian culture, and muttered again about U.S. genocide. But silence about awkward historical facts was not the exclusive province of the Soviets. Time was silent about the landing party from the USS Boston, whose cannons ensured the destruction of Hawaii’s monarchy, yet Time managed to find space to record the twenty-one-gun salute fired by the USS Philadelphia when the islands “became part of the American Republic.”50 U.S. propagandists proclaimed that Hawaiians’ yearning for the equality of statehood had become reality. Statehood answered “overseas critics who have made a great issue of our race problems,” asserted George Allen, the director of the USIA. “Far from crushing minorities, we are glad to have them.” The president took a similar message to India. Addressing India’s parliament, he held up a vision of Hawaii as a distinctly American place where people of “every creed and color . . . live together in neighborly friendliness, in mutual trust.” To ensure foreigners would have the opportunity to see this demi-paradise (and to vitiate Communist propaganda that condemned Americans as colonialists), the government sponsored visits during which foreigners could “observe how Hawaii’s many races are able to live in harmony.”51 Unfortunately, the same could not be said about races on the mainland.

Chapter 8

Crisis after Crisis

S

egregationist mobs whipped up crisis after crisis in the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency and the opening months of Kennedy’s. The first and most important of these crises, the sit-in movement of 1960, mobilized black Americans across the South with astonishing speed. The violent reaction to the sit-ins was matched in intensity (though not in scale) later in the year when the New Orleans public schools were desegregated. As sit-ins continued across the South and the turmoil in New Orleans spilled over into January 1961, new disorders appeared as mobs attempted but failed to keep the color bar intact at the University of Georgia. The sit-ins would bring significant changes to the strategy, tactics, pace, and leadership of the civil rights movement, but they started in a minor key. Four black college students who had been refused service at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, launched the first demonstration on February 1, 1960. The tactic itself was not novel: Labor unions had conducted sit-down strikes in the 1930s, and the NAACP tried out the tactic two decades later, but the black students proved its effectiveness on a mass scale across an entire region. During 1960 and 1961 as many as fifty thousand persons, most of them African Americans, joined demonstrations in a hundred or more cities (some were outside the South), and more than thirty-six hundred persons were jailed. The students’ fight against Jim Crow—and their struggles against their elders’ domination of the civil rights movement—signaled that the youngsters would be a force to be reckoned with.1 The press awoke to the import of the sit-ins belatedly, partly because of preoccupation with the Civil Rights bill pending in Congress, but more so, probably, as Claude Sitton of the New York Times acknowledged, because journalists didn’t take the sit-ins seriously, but “as another college fad of 119

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the ‘panty-raid’ variety.” They were disabused of that notion, however, as the sit-ins “spread from North Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee.”2 The Times published at least ten items with references to foreign public opinion about the new campaign. Harold C. Fleming, the executive director of the biracial Southern Regional Council, wrote the most thoughtful article, one predicting that the sit-ins would create an “international scandal over the region’s racial problem.” To Asians and Africans, Fleming elaborated, “racial incidents are atrocities of an undemocratic and unchanging society,” which were interpreted as “the archenemy colonialism in American dress and on the ascendancy.” The episodes of violence, he warned, were “made to order for Communist propagandists,” who, in point of fact, took much of their material about them from the domestic U.S. press.3 Other reports dealt with U.S. racism in general. One article was a “debate” of sorts between Dmitri S. Polyansky, the premier of the Russian Republic, and Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. (It was one-sided: Celler was quoted, but not the Russian.) While admitting to America’s racial failings, Celler contended they were being gradually eradicated and made this observation about critics in glass houses: “I could point out to you where Russia is not perfect.” The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano pointed out instances when America was far from perfect. In Houston, for instance, three whites savagely beat a black man with a chain, carved the letters KKK on his body, then hanged him by his knees in a tree. Austria’s Arbeiter Zeitung published a cartoon of “a gorilla-like southern white refusing service to a Negro girl.” It bore the ironic caption: “That is a free country.” Other stories told of Eleanor Roosevelt likening African independence struggles to the sit-ins, and mentioned the debt owed Gandhi “for inspiring . . . nonviolence in the struggle for racial equality in America.”4 The international factor also showed up in the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek, and no doubt others as well. A sociologist told of African exchange students who influenced their black American brethren with tales of freedom movements in their homelands, and sometimes reproached their black American brethren “for not being as aggressive.” Columnist Ernest K. Lindley advised Newsweek readers that the violence directed against the sit-ins, along with “every manifestation of . . . racial discrimination in the U.S.,” hurt the country in “the most critical areas in the struggle between Communism and freedom”—Asia and Africa.5 Still, the discourse on foreign public opinion and race in America was not unanimous. The News & Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, a defender of Jim Crow, broke out the Red brush, implying that instead of being “stunts by idealistic students,” the sit-ins were likely caused by Moscow’s troublemaking. This conspiratorial view would recur in the future.6

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No Red hand guided the sit-ins, which had no real organization, headquarters, or formal leadership, although certainly the Communists made the most of the demonstrations. Pravda hailed the campaign and the solidarity of blacks and whites in the North who supported it. (Marxist theory hewed to interests based on class, not race, and Moscow and Beijing often praised “progressive” Americans who joined in supporting the same causes, while denouncing American elites or Washington.) “What are they guilty of?” demanded Izvestia of those who arrested the students. Nothing, it answered, except opposing segregation.7 Peking Review got in shots of its own, scoffing at Washington’s claim, for instance, that the United States had a “special interest in Africa” because one of every ten Americans had some African blood. Peking Review conceded that “nineteen million Negroes” did live in the United States, but so appalling were the segregation and “Ku Klux Klan-type terrorism” that only South Africa had worse conditions for blacks—an example of which the Chinese offered was that black Americans had to struggle merely for “the right to sit down and eat” in public restaurants, presumably a reference to the sit-ins. Given the miserable U.S. human rights record, Peking Review said contemptuously, Washington should “tone down its pretensions” to championing equality and freedom in Africa. Three weeks later, by which time more than five hundred arrests had been made in a week’s time, Peking Review printed a cartoon titled “Equality Inn Lunch Counter.” A robed Klansman offered a recognizably black figure a container with a skull-and-crossbones label. The caption asked: “May I pass you the poison?” The All-China Students’ Federation sent a belated message of support to the American students for their “struggle against racial discrimination and for democracy and freedom.” Despite “the barbarous atrocities of the U.S. ruling bloc,” the message proclaimed, “truth and justice [are] on your side,” and “will surely win the victory.” Not for the last time had the Chinese found commonalties between race in America and race in colonial Africa.8 The Times (London) paid scant attention to the sit-ins until they had spread to eighteen cities and resulted in hundreds of arrests. By that time, it ranked them as more decisive than a filibuster under way in Congress over the Civil Rights bill. Britain’s New Statesman rebuked President Eisenhower for taking a noncommittal attitude toward the “two-class system of citizenship” that America should no longer tolerate. Objections were raised in some quarters against the direct-action militancy embodied in the sit-ins, but New Statesman justified the tactic by pointing out that so feebly was the right to vote protected that blacks had no effective option except to stage demonstrations.9 The foreign press was not uniformly hostile to the United States. Newspapers in Norway ran caustic reports on segregation, but some of

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their editorials about the sit-ins were “understanding, even sympathetic,” the U.S. Information Agency heard from one of its officers. Aftenpost, Norway’s largest newspaper, emphasized the difference between the records of the United States and South Africa and put stress on the positive improvements being made, especially among and by younger blacks. No doubt the contrast gratified Washington, which expended considerable effort on distinguishing between racial conditions in America and those of South Africa, and promoted the indicators of U.S. racial improvements.10 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not inaugurate the sit-ins, but he joined one of them in Atlanta and was arrested. The arrest almost certainly would have been smoothed over by Atlanta’s white leaders, most of whom wished to avoid the hostile publicity attached to racial hot spots. But King was on a year’s probation for neglecting to get a Georgia driver’s license after moving his residence from Alabama to Atlanta. After his arrest in the sit-in, the judge revoked the probation and ordered him imprisoned for four months.11 The affair took on added importance once it became entangled in the 1960 presidential election campaign.12 Advisers to Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy persuaded him to telephone Coretta Scott King to express concern. His brother, Robert Kennedy, called the judge in the case, pressuring him to free King on bail. King was released. Whether or not it was the younger Kennedy who managed the trick (King’s lawyer thought otherwise), it was a political masterstroke for the candidate, one his Republican opponent Richard Nixon did not match. Kennedy’s gesture persuaded King’s father to switch his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy.13 Moscow and Beijing exploited King’s sentencing in order to degrade America’s image to the maximum extent. U.S. propagandists certainly would have preferred the imprisonment be ascribed to a state judge in segregated Georgia, but Izvestia’s headline labeled it, more generally, as the work of a “Racist Judge in America.” Beijing’s interpretation was that the sentence showed U.S. authorities were “stepping up their persecution of the Negro people” and “redoubling their efforts to . . . enslave” Africans with false claims of supporting freedom and equality.14 The Communists would have a good deal to say about another issue, desegregation of New Orleans public schools. Until that crisis actually erupted, New Orleans, with its Latin-inflected social life and mores, was widely regarded as an unlikely stage for a desegregation dispute to flare up into a major conflict in 1960. Unlike most other major southern cities, New Orleans had relatively few racial barriers in housing, public transportation, and recreation; the New Orleans campus of Louisiana State University had been peacefully desegregated; and members of both races often lived side-by-side in neighborhoods. Still, there was a portent of

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trouble in as much as New Orleans Catholics had blocked the integration of parochial schools.15 Public schools in New Orleans had been under a federal court order to desegregate since 1956, but little progress had been made toward this goal until U.S. District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright set a deadline in 1960 to admit black children to all-white elementary schools. Louisiana authorities attempted for months to nullify federal court orders and to seize control of the schools. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Wright’s rulings striking down the legislature’s anti-integration tactics as unconstitutional, and on November 14, four six-year-old black girls were enrolled in two white elementary schools. White mobs jeered the children, and most white pupils were withdrawn by their parents. The real fury broke out the next day. Thousands of white youths assaulted and stoned blacks and pelted buses and cars with stones and bottles, and that evening, blacks retaliated. The police dispersed the rioters with fire hoses and arrested three hundred of them. The trouble resumed on school days in November and December: “mobs of women met the [black] children with screams, threats, and racial epithets.” After witnessing the events, the novelist John Steinbeck described them as elements of a “frightening witches’ Sabbath.” As with the incident in Little Rock, Time and some television news crews were accused of encouraging the mob scenes, which, if true, no doubt impacted the coverage abroad.16 The Jesuit magazine America published an extensive report about coverage of New Orleans in Italy, France, Belgium, West Germany, Britain, and Spain, and, of course, by Communist organs such as Pravda. Initially, the accounts were restrained, but as the size of white mobs in New Orleans swelled into the thousands, the number of column inches devoted to the story rose similarly. A Jesuit then in Rome, George H. Dunne, wrote sarcastically of the “magnificent pictures” appearing across the globe of housewives with “faces grotesquely contorted with hate, screaming epithets at a bewildered little Negro child and her quietly courageous father.” Another Jesuit, Charles E. O’Neill, judged the most stinging coverage was in the Dutch Catholic daily De Tijd, which “emphasized the jeering of the bystanders, who used the Dutch equivalent of the English ‘nigger,’” when the four little Negro girls entered the schools. De Tijd also remarked about the great injury “to American prestige abroad.” Adding to the “grim relevance” of foreign views was the “considerable stress” Britain’s Times and the Guardian gave the crisis; both papers had “enormous prestige and influence among African and Asian leaders.”17 While the press of Western Europe hid neither the events “nor its disapproval of racial violence,” O’Neill said, Communist sheets exploited them for “partisan propaganda.” L’Unità of Rome claimed, for instance, that the

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New Orleans police abetted the white mobs. (Most non-Communist sources, however, thought law officers had protected blacks.) Predictably, the Communists fostered confusion about state and federal authorities, implying that the latter bore responsibility for “a growing wave of fascism.”18 Observing the mobs from thousands of miles away was an African with bitter knowledge of racism acquired as a student in America: Nigeria’s governor-general, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, known as “Zik” to generations of African nationalists. Like many Africans who had sojourned in the United States, Azikiwe thought the circumstances of black Americans’ lives resembled those of Africans under colonial rule.19 The scenes in New Orleans would not have dissuaded Zik from that view. For a week, Newsweek reported, “gangs of whites roamed the streets, attacking lone Negroes, and Negroes . . . set upon whites.” Newsweek reported the disorders as more than a domestic matter. Azikiwe, for instance, had “racial feelings still burn[ing] strongly within him,” and he pledged that Nigeria would regard as “‘an unfriendly act’ any racial discrimination occurring in any nation.” Quite clearly, Zik intended New Orleans to take note.20 Equally clearly, Newsweek intended its readers to heed Zik—and others like him. An American heiress, Ellen Steinberg, heeded the horrifying scenes in New Orleans and was so disturbed by their international implications that she offered financial assistance to the New Orleans schools. They needed it desperately: The Louisiana legislature, in order to block desegregation, had stripped the school board of funds to operate the schools and of the authority to borrow any. With bills of almost $3 million piling up, it was doubtful whether classes could be resumed after the Christmas holidays. Steinberg pledged $500,000 to help keep them open. Since she lived in St. Louis, her motivation was no local civic impulse. Instead, Steinberg told the New York Times, “she was ‘deeply distressed over the poor image of our country being created abroad’” by the turbulence accompanying the desegregation of southern schools.21 That battered image was pertinent when Time delved into how the South looked to “six inquisitive Africans” who toured the region’s “hottest hotspots of racial strife.” These hotspots were the sit-ins and the riots in New Orleans. A New Orleans segregationist “huffed that the Africans . . . came down here with closed minds,” but Time turned to the Africans for a didactic summary. “The segregationists’ outspoken readiness to abet the world’s impression of a racist U.S. amazed the Africans,” said one of them. “‘They had no worry about [damaging their] country, just their local situation.’”22 TASS and Xinhua, the Soviet Union’s and Red China’s news agencies, described the events in New Orleans “in sensational terms” and argued that the United States was dragging its feet since “many years” had passed

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since the Supreme Court issued its Brown ruling. (Actually, it was handed down six years previously.) TASS and Xinhua spread the word through radio-teletyped dispatches in English to Europe (and presumably elsewhere in that and other languages).23 TASS expressed admiration for the black children who braved the mob. “The sad, frightened eyes of Negro babies told an eloquent story of what it means to be a Negro child in the southern United States.” (TASS also did not ignore what happened to white parents who brought their children to school. One white mother was twice beaten by the mob, which chanted obscenities at her and shouted, “We won’t let you take her to school with niggers.”) International Affairs (Moscow) laced its report with details of “the fury of rabid Negro-baiters”; “racialist-minded city bosses”; “the barbarous traditions of segregation,” and so on. But the Soviet monthly had in mind other lessons as well: how little desegregation had touched southern schools, and how the failure to guarantee civil rights “undermines the fallen prestige of Washington” in Asia and Africa. America’s shame had visual form in New Times (Moscow). A cartoon depicted the Statue of Liberty with haunted eyes and ridden by Klansmen, who defaced her cheeks with daubings signifying “New Orleans” and “Little Rock.”24 Xinhua stressed the vulnerability of “four little innocent, harmless Negro children” who wished only to attend first grade “with white children,” but were menaced by the mobs. And where was Washington? At long last (according to Xinhua), the national government sent “police to protect these little children”—not because it was right to do so, but only under “heavy pressure” from those struggling “against the U.S. barbaric system of racial discrimination.” The Chinese later accused Eisenhower of indifference to the rioting and of abetting Louisiana authorities who aided those who burned crosses and committed reprisals against black parents for sending their children to white schools.25 Almost as scathing was the commentary of Anthony Howard for Britain’s New Statesman. Howard characterized the story as one “that shook the world,” and indulged in the hyperbole that “the American nation has done its best to wash its hands” of the situation. American media were taken to task for trying to “explain away New Orleans” to a world aghast at the racist violence. But he reserved special blame for Eisenhower, who failed to act even when it was clear that any “decisive initiative” would have to come from Washington. To show how a determined president could have brought the racists to heel, Howard contrasted what little Eisenhower did with what the new president, John F. Kennedy, was prepared to do: put “the whole moral authority of the Presidency” behind desegregation. Kennedy would whip the bigots into line, it implied, merely by hinting he would punish them for their defiance. Prophecy, alas, is a chancy business:

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Kennedy would fetch up against a graver crisis than New Orleans—insurrection at the University of Mississippi, to which he would have to send thousands of soldiers to quell.26 Before Ole Miss, however, there were more (albeit less extensive) disorders at the University of Georgia, where Charlayne A. Hunter and Hamilton E. Holmes broke the color line in January. Mobs spat epithets, burned crosses and black effigies, and rioted outside Hunter’s dorm. Copying the handling of the Lucy affair by the University of Alabama, Georgia administrators suspended Hunter and Holmes, but a federal judge disallowed such actions. The resistance to integrating the University of Georgia crumbled as legal means to block it were exhausted and a backlash arose as thousands of alumni, shocked by the potential damage to their university, objected. Readmitted, Hunter and Holmes were eventually graduated from Georgia in 1963.27 The Christian Science Monitor lamented the “sorry picture” that suspending the black students gave the world. But it also complained that foreigners paid more attention to the riots and suspensions than to the eventual quiet resolution of the issue.28 Some “unfavorable publicity” was disseminated in Italy. The USIS thought the Communists deftly exploited the disturbances at Georgia, since even pro-American Italians were affected by “false impressions and over-simplified ideas.” Overseas publicity—the Times (London) was one source—brought “a flood of letters, telegrams, postcards, and gifts” to the two students from Brazil, France, and Australia, among other places.29 Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became the point man for the administration when it came to race and international public opinion. He delivered a speech at the University of Georgia months after the crisis subsided. Kennedy informed his audience forthrightly that the administration would enforce desegregation rulings, and, Newsweek reported, he constructed a litmus test of patriotism. It was that “Loyal Americans must measure the impact of their actions” abroad, not just their parochial concerns, so that foreigners “will see . . . Americans living by the rule of law.” Kennedy later represented the nation at the commemoration in 1961 of the Ivory Coast’s first year of independence from France. He achieved what Time praised as a “nice diplomatic success,” parrying questioning from African journalists about the “inhuman and intolerable conditions of the [Southern] Negro.” Kennedy acknowledged America had racial difficulties—he could scarcely have denied they existed given the amount of publicity accorded them—but also pointed to the progress black citizens were making, such as positions held as ambassadors, judges, mayors, and delegates to the United Nations. Still, Kennedy attached the significant caveat that “we will continue to have problems.”30

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And problems did continue. Even those that lacked the magnitude of the sit-ins or the violence in New Orleans or at the University of Georgia stimulated overseas interest. One incident involved Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche and his son. The latter’s athleticism had impressed the pro of the Forest Hills Tennis Club, who suggested he join the club. Young Bunche applied but was turned away because the club accepted neither blacks nor Jews as members.31 Newsweek referred to the international interest in the affair while defending Ralph Bunche against any intimation that he wanted to embarrass his country; actually, said the magazine, Bunche took a hand in the controversy only because it was his son who was snubbed; ordinarily, Bunche made no fuss about the color bar lest he give propaganda ammunition to the Soviets. (In reality, it probably had nothing to do with the Soviets. Bunche no doubt was nonconfrontational because that was how he had learned to negotiate the color bar in America.) But, in the end, a “torrent of protest” from persons sympathetic to the Bunches forced the club to scuttle its racist policy.32 The journalistic factor of prominence that had given legs to the Bunche story was absent when Secretary of State Dulles intervened in another cause célèbre, this one in Alabama. While declaring his intention to not interfere with a state judicial system, Dulles did something not too dissimilar: He advised Alabama’s Governor James Folsom in 1958 that “U.S. embassies around the world were being flooded with letters about the fate of a condemned Negro, Jimmie Wilson,” who had been convicted of nighttime robbery (a capital offense in Alabama) for taking $1.95 from an elderly woman. The London Embassy received some six hundred and fifty letters and telegrams about the case in eight days, and press coverage in Canada, Trinidad, Jamaica, Germany, France, and Belgium was condemnatory. Folsom replied that his own office was receiving a thousand letters per day about Wilson, some of which included petitions bearing as many as four thousand signatures. Two weeks after their exchange of correspondence, Folsom, taking note of the “international hullabaloo,” commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Newsweek extracted a lesson from the controversy: Racial issues that Americans once considered purely domestic attracted such comment worldwide that even “an isolated racial action in a southern town” could “send ripples around the world.”33 An isolated racial action in Monroe, North Carolina, sent ripples across the Atlantic. Two black youngsters were sent to reform school for kissing a white girl. Learning of their fate, members of a Catholic boys’ club in Rotterdam reminded Dutch students that black U.S. soldiers helped liberate their country during the Second World War, and urged them to ask President Eisenhower to free these boys. Twelve thousand letters arrived

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within a week, and ten Dutch high schools sent delegations to request the letters be forwarded to Mamie Eisenhower, the president’s wife.34 Early in the Kennedy presidency, a case in Georgia attracted scrutiny overseas because of the death sentence handed down in the case of confessed murderer Preston Cobb Jr., whose age (fifteen years) would have made him the youngest prisoner to be executed since records had been kept. According to Newsweek, his fate was “torturing consciences around the world,” the evidence of which was a petition signed, it was said, by two million Europeans as a result of a campaign led by a former Dutch prime minister.35 The petition was delivered in 1961, but concern about Cobb’s fate continued for years. On the eve of Cobb’s scheduled execution in 1963 (by then, he was seventeen years of age), several hundred students demonstrated in Amsterdam to save him; they deposited with U.S. diplomats petitions signed by forty-five hundred Dutch pupils.36 News of race in America became part of a continuum of journalistic coverage. A New York Times editorial found a common thread of “discontent among those whose skins were black, brown, or yellow at being dominated by those of lighter pigmentation”; its examples were taken from African struggles against colonialism and American struggles against racism. Increasingly, wrote James Reston of the Times, there was a sense of identification between African Americans and Africa. No longer, he added, “is the American Negro asking, as Countee Cullen did thirty-five years ago, ‘Copper sun, scarlet sea, what is Africa to me?’” John Hughes instructed readers of the Christian Science Monitor about the sensitivity of Africans and Asians to colonialism and racism, whether in Little Rock, the turbulent Notting Hill district of London, or in African colonies. From Massachusetts, the Woburn Times added its small voice to the discourse, listing “segregation [as] our greatest liability” in the Cold War. For too long had “the great American Symphony” been played using “just the white keys,” it maintained, urging: “Let’s start using the black keys, too, and get some real melody and lilt in the tune.”37 Communists contributed to the discourse as well. New Times expended three pages on a tongue-lashing that the Ethiopian papers Zaman and L’Ethiopie d’Aujourd’hui administered to “American Racists” generally, Time magazine in particular. Their ire was aroused by statements that Time published to the effect that Emperor Haile Selassie required young nationalists “to bow and scrape” before him, and that prostitutes working in Addis Ababa’s thousands of brothels had been ordered to tone down their solicitations of customers. “This fascist magazine,” L’Ethiopie d’Aujourd’hui shot back, should direct its attention instead to its own land where black victims were stoned, hanged, and burned alive in homes and churches.38

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Radio Moscow derided Washington’s attempts to smooth over the controversy engendered by insults to African delegates at the United Nations. The claims of U.S. officials notwithstanding, said the broadcast, the Ku Klux Klan “acts freely and with official support in wide areas of the United States.” By contrast, asserted a broadcast the previous week, the Soviet Union was free of ugly racialism. Other Soviet treatments of American racism included a story about a journalist who was a guest of the Klan (Izvestia lifted it from Britain’s Guardian and illustrated it with a cartoon from the New York Herald Tribune). Asians and Africans were alert to American “persecution of Negroes and all colored races in general,” said the Soviets’ publication Abroad, and as a result were unwilling to accept American leadership. Having won “independence in a bitter and bloody struggle,” they were not about to exchange old colonial masters for new ones.39 Contributions to the discourse came as well from the non-Communist press. The Times (London) publicized heavyweight boxer Floyd Patterson’s insistence that Jim Crow seating be banned from his scheduled championship fight, a condition he backed up with the requirement that $10,000 be forfeited to the NAACP if the condition was not honored. Across the Channel, Paris-Match ran eight pages of powerful photos and a few scraps of text about American writer Howard Griffin, who, by darkening his skin and passing for black, was able to witness and record the injustices imposed on blacks in the South.40 Press portrayals of blacks as national assets reappeared. Newsweek columnist Ernest K. Lindley chided whites for not recognizing that “educated American Negroes are an enormous potential asset” both to the country and “the free world.” Their value was due in no small part to their being in a position to respond tellingly to foreign naysayers about America. The reputation of Harlem U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., as a fiery “advocate of racial equality” gave him, for instance, “all the more weight” when he defended America against accusations that it was irremediably racist.41 Powell’s usefulness as this sort of asset made for strange bedfellows: Democrat Powell on the left, Republican U.S. News on the right. The magazine clambered into bed with Powell ideologically because he “riddled a favorite Communist propaganda theme” at the 1955 conference of nonaligned states in Bandung, Indonesia. It took some doing for Powell to get into a position to pepper the Red propaganda. Powell had asked the Eisenhower administration to send “an interracial delegation of observers” to Bandung and volunteered his services, on the ground he knew many African and Asian leaders personally. The administration was uninterested, so Powell wrangled press credentials from a black paper and came up with the money to pay for the

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trip. After his return, colleagues in Congress praised him extravagantly, but Powell was rebuffed when he tried to deliver a report in person to Eisenhower or Dulles. Only after threatening “to make his report public and ‘that it will not be pleasant’” did he get his meeting.42 U.S. News was so taken with Powell that it paid exorbitant transmission rates to rush a lengthy interview with him into print. Race and the Cold War were commingled in the interview: Powell boasted of stopping Communist propaganda by telling “the truth about the race problem in the United States”—that while more reforms were needed, America was making real progress on the color front. He claimed to have so frustrated the Communists’ attempts “to smear the United States on the Negro question’” that they ceased their efforts to do so at Bandung.43 Powell received front-page coverage—and praise—from such papers as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. It was the New Republic, however, that captured the irony behind his efforts. Whatever Powell’s effectiveness in persuading “delegates of America’s decency in racial relations,” he himself still had to “sit in the rear of buses,” and “certain hotels and many restaurants” refused to accept him as a guest while he was in Dixie.44 U.S. News also came to the defense of another African American whom the Soviets vilified in 1960. New Times accused Ralph Bunche of the United Nations of being a tool of Washington, which used him to inspire unwarranted confidence about American policy in Africa and Asia. “Bunche’s black skin,” Izvestia sneered, did not prevent him from supporting a policy designed to strangle the “freedom and independence” of new African states. The Soviet Union was just vexed, according to U.S. News, because it had no one of Bunche’s character to send into Africa.45 But Americans of various races were showing up increasingly in Africa under the auspices of Operation Crossroads Africa, a progenitor of the Peace Corps that was organized by the black clergyman James H. Robinson. More than 750 students had worked alongside Africans on such projects as a model village by 1962. Crossroads Africa made Robinson a national asset in the eyes of Time, which praised his organization for dissipating negative images of America. His organization put a cross-section of Americans in the field—women, southern whites, African Americans, Indians, and Chinese Americans. Their labor and friendly persuasion changed “the anti-American notions of African students” who had once thought the United States “a kind of coast-to-coast Little Rock.”46 Black Americans and their institutions received glowing notices for providing intellectual expertise to Africa. Time extolled the contributions of civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to framing a constitution for Kenya. Marshall was an unpaid adviser to Kenya’s delegation at the 1960 London

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conference that arranged for most of the political decision-making of the British colony to pass into African hands. Marshall helped craft a bill of rights essential to convince 270,000 Asians, Arabs, and Europeans that they would not lose their rights when the six million Africans took power in Kenya.47 African Americans served prominently in delegations Washington sent to mark such occasions as new African nations’ achievement of independence. Representing the United States at Ghana’s independence celebration were, among others, Bunche, King, Powell, and the black labor union leader A. Philip Randolph.48 But the eminent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois was absent, a bitter pill to the man who invited him, Prime Minister Nkrumah. As the father of Pan-Africanism, Du Bois should have led the list of honored guests, but as Gerald Horne wrote, the U.S. government regarded him as a “dangerous ‘communist’ to be prevented from traveling abroad.”49 Positions on these delegations were primarily ceremonial—but then the State Department had a “bad record” when it came to appointing minorities to the Foreign Service, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles informed President Kennedy. Of 3,674 officers, the “best guess” was that only fifteen were of African heritage, five had Japanese surnames, and five were born in Puerto Rico. Kennedy made a start by appointing the ranking black career officer as ambassador to Norway, but Bowles’s estimate that “we can and must bring about a major improvement in this situation” in a year’s time was much too optimistic. By late 1963, the Christian Science Monitor learned, no doubt to its dismay, just two additional blacks had been appointed to the Foreign Service, a dismal performance it traced to pressure from southerners in Congress to deny “qualified Negroes” diplomatic posts.50 Despite the State Department’s bad record regarding minorities in the Foreign Service, thousands of Americans did go abroad on cultural and athletic tours for the U.S. government. Eisenhower became convinced early in his presidency that cultural programs would increase American influence abroad and were vital to counter Communist propaganda that painted capitalists as “cultural barbarians.” Through the influence of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American elected to Congress from New York, jazz, and specifically Dizzy Gillespie, became cultural ambassadors for the United States. Gillespie’s biographer wrote, “The idea was simple—by actively promoting one of America’s most visible and internationally popular assets, jazz, through a budget underwritten by the State Department, a positive image of the United States would be conveyed to audiences across the globe.”51 But Gillespie’s big band was not just a jazz band. “We had a complete ‘American assortment’ of blacks, whites, males, females, Jews, and Gentiles in the band,” Gillespie wrote.52

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And most importantly, Gillespie, the leader of that “American assortment,” was black. Gillespie’s inaugural 1956, ten-week tour consisted of sixty-four concerts in fifteen cities around Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. According to the New York Times, the band “surpassed Government propagandists’ hopes . . . [and] sent United States goodwill soaring” in Pakistan. In fact, they were a hit everywhere they played. When confronted with questions about racism in America, Gillespie adopted the official stance, “We have our problems but we’re still working on it. I’m the leader of this band, and those white guys are working for me. That’s a helluva thing.”53 With the success of the jazz tours, the American National Theater and Academy selected and sent abroad (under State Department supervision) 160 artistic groups to more than one hundred countries in the next few years. (The Amateur Athletic Union did the same for athletes.)54 The great contralto Marian Anderson, whom the American National Theater and Academy sent to seven countries in 1957, impressed Newsweek with her deft handling of the recurring challenge, “What about Little Rock?” U.S. General Alfred Gruenther testified to her effectiveness, telling Newsweek that more like her were needed. Others agreed. The Daily News of Greensboro, North Carolina, believed Anderson more valuable than “two hundred sputniks in space,” and the “often anti-American” Manila Chronicle thought her efforts would ease tensions “between the Philippines and the United States [more] than . . . hundreds of tons of agricultural surpluses.”55 A theatrical company’s production of Porgy and Bess was another asset. But it first had to overcome objections, Wilson P. Dizard wrote, that “we were out of our collective minds to propose that a play about Negro slums . . . that includes a murder and a rape,” go abroad under government auspices to play to foreign audiences. The skeptics were wrong: Porgy and Bess performed to rave reviews, showcased black America’s cultural achievements (so judged U.S. envoys), and became “living proof to foreign audiences of the great progress achieved by the race” in America.56 The newsweeklies ranked Porgy and Bess as among the effective rejoinders to Communist propaganda. In one of its rare digressions from the affairs of government and economy, U.S. News enthused: “Even the Communist press called this folk opera . . . one of the masterpieces of the lyric stage,” and numerous Europeans regarded it as “an effective reply to widespread stories of racial tension in the United States.” Time declared “that the charm and cheer of Porgy’s cast was spreading good will for the U.S.,” while Newsweek used the estimate of Cavendish W. Cannon that Porgy and Bess generated millions of dollars in publicity for the United States in Greece, where he was ambassador.57

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Black athletes also won laurels as unofficial envoys. The State Department persuaded tennis champion Althea Gibson to undertake a goodwill tour abroad, one that Newsweek considered well-timed, since it came when “racial tensions at home threatened to hurt the U.S. abroad.” Although the color line had barred Gibson herself from competing in some major tournaments, she nevertheless represented her country, as Time said, “like an American champion.” When foreign journalists raised questions about race, she was candid but defended America: “Sure we have a problem,” she commented, “as every country has its problems. But it’s . . . solving itself, I believe.” Another defender of America (before he became a Black Muslim and took the name Muhammad Ali), heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay faced down a Russian journalist (Time reported) “who prodded him about the plight of U.S. Negroes,” thereby earning this retort: “The U.S.A. is the best country in the world, counting yours.”58 The U.S. press returned to the theme of America as inspiration to the world with Lincoln as the case in point.59 He was “something of a national hero” in Ghana, a U.S. journalist learned in 1959. Ghana’s schools even conducted an essay contest about Lincoln that was timed to his birth date. When Nkrumah of Ghana and Sékou Touré of Guinea formed a union of their countries in 1959, Time reported, they were “inspired by the example of the thirteen American colonies.” Similarly, the Ivory Coast chose the U.S. Constitution as a model for its own document. And so moved was Nigerian prime minister Balewa by the example of Americans of diverse races and origins that he wished the same for his own country’s “different peoples, languages, and religions.”60 As had been the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-in movement was presented as a model for Africans, who, said U.S. News, staged “a U.S.style . . . demonstration” in “rigidly segregated South Africa,” while Time painted a picture of a meeting of Kenneth Kaunda, a black African leader of Northern Rhodesia, and the young Americans who led the sit-ins, at which they “compare[d] notes on tactics.”61 Nkrumah was also used as a Cold War symbol in another context. His sojourn as a student in America during the 1930s left him disenchanted by the racial humiliations and the intolerable conditions in which the poor lived.62 Nevertheless, Time insisted that even having seen America at its worst and having studied Marx about Communism’s “imaginary best,” Nkrumah still “leaned clearly toward the West’s patient methods.” (Actually, according to a former aide, Nkrumah’s social activism resembled that of Latin America’s radical priests, who commingled Christianity and socialism “in the fight for freedom.”)63 Newsweek interpreted Nkrumah’s life as a progression from abject poverty as a student in America to dining “at the White House as the guest

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of the president.” There was a subtext to that rendering of the Horatio Alger myth with an African face. The white supremacy that had made Nkrumah’s life hellish may not have hurt the country after Nkrumah came to power.64 Implicitly, however, the result might well be different if other African leaders-to-be experienced the same ill treatment. Newsweek attached two related lessons to its account of an official reception for Nkrumah. The first was straightforward: America needed African friends. The second was that it would be difficult to find them among Africans on whom Americans, literally and figuratively, had spat. How Americans should comport themselves was suggested in Time’s coverage of the visit to the United States in 1959 of Sékou Touré of Guinea. Knowing of his Marxist studies in Warsaw and Prague, the State Department “swallowed hard” when he wanted to visit a southern state. But the state selected, North Carolina, “rose nobly to the occasion,” as Time put it, and made a “sharp departure” from southern customs, according to U.S. News. Governor Luther Hodges welcomed Touré, and the Carolinians set aside Jim Crow customs, hosting Touré at a biracial dinner and putting up his party at an inn at which they “were the first Negro guests to sleep.” Touré was impressed, U.S. News reported, by the “joy and confidence” in African Americans’ eyes and by their college, bank, and insurance company. So well had things gone that Time indulged in a Cold War-inspired pun: The Touré party found the U.S. much better “than it had seemed through Red-colored glasses.”65 By 1960, the Soviets stepped up their efforts to build relationships with the newly independent countries in Africa by increasing the number of African students educated in the Soviet Union. The U.S. press set out to impair Soviet propaganda by depicting the Reds as cynical exploiters of Africans, African Americans, and racial issues. That theme was in evidence during the visit to the United Nations by Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro of Communist Cuba in 1960.66 The two leaders had much to say about race even before their visit to New York City. On an earlier trip to Paris, Khrushchev, keying his remarks to race riots in Africa, promised (according to Newsweek), “There’ll be room for blacks and reds and whites under the Communist flag”—the implication being there would be no such mingling of races under the Stars and Stripes. Two months later (Time reported) Castro made ominous noises about arming black Americans and setting off a race war. “‘What would happen,’ he asks, his eyes alight at the possibility,” if black southerners, “‘so often lynched, were each given a rifle?’”67 Khrushchev and Castro came to New York City to attend a session of the U.N. General Assembly. Khrushchev used the occasion, Newsweek said, to appeal to African delegates “for a declaration against colonialism” and

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to make cutting remarks about “racial discrimination in the U.S.”68 Castro moved his retinue into Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, where he portrayed himself as the champion of all “the humble people.” Then Khrushchev put in an appearance at the hotel and posed for the cameramen bear-hugging Castro.69 The interpretation of U.S. News was that he intended to convey his approval of Castro’s taking up residence in Harlem. The magazine raised another possibility about the doings in Harlem. It was to depict the United States, while under the gaze of the U.N. African states, as antiNegro and thus “anti-African.”70 Newsweek was annoyed by Castro’s “cynical attempt to make political capital,” even though Harlem exhibited scant interest in it. Putting its best leer forward, Time implied that Castro had availed himself of the services of an attractive lady. An unidentified hotel employee said that a “bosomy blonde” visited Castro from 2 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. The informant “did not know,” Time smirked, “whether they discussed high international policy.”71

Chapter 9

Riots and Insurrection

D

omestic racial issues pushed their way onto the agenda of President John F. Kennedy soon after he took office in 1961. That this happened should have been no surprise to Kennedy, who had criticized his predecessor, President Eisenhower, for not taking vigorous action on issues in the United States important to black Americans and for paying little attention to Africa, where eighteen new countries emerged from colonial status in 1960 alone.1 Racial problems had been a central focus of the 1960 election. Kennedy had done a better job of courting the black vote by focusing on improving American relations with the newly created African countries than had his opponent Richard Nixon. Although Kennedy had successfully linked Africa and civil rights at home during the campaign, his primary interest really was in foreign policy, and once in office, his priorities did not reside in domestic reforms.2 But exigencies such as the Freedom Ride of 1961, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and touchy protocol problems involving envoys from new African nations forced him to take action domestically. The Freedom Ride represented an embarrassment, inasmuch as the government had failed to enforce a Supreme Court ruling that struck down segregation in interstate commerce as unconstitutional. Despite the ruling, buses and terminals in the South remained segregated. The Freedom Ride was a project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose executive director, James Farmer, intended to create a crisis that would generate headlines “all over the world” and compel the government to enforce the law lest there be further damage to the U.S. reputation overseas.3 An integrated party of thirteen Freedom Riders boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., on May 4 headed to New Orleans. Ten days later they were attacked along a highway at Anniston, Alabama, and another round of assaults followed on the streets of Birmingham, where young racists 136

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flailed away at the Riders with iron bars and baseball bats when policemen did not show up for almost a quarter hour. Asked to account for their tardiness, Fire and Police Commissioner Eugene Connor—later to become infamous as “Bull” Connor—claimed disingenuously that most of them were off duty, visiting their mothers on Mother’s Day.4 Connor had seven of the Riders taken into “protective custody.” That night, they were driven to the Alabama-Tennessee state line and told to leave the state.5 But the next day reinforcements arrived, and the Riders left Birmingham, pushing on toward Montgomery. There, on May 20, they, along with John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Kennedy, were battered by a mob of several hundred people after the state police escort suddenly vanished. The Kennedys had counted on persuading Alabama’s Governor John Patterson, one of the few leading Southern politicians to support Kennedy for president, to protect the Riders, but Patterson refused even to take their calls, doubtless because he had no intention of protecting the Riders. In fact, Patterson’s attorney general sought an injunction from the circuit court forbidding CORE from testing bus segregation in Alabama. News of the writ, which prohibited the Riders from “entry into and travel within the state of Alabama,” appeared on the front page of the New York Times the following day, the day violence erupted in Montgomery. To protect the demonstrators, U.S. Attorney General Kennedy sent federal marshals, rather than the military, into Montgomery; having rebuked Eisenhower for dispatching troops to Little Rock, President Kennedy wanted no soldiers dispatched to Alabama.6 On the night of May 21, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders (some still nursing injuries from being beaten), and fifteen hundred black and white supporters were besieged in a church. King’s aide Wyatt Tee Walker recalled, “[I] thought we’d had it that night,” but unaccountably the “little handful of marshals repelled this mob of a couple of thousand” persons.7 Farmer now had his crisis, as did (unwillingly) Kennedy, who was preoccupied with preparations for an upcoming summit conference with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. Kennedy wanted to avoid the appearance of disunity in the United States or weakness on his part, especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco that had occurred a month earlier. “Tell them to call it off!” Kennedy ordered his civil rights liaison officer, Harris Wofford. “Stop them!”8 But the Freedom Riders would not stop. Two buses continued into Mississippi, where the Riders were arrested and jailed in Jackson, the state capital. Other Freedom Rides were mounted in the wake of the first, and there were still more arrests in Jackson and other southern cities, but these attracted relatively little notice after the turmoil in Alabama. Attorney

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General Kennedy did intervene to persuade the Interstate Commerce Commission to tighten regulations against racial discrimination.9 One Freedom Rider, Widjonarko Tjokroadisumarto, caused a flurry of activity at the State Department when he boarded a Freedom Ride bus traveling from Nashville, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. His presence came to the attention of diplomats, who found out he was the son of the Indonesian ambassador to Pakistan. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised the Jakarta embassy that the FBI and local police had been informed that Tjokroadisumarto was aboard the bus and were asked to take “measures [to] avoid trouble or publicity.” Jackson police did as requested, and Tjokroadisumarto was not taken into custody along with others in the demonstration.10 Another foreigner, Philip Wangalwa, a Kenyan studying in Oklahoma, wrote a column about the Ride for a paper in his homeland. He recounted the “strange way” that Alabamans spent Mother’s Day—by assaulting “a small, unarmed group” of blacks and whites who were testing “whether equal facilities were being accorded interstate passengers,” as the high court had ruled. To encourage Kenyans’ sense of identification with the mostly black American demonstrators, he called them “Uhuru Riders.”11 Accounts of the convulsions in Alabama were spotted by USIS officers in Western Europe, the Far East, the Near East and South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and, of course, by observers in the Soviet Union and mainland China.12 The news agencies undoubtedly originated many, perhaps most, of the stories. The New York Times, for example, did not have its own reporter on the ground in Alabama until May 21, six days after the first violence occurred. Thus, the AP and the UPI essentially covered the Freedom Rides for the domestic press, with UPI originating the majority of the stories. The UPI articles tended to have a more pro-Rider stance than did the AP’s. The Riders were biracial “bias testers” who were confronted by “mobs” who beat them with pipes and used firebombs. The AP reports talked of “integrationists” who were met by “crowds,” suggesting that AP was careful about how its southern members might view its reporting.13 The Kennedy administration’s handling of the demonstration received some press commendations abroad. Japan’s Asahi contrasted Kennedy’s “quick action” with Eisenhower’s laggardly approach to Little Rock. (Actually, events forced the hands of both presidents.) Morocco’s Al Fair also commended Kennedy for his action although it believed such incidents were “compromising the U.S. position of world leadership.” The foreign press duly noted some progress on the U.S. racial front along with difficulties arising from the U.S. federal system. Still, the USIA reported that the “impact on the American image abroad . . . was highly detrimental.” The incident in Alabama “had dealt a severe blow to U.S. prestige

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which might adversely affect its position of leadership in the free world as well as weaken the overall effectiveness of the Western alliance.”14 George H. Dunne would have agreed; he informed readers of the Jesuit magazine America that headlines and shocking photographs appeared in Italy in a range of papers—from the Communist L’Unità to the middleof-the-road Il Messaggero, to the right-of-center Tempe, and, of course, to the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano. It was much the same for papers in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere—“rejoicing our enemies, dismaying our friends, alienating the undecided.” And what the world thought mattered, Dunne continued, what with Southeast Asia “tottering,” Africa “threatening,” and Latin America “in doubt.”15 Soviet and Chinese propaganda, as analyzed by the USIA, reflected an intent to nudge foreign public opinion toward the view that violence against African Americans was symptomatic of American society, not merely the outcome of a few isolated incidents. But although the USSR and China shared an enmity of the United States and a Communist ideology, their Cold War interests were not identical. The Soviets were locked in a battle with the United States for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. One goal was to establish the Americans as hypocrites, to convince the rest of the world that the American way of life did not promise freedom; the Soviet way did. And that message had to be repeated, even at home. Thus, Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Izvestia, the paper of the Soviet government, printed a dozen articles, photographs, and cartoons; their tenor is indicated by headlines such as “Alabama is arena of terror—Howling crowds of racists attack Negroes”; “American Nazis rear heads”; and “Black day for America—Progressive people of entire world brand crimes of racists in Alabama.” As Izvestia remarked sarcastically and succinctly: “The imprisonment of . . . the Freedom Riders—is this an example of freedom?” The Russians soon shifted to advising new nations of Africa and Asia that millions of people of color looked on the United States with “suspicion and caution.” International Affairs (Moscow) found the brutality of the attacks on the Riders called into question the sincerity of Americans when they denounced racist South Africa; inasmuch as Americans showed they were consumed by racial hatred, it elaborated, their sympathies resided with the masters of apartheid.16 Certain characters fostered anti-American interpretations. Izvestia found (or created) one villain at a transportation exhibition in Volgograd. An American woman had accepted the invitation of a dark-skinned Indonesian to dance, but then “the vulgar cursing of a racist . . . was heard: ‘Don’t touch a white woman!’” The outburst came from an American guide at the exhibition, one “Mr. Nepo,” who, like his country, was wont

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to lecture endlessly about the glories of “American democracy.” But indignant Soviet citizens set things right by having Nepo “expelled from the city.” True or fabricated, the item fit the Soviet line.17 Dispatches from Beijing also bristled with references to U.S. Nazis and the Klan, but for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), imperialism and its consequences were personal. From the mid-nineteenth century until Mao’s Communists “drove out” the imperialists in 1949, the Chinese felt themselves “at the mercy of many enemies.” Attitudes toward the United States were marked by distrust and hostility. On June 30, 1949, Mao Tsetung published “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” in which he wrote, “Not only in China but also in the world, without exceptions, one either leans to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism.” China signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR in February 1950, no surprise given Mao’s belief that “imperialism is still standing near us, and this enemy is very fierce.”18 But Mao had reservations about the Soviets, especially after Nikita Khrushchev launched a de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. The Polish and Hungarian crises later that year encouraged the sense among the Chinese Communists that they were more qualified than the Soviets to lead the international Communist movement.19 Given the tensions between the PRC and USSR, Mao considered Castro’s successful 1959 revolution in Cuba a significant event and sent a Xinhua reporter stationed in New Delhi to Chile to make contact with Cuban authorities. As Yinghong Cheng has explained, “at a time when China had few embassies and consulates worldwide, the mission of the [Xinhua] went far beyond journalism.” In December 1959, Cuba officially approved the establishment of the Chinese news service’s Havana bureau, its first in the West. The bureau issued Spanish versions of Xinhau’s daily reports and commentaries, reflecting official PRC policy.20 Thus, when Chinese leaders reacted to the Freedom Ride, they did so in light of what they perceived to be the United States’ latest venture in imperialism—the invasion of Cuba. A great deal was made of the political relationship of President Kennedy and Governor John Patterson, especially in the Peking Review, China’s only national news magazine in English. Patterson was shown endorsing Kennedy for president, being, the Review noted correctly, “the first southern governor” to do so. This same Patterson branded the Freedom Riders as “rabble-rousers” and allowed or arranged for “black and white people who wished to ride or eat together” to be assaulted. Their close association, the Review insinuated, was proof Kennedy chose “‘apartheid’ as usual” over racial equality. In fact, Patterson had infuriated Kennedy when he said in a news conference reported by UPI that the Riders were “rabble-rousing agitators,” and that he would not provide them with protection. But for the Chinese, even more important than

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Kennedy’s choice of “apartheid” was that the Freedom Ride was evidence the “paper tiger” was beginning to experience serious problems at home.21 Overseas posts apprised Washington of the fallout. While press coverage was restrained in such nations as Britain, Japan, and the Cameroons, a theme came to the fore in Tripoli and Belgium to the effect that the United States could not be trusted to defend democracy since it was awash in white supremacy. Commentary in Japan and India criticized Americans for supplying propaganda grist to the Reds. From Tokyo, Ambassador Reischauer cabled his estimate “that these incidents . . . are [a] boon to [the] Communist propaganda mill.” The U.S. consul in Madras, India, agreed about the damage but thought the “vigorous action” of the Kennedys took some of the “sting out of [the] reaction to riots.”22 As before, the U.S. press kept readers informed of what foreigners thought of the shocking scenes in Alabama. The New York Times ran several short news articles about press and radio reportage abroad and a major piece about USIA. The Voice of America, wrote a Times reporter who had reviewed its files, had not “conceal[ed] the facts of lawlessness and brutality from the overseas listeners and readers,” and justified that candor to Americans who might object that the agency was serving the interests of the Reds. Because other news sources—including Communist ones—were available to most of the world’s population, the Times reporter insisted, “if we tried to slant or suppress such a story as this, the country would lose a good deal more in prestige than it might gain.” Tagged onto that story was a UPI item about Radio Moscow linking the “bloodshed in Montgomery” to the Peace Corps offering aid to African countries; Radio Moscow jeered, asking who could believe that “Americans love them . . . after what has happened in Alabama?”23 The New York Times recorded the crisis as a Communist victory. Sig­nifi­ cantly, however, it did not blame the defeat on the Riders, but on those who, by engaging in violence, gave assistance to “the Communist cause throughout the world.” It encouraged readers to see the events in Alabama through the eyes of Africans, Asians, and others who viewed press photographs of and read stories about the vicious beatings being administered to unarmed people of color and white sympathizers, both women and men—“and there will be no need for the most skillful Red propaganda to embroider the facts.” What, then, foreigners will ask, does the United States truly stand for?24 The Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek attempted to shatter any notion that America could isolate itself from the scrutiny of a skeptical world. Just as stories of a U.S. space flight sped across the globe in minutes via shortwave radio and the wire services, said the Monitor, relying on the fascination the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States

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held for audiences, “the story of race riots in Alabama crackles around the world.” Thus, “a stone tossed in Alabama may . . . deface” the American reputation in the “consciousness of millions of Africans.” Newsweek described the flow of news almost poetically: “As if written on the wind, the Freedom Riders story swept around the world” and the global press, in Nairobi, New Delhi, London, Moscow, and other points “splashed headlines and photos across their front pages.”25 While recording the reproaches of foreigners, Newsweek also welcomed supportive responses, such as when Kenya’s Nation held that the “often maligned United States government . . . has continually been thwarted in its attempts to break down racial barriers by obtuse prejudice of smaller men in . . . the South.” In New Delhi, the Indian Express sounded a note of hope. “Everywhere reactionary elements are fighting with their backs to the wall, whether it is in Alabama, Angola, or Durban.” But Newsweek also borrowed a “cruel cartoon” from the London Daily Mirror, in which figures labeled “Alabama Race Hate” tore pieces from the Statue of Liberty and hurled them at blacks.26 The Chicago Daily News advised readers that winning the Cold War would depend as much on what happens “in the bus stations of Alabama” as in Africa and counseled readers not to expect Communist misdeeds to eliminate the difficulties of their country. Atrocities such as the “rape of Budapest,” the paper explained, were “too remote intellectually and geographically” to move Africans, who were all too “aware of our weaknesses,” such as racism.27 Probably expecting objections about insults from Communists abroad, Newsweek and Time took steps to mollify readers. They continued to print excerpts from the Soviet press, but they often undercut what was said in advance. Newsweek accused the Soviets of crusading only against “the shortcomings of those outside the Iron Curtain,” then printed this damning Izvestia headline: “Alabama Is Arena of Terror.” Time wrote that Russian journalists touring the United States “discovered a parallel between the ‘fascists’ of the John Birch Society and . . . ‘fascists’ who beat up the Freedom Riders,” but first administered antivenin in the form of this comment: “Inevitably, some of the Red newsmen . . . unreeled a few meters of the Red Line.”28 Time unreeled a meter or so of its own Line. It was that the Freedom Ride, like the sit-ins and the Montgomery bus boycott, inspired Africans to take cues from the U.S. model. Very likely they did emulate the wellpublicized Freedom Ride in some ways. But this emphasis enabled Time to skirt something less palatable: What made the Freedom Ride necessary was Washington’s failure to enforce the settled law giving citizens the right to be free of Jim Crow when traveling in interstate transportation. Even the

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pro-segregation Albany (Ga.) Herald acknowledged as much. It stated flatly that state governments had an “an intolerable legal position when they attempt to block the ‘Freedom Riders.’”29 The same could be said of Mississippi’s attempts to block James Meredith from breaking the color barrier at the University of Mississippi. When a legal campaign failed to keep him out, hundreds, if not thousands, staged an insurrection. The Kennedy administration dithered, misread, and mishandled the situation, most glaringly by sending only five hundred U.S. marshals, far too few for the task, to effect his admission. What started as a vicious skirmish escalated into the insurrection on the night of September 30 and extended into the next morning. The badly outnumbered U.S. marshals were almost overwhelmed by the mob. Two persons were killed, hundreds of others were injured, many of them federal officers, and several hundred arrests were made. President Kennedy was forced to do what he reproached Eisenhower for doing in Little Rock—he sent in the military. Kennedy summoned Mississippi National Guard units into federal service and ordered thousands of army men deployed. By October 3, there were 9,827 of them in Oxford, a town of six thousand, and another 10,282 were encamped nearby. Within two weeks, the operation mustered 23,000 men. After deploying the force belatedly, Time said acidly, Kennedy finally brought in “far more than could possibly have been needed.”30 Still, using soldiers to protect “the admission of a black man to a southern university” impressed African diplomats, Secretary of State Rusk recalled. And from Karachi, U.S. Ambassador Breithut, using the shorthand of cable communication, sent the message that the “Paks [Pakistanis] [were] favorably impressed by swiftness of government action in bringing order to Oxford and enforcing federal court order,” and the Pakistani press gave “full and sympathetic coverage” to the action. Approval was expressed at the United Nations by a diplomat of the United Arab Republic (then a union of Egypt and Syria); in Belgium, where leaders of the Catholic and Socialist parties hailed President Kennedy’s “courageous” handling of the crisis; in Libya, where congratulations were offered on a “splendid example [of] democracy in action”; and in Mali, where President Modibo Keita commended Kennedy for taking action “to abolish intolerable racial segregation.”31 At Kennedy’s direction, the USIA surveyed foreign press responses. It found “substantially more understanding of U.S. racial progress” after Ole Miss than during the crisis in Little Rock. Kennedy won praise from the press for firmness in meeting the challenge, U.S. diplomats reported. An editorialist in Sydney wrote the ultimate éclat: Kennedy’s words “had ‘the true ring of Abraham Lincoln.’” Not all responses were laudatory. The Dutch Algemeen Dagblad noted sternly: “Who can contradict Moscow, . . .

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when it asserts that the much-lauded American way of life leads to civil strife in the United States itself?” Finland’s Päivän Sanomat wrote caustically of a “Nazi-type Herrenvolk mentality” in Dixie, and even more cuttingly that Rusk brought incredulous laughter abroad by listing as “guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy freedom, law, peace, and . . . democracy.”32 Other USIA reports suggested that foreigners remained skeptical or critical of America. In New Delhi, “good or very good” opinions “of U.S. treatment of Negroes” rose from 2 percent after Little Rock to 14 percent after Ole Miss, while “bad or very bad” views declined from 41 percent to 24 percent. Despite the improvement, the negative still outweighed the positive results. Overwhelmingly, Colombian students believed Ole Miss had lowered U.S. prestige but had elevated Kennedy’s.33 Major newspapers of the Far East relied on the news agencies—primarily AP, UPI, AFP, and Reuters—for articles and photos about Ole Miss. (Thirty-six radiophotos were printed in nine days by eight of ten papers studied in Burma, Japan, Malaya, and the Philippines.)34 If Beijing’s response was muted, Moscow made up for it. New Times labeled the insurrection “A Disgrace.” While praising Meredith’s courage, the Soviet magazine heaped contempt on the Kennedy administration for taking “measures against the white supremacists” only after their defiance forced it to act (an exaggeration, but not totally lacking in truth); and decrying the failure of the U.S. military “to restore law and order” (a canard since almost ten thousand regulars and National Guardsmen outnumbered the population of tiny Oxford).35 Pravda and Izvestia, each typically four to six pages in length, added to the propaganda glut by publishing, during the last four months of 1962, twenty-five stories about Ole Miss—including seven hundred words in Pravda under the headline, “Washington Capitulates before Onslaught Of Racists,” and Izvestia’s account, “Racists Orgy,” with twelve hundred words plus photos. Once it could no longer be denied that the disorders had been suppressed, the Soviets shifted onto a more promising tack, the harassment of Meredith by white students. As usual, the Soviets mined the non-Soviet press. Izvestia took an article by columnist Art Buchwald from the New York Herald Tribune. New Times republished cartoons, one of which (from Arbeiter Zeitung of Austria) showed Mississippi’s Governor Barnett barring a black man from the university, and bore the sharpened insult: “In a state where even the governor doesn’t know enough to read the Constitution, there’s no reason for a Nigger to study!” Africans were lectured, not for the first time, to beware lest they be the next targets of racecrazed Yankees. Izvestia lifted a story from an unidentified West German newspaper about “three Americans beat[ing] up three Nigeria students in

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Wuerzburg.” Of what probably was a minor brawl, Izvestia blared: “Racist Orgy for Export.”36 Izvestia’s tale of a “Racist Walpurgist Night” in Mississippi caught the eye of Ambassador Kohler in Moscow. Concerned about the effects of Soviet publicity, he urged Washington to launch a propaganda campaign to contrast Ole Miss, “where two people were killed,” with the Soviet city of Novocherkassk, where “probably hundreds [of] women, children, youths, and workers [were] killed by Soviet troops” on June 1. The United States had used its military to secure one individual’s rights; the Soviets, in contrast, shot down peaceably demonstrating citizens unhappy about the rising prices of consumer goods. Secretary Dulles had attempted to make a similar contrast during Little Rock; his successor Dean Rusk contemplated the “useful possibilities” of giving the Novocherkassk killings “greater publicity” through the Voice of America and nongovernment media.37 The U.S. national press allotted space to foreigners’ interest in Ole Miss and the Kennedy administration’s response to it. That angle dominated the lead story of the Christian Science Monitor on October 2. Drawing on interviews with twenty U.N. delegates from Africa and Asia, the paper reported that enforcing desegregation in Mississippi had done “much to counteract earlier damage . . . to the United States’ world reputation.” Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku was quoted as praising President Kennedy for having “an unpleasant duty to perform, and . . . did it.” Still, Wachuku continued, the United States, while “moving in the right direction,” needed to speed up the improvements. Other diplomats were more caustic. From Ghana, a long-standing critic of the United States, Alex Quaison-Sackey, implied that racism would persist in the country. The Monitor’s London bureau outlined the “conspicuous attention” paid the story by the British press and the BBC. The Monitor warned readers in advance that Communists would exploit “such . . . situations,” and gave an example from the Daily Worker, which berated U.S. leaders for “endlessly lecturing the . . . world” about America where “prejudice against African Americans “is whipped up . . . and racial discrimination is widely practiced.”38 London, Paris, and Moscow datelines dotted the New York Times examination of foreign reactions. British papers, national and provincial, supported Kennedy’s actions; the French were shocked by the violence in far-off Mississippi (in part because of the murder during the Ole Miss rioting of AFP journalist Paul Guihard), but they approved of Kennedy’s decision to use force; Moscow broadcast a special ten-minute radio program asserting that even getting Meredith enrolled would not lessen “‘the national shame’ of the United States,” that thousands of other blacks remained barred from universities, it pointed out, and “millions of other

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Negroes” were second-class citizens. TASS scorned the “meek protests” of the Kennedy administration to racists in Mississippi. World public opinion (not conviction that this was the right thing to do) forced Washington to send in the soldiers, TASS claimed.39 The Times also hopscotched among other datelines outside Europe: Moroccans “adopted . . . Meredith as a symbol of the African struggle for racial equality.” Cairo’s Al Ahram, “the newspaper of the Arab world,” was of two minds about Kennedy, viewing him as both Lincolnesque (“a fighter for civil rights”) and as a gangster (“for ‘arming Israel’ and supporting colonialism against Cuba”). South African newspapers gave conspicuous play to the riots, and supporters of apartheid cabled offers of “moral support” to segregationist Mississippians. The insurrection was featured in all Japanese newspapers. Sankei, for instance, thought segregation “disgraceful to . . . the leader of the free nations.”40 While insisting “the problem . . . and the responsibility for resolving it is ours,” the New York Times effectively demolished the idea that Ole Miss was a purely domestic affair. It asserted, instead, that the crisis injured America in Africa and Asia; crippled “efforts to weld hemispheric solidarity against Soviet military encroachment in Cuba”; made European allies anxious about “our approach to the Berlin crisis; and made enemies of freedom behind the Iron Curtain” gleeful.41 The Times also was impressed by U.S. propaganda agencies’ candor in dealing with the crisis.42 Once the dust settled, a front-page article asserted that, contrary to the fears of some in Washington, “the government’s firm handling of the events in Mississippi made “a favorable impression in Africa.” It cited congratulations from the president of Mali to Kennedy and praise from Guinea. (But the Times cautioned that the latter may have resulted, in part, from disapprobation for the Russians over a coup d’état; disarray in Soviet aid programs; and the discovery that the Russians were snobbish, if not racist.)43 Notably, Newsweek informed readers of foreign reactions before listing domestic ones. Ole Miss rioting “commanded huge headlines from Mos­ cow to Uganda, Tokyo to Johannesburg.” Most non-Communist newspapers, while expressing regret over the violence, pointed out the U.S. government had taken what the Mainichi of Japan called a “courageous step” in forcing Meredith’s Ole Miss registration.44 Time (and to a lesser degree the New York Times) converted the insurrection against the national government from an embarrassment into something that was both idealistic and had an only-in-America cast. Time opened with Lord Mansfield’s famous dictum, “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” The heavens did not fall, but it was a hell of a night at Ole Miss, where the “frenzied mob . . . fought a bloody, nightlong battle” that was defeated in the end only by “the might of the national

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Government.” Armed rebellion against national authority was seldom a source of national pride for any nation, but Time made it into one because what was at stake was a quest for justice even for the least of citizens. “Only in America, perhaps,” as Time put it, “would the Government send thousands of troops to enforce the right of an otherwise obscure citizen” to attend a university. The Times found an echo of this judgment in a question by Guinean leaders: “What country in the world would mobilize a whole army to get a Negro student into college?”45 But mobilizing soldiers would not lessen the problem of foreign diplomats suffering indignities and assaults at the hands of Americans. This problem worsened during the Kennedy presidency as increasing numbers of Africans took up diplomatic posts in the United States. Although twenty-two African lands had won independence during the Eisenhower years and only six while Kennedy held office, most of the protocol problems were delayed until Kennedy’s watch because it took time to staff and open new embassies in Washington and U.N. delegations in New York. Twenty-eight new African nations either had just opened or had plans to open embassies in Washington when Kennedy took office.46 The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations bound signatory states to prevent “any attack on [the] person, freedom, or dignity” of diplomats. The effects were significant because the snubs and physical assaults represented affronts to other nations that the diplomats represented in the United States. While such incidents often gave rise to diplomatic notes objecting to the host nation’s failure to honor ancient international standards of respect for foreign envoys, they also could have other consequences. Secretary Rusk recalled, for instance, that one African envoy, denied service at the Miami airport, flew on to New York, “where our delegation asked for his vote on human rights issues” at the United Nations. The effects did not end there: The delegate eventually rose to become prime minister, and “his chronic bitterness toward the United States,” Rusk learned, “stemmed from that incident.”47 The U.S. press alerted readers to the cost the country might have to bear. U.S. News explained: “It takes only a few incidents of racial discrimination to lose this country millions of friends in populous and strategic parts of the world.” The same idea appeared in the provincial press. The Minneapolis Tribune conceded there probably were only a few cases of discourtesy, but “even one was one too many,” because “hundreds of millions of non-white people” were watching “with sensitive, curious, and often indignant eyes.” And don’t expect the controversies to escape notice, the newspaper informed readers: Communist wordsmiths stood ready to ensure they were “picked up, embellished, and magnified” across the world.48

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Indeed, the incidents were exploited at the highest levels of the Soviet government. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev seized an opening in 1960, urging member nations to move the U.N. headquarters from New York City to Europe because many diplomats fell victim to racist attitudes— and this in the largest and most sophisticated American city. Actually Khrushchev did not greatly exaggerate the problem, Secretary Rusk indicated. Rusk was surprised, in fact, that “American racial problems were not brought to the floor of the United Nations,” since diplomats in New York had racially motivated run-ins similar to those in Washington.49 Hate letters sent to African and Asian diplomats created friction during the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies. One missive, signed “Ku Klux Klan,” warned “tree-climbing sub-human[s] from . . . Africa” to keep their “filthy itching paws” off white women and threatened to lynch them. Washington informed thirty-six posts in Africa of the missive, which embarrassed and harmed the United States. The potential for trouble was taken seriously enough that FBI field offices in New York and twenty other cities were ordered to investigate.50 Red cartoonists seized on the hate mail. Peking Review depicted a Klansman armed with a rifle (and identified as the “Welcoming Party”) blocking the entrance to the U.N. building in New York City. The text elaborated: “Coloured delegates to the U.N. are receiving letters from the Ku Klux Klan, threatening to attack them if they do not ‘stay close to buildings of the U.N. and the brothels of Harlem,’ or if they ‘enter the hotels and restaurants of our white city.’”51 Diplomats of color experienced problems as bad or worse in Washington, whose culture more resembled that of a small southern town than the capital of a great nation. Africans quickly learned that some Washington districts were virtually closed to them; they were barred from restaurants, hotels, recreation and entertainment venues, clothing, groceries, department stores, barbershops, and so on. The segregation and discrimination continued along Route 40, the highway connecting Washington, D.C., and New York. In fact, the rising number of racial incidents involving African diplomats prompted the establishment of the Special Protocol Service Section (SPSS) within the State Department’s Office of Protocol. Originally created to prevent racial incidents involving black diplomats, it soon took an active role under its director, Pedro Sanjuan, in seeking civil rights changes in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Sanjuan used to his advantage the international ramifications of racial discrimination on America’s image abroad and hence its ability to implement its foreign policy. He knew President Kennedy viewed the newly independent nations of Africa as an important battleground in the Cold War, as did the Soviets.52

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To spare diplomats humiliations (and the country embarrassment), the State Department compiled lists of establishments that promised courteous treatment of African diplomats. But the color line remained intact. So deeply embedded was Jim Crow in Washington that when Sanjuan told Secretary of State Rusk that a newly arrived African envoy had been refused a haircut, Rusk suggested “that he could have his hair cut where I had mine cut, a little room next to my office,” by Rusk’s personal barber.53 Finding adequate housing in Washington was a particular ordeal for dark-skinned Africans. A survey determined that in 1961 only eight owners of apartment houses “definitely” would accept, and twenty-one “might” accept Africans; seventeen “probably would not” accept them and 128 “definitely would not” accept them.54 The SPSS, working with the Washington Real Estate Board, managed to persuade controllers of some apartment houses to end the color line, but the improvement did not endure; indeed the situation deteriorated.55 A New York Times story (which U.S. News reprinted) reported in 1961 that State Department officials were “becoming desperate over their inability to crack the racial barriers . . . [for] African diplomats and their families.” And the failure, Chief of Protocol Angier Biddle Duke concluded, was producing “an adverse effect” on Washington’s relations with many new African governments. America put the issue squarely in a Cold War context with this acidly phrased observation: “Can you imagine . . . [this happening to] any dark-skinned diplomat in Moscow?”56 The color bar in force at private clubs led to a flurry of activity early in the Kennedy administration. Newsweek implied that Kennedy was outraged that these clubs denied nonwhites the “automatic guest privileges [extended] to all foreign ambassadors.” This leak was followed by public, but unofficial, complaints from cabinet officers led by Attorney General Kennedy, who rebuked as hypocrites those who practiced racial discrimination while criticizing the South for its racial mores. On his list were members of “private clubs . . . where Negroes, including Ambassadors, are not welcomed even at mealtime.” The attorney general and others in the administration resigned from some private clubs that refused to change the policy.57 Diplomatic incidents also occurred in the region. In 1962 two African delegates serving at the United Nations observed naval maneuvers off North Carolina as the president’s guests. Driving back to New York, they were denied service at a diner in North Carolina. One of them angrily “identified himself as Ambassador [Pinto] from Dahomey, mentioned [his] contacts with” the president, and threatened to inform the secretary of state. The waiter was unmoved. The State Department apologized and promised to investigate. More apologies were necessary after Eswakema

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Oton, a Nigerian vice consul in New York, was turned away by two motels in Maryland; the Nigerian embassy protested, and the Foreign Office in Lagos expressed indignation. Gabriel Indigo, the editor of the Nigerian Outlook and a guest of the U.S. government, was snubbed in Little Rock. The State Department expressed regrets to the Nigerians, and Little Rock leaders apologized. But Indigo reported the insult in his paper.58 Other incidents also made the papers in Africa. “[A]n act of discrimination against any nonwhite diplomat was considered” a slight to them all because of the close ties the new African nations had to each other. The State Department issued a press release detailing the outraged reactions, the most scathing of which were published in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The latter’s West African Pilot rhetorically attacked the United States as “devoid of respect for human dignity, . . . with a completely bankrupt racial policy,” and thus had “no claim to the leadership of free men.”59 The Red “propaganda network” made the most of these incidents, declared Acting Secretary of State Bowles. The Communists again tapped into Western press sources. TASS copied “almost word for word” a New York Times article about an insult to a diplomat from Sierra Leone. The story was “headlined in . . . African countries within twenty-four hours,” the Christian Science Monitor said. Moscow’s New Times turned up another snubbing. Indrani Rehman, a prominent dancer from India, whose recitals in the United States had “fostered American-Indian friendship,” had, along with her company, been ejected from four restaurants because of their color, causing indignation in her homeland.60 The press of Freetown in Sierra Leone was agitated about the experience of a Nigerian envoy whose diplomatic credentials did not prevent him from being refused service at an establishment in Charlottesville, Virginia. The incident, Consul General H. Reiner Jr. informed Washington, “reawakened memories” of humiliations of African officials during the Eisenhower administration and “incited much adverse local comment about American race practices.” He castigated Reuters for handling the news “in its customary rancid fashion”—illustrating both the news agencies’ central role in the global news flow and the hostility some U.S. diplomats nursed for Reuters.61 Time’s compilation of such incidents was stingingly direct. “One African diplomat ha[d] been turned away from a Virginia drive-in theater. Another, with his daughter, was stopped at the gate of a Maryland amusement park.” The incidents did not end there. “Diplomatic staffers from Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia, Cameroun, and Ethiopia [had] suffered indignities of various sorts because of the color of their skin.” Time went on to note that although Washington restaurants were required by law to serve anyone, they often harassed blacks by “giving them back-corner tables or

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making them wait” even though there was “obvious available space.” In fact, “private clubs are out, and so are most of the Virginia and Maryland beaches.”62 Time flailed rhetorically at the dolts who embarrassed the country. It reserved special vitriol for Hagerstown, Maryland, which shamed the nation in March when “Dr. William Fitzjohn, chargé d’affaires of . . . Sierra Leone, was snubbed out of another Howard Johnson restaurant” in the city. Its rebuke was all the sharper because Hagerstown seemed to have mended its ways, even inviting Fitzjohn to an integrated banquet before he left the United States to become high commissioner to the Court of St. James.63 Hagerstown was far from the only trouble spot. Businesses along a stretch of Route 40 from the Delaware River south to Baltimore “earned ill will for the U.S.,” reported Time, by repeatedly turning away Africans. The problems were sufficiently well publicized by 1961 that journalists could even poke a bit of fun at the issue. The New York Herald Tribune ran a human-interest piece that started with the collision of a foreign object with a foreign dignitary in Indiana. “Plop, went the snowball, straight into the face of the honorable member of the Tanganyika Legislative Council.” The paper posed a question that would have badly confused its readers—a cardinal sin in journalism—unless most of them were aware of the trouble for the country caused by insults or worse assaults on foreigners. “Another international incident in the making?” the article asked rhetorically. Actually, no: the “target was Mary Josephine Kasindi—at the moment without diplomatic immunity in girlish horseplay.” Kasindi was studying at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, on her way to becoming Tanganyika’s second female to win a college degree. The paper made it clear there was something serious at stake along with the horseplay; Kasindi was just “the kind of student” Washington enrolled in American colleges—and who would become friends of America: intelligent, mature in thought, dedicated, and already influential or well on the way to becoming influential in her country. Luckily for America, what Kasindi found off-putting was snow, not the flying snowball. “‘I’m so happy to be here,’ she said. . . . ‘But I have to confess that I’m still a little afraid of all this snow. I never saw snow before—except on top of Mount Kilimanjaro from a distance.’”64 Reporter magazine served up a not-so-delicious irony. Most restaurants in Baltimore refused to serve blacks, but “when a magnificently robed patron was identified as finance minister of ‘Goban,’” his party was politely ushered to a table. The “Africans” turned out to be staffers of the Baltimore Afro-American, bent on exposing the hypocrisy of going all out to get African diplomats served in restaurants where African Americans could not get so much as a sip of water.65

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In an effort to avoid the problems stemming from discourtesy to foreign diplomats and dignitaries, the U.S. press coached readers about conduct they should and should not emulate. Newsweek’s worthies included the good people of Burns, Kansas, who customarily invited foreign students at the University of Kansas to share Thanksgiving and to experience small-town America in everything from making ice cream to calling hogs and minding babies. These and other activities—dating Americans, debating Americans, viewing monuments, and so on—were, Newsweek believed, how African students should be experiencing America, with help from Americans.66 But some conduct was unfit to emulate. For example, Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana never wavered from his fixed belief that “the Negro is inferior to the white man.”67 His attitudes might have gone unremarked in an earlier era, but in 1962 “outrage [about him] echoed from every corner of Black Africa,” Newsweek said. Since these lands were no longer colonies but nations, they could translate displeasure into decisive action. Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Ethiopia refused to permit him to set foot on their soil, and Kenyan minister Tom Mboya wired President Kennedy that Ellender would “not be welcome here with his dirty creed.” Headlines in Ghana shouted: “Lunatic Insults Africa.”68 The Communists regarded Ellender as a perfect vehicle for their prop­ aganda. New Times (Moscow) squeezed Ellender (and by extension the United States) into the same category as South Africa and Rhodesia when it came to making “the evil of racialism government policy.” Peking Review linked Ellender with Kennedy, as it had linked Kennedy and Governor Patterson. It brushed aside the “lame explanation” of the State Department that Ellender was speaking only for himself. “But was he?” the Review asked. Its answer was that he, like Kennedy, was a Democrat. (The magazine could count on few foreigners being aware of the wide political distinction between a Democrat from Boston and a Democrat from Louisiana.) Besides, Peking Review explained, the “loose-mouthed Ellender was merely blurting out loud” what the Kennedy administration was trying “to do on the quiet.”69 U.S. News, very likely with an eye on its southern subscribers, handled Ellender gingerly. Nevertheless, it was also a creature of Washington, a one-industry town, and it responded to that perspective by pointing out that some African nations had barred him from entering, and that U.S. diplomats had disavowed his views as not representing the government’s.70 Time and Newsweek laced their articles with details likely to make readers cringe at the harm Ellender was causing. The former noted that Ameri­ can diplomats at overseas posts “blanch with dismay” on learning that

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Ellender was on the way. And with reason: Ellender unburdened himself of the notion in Egypt, for instance, that it hadn’t “achieved anything great since the Pharaohs began practicing desegregation with their slaves.” Newsweek painted him as something of a village idiot, mocking his practice of inserting into official reports such gems of wisdom as his noting that Holland’s “canals were filled with water,” and “the south of France has a Mediterranean climate.” Time concluded its portrait with a stinging gibe. Ellender once instructed photographers to shoot more pictures, saying that “I don’t have horns on my head.” Nor, Time said, regretting the absent missing body part, “did he have a zipper on his lip.”71 The social coaching of the press was extended to clueless Americans who, Time said, did not know “the location of Mali, Gabon, or Dahomey,” or, for that matter, that they existed. “When you’re dealing with an African student,” Time explained patiently, he very well may become “prime minister in five years.” But this future prime minister was “certain to encounter discrimination” in America, which mattered because of the Cold War competition for Third World friends and allies. Elspeth Huxley, whom U.S. News credited as “one of the world’s foremost authorities on Africa,” noted that thirty thousand Africans were studying in Communist schools. Since there were so few educated Africans, she said, almost every one of them would find a position of trust and prestige in their homeland.72 Newsweek illustrated why it was important they return home well-­ disposed to America with the example of a student who left ill-disposed— Nkrumah of Ghana. After “ten difficult years” in the United States, he returned to Africa with four degrees “and, some critics say, an unfavorable impression that still influences his politics.”73 America not only educated future African leaders, but also inspired, provided practical assistance, and guided them and their new nations in various ways, according to the theme, which was part exculpatory in purpose and part inspirational in tenor. The theme of America as inspiration appeared, for instance, in the claim of U.S. News that Nigeria’s prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, drew on U.S. history “for guidance in preserving a union” among that nation’s disparate tribes. As visual support of the theme, there was a photograph of Balewa paying homage to Lincoln at the Memorial. Balewa may have chosen to be photographed there, but it was U.S. News that decided which image to print, indeed whether to print any at all. And in fact, the U.S. press published photos of other Africans at the Lincoln Memorial, from the Ivory Coast’s president Félix Houphouet-Boigny to obscure students.74 America inspired the world with the justice given to the humblest of its citizens, the Christian Science Monitor suggested. A case in point was Elijah McNeal, a black man whose conviction for assault the U.S. Supreme

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Court reversed because he had not been provided counsel. Despite more momentous causes before it, the Monitor reported didactically, the Court intervened to protect the rights of even the least of Americans, “an indigent and uneducated Negro” unfairly convicted.75 The U.S. press celebrated Americans and America for providing assistance to Africa, such as the U.S. universities and professors who helped establish or improve Nigerian universities. Well before the Peace Corps was established, the Monitor reported, “a vanguard of one hundred fifty American teachers” traveled to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar to help graduate more teachers. The Cold War competition between “the free and Communist worlds for . . . neutrals” was used to justify the effort. Yet in this global struggle ordinary Americans could do their bit. Among those singled out for doing it were a group of New Jersey collegians who were indignant that a Russian official had scoffed that the United States was too decadent to inspire poor nations. They organized Operation Uganda and collected and shipped more than forty thousand books and assorted school supplies to the British colony of Uganda.76 Inevitably, the theme of racial progress recurred. Embedded in a 1961 story published by U.S. News were responses to foreigners skeptical about U.S. race relations.77 U.S. News devoted five pages to a “story of amazing progress.” It dismissed the notion, “at home and abroad, that the American Negro is relegated to a life of hardship and persecution.” In reality, the magazine claimed, “probably no group in history . . . has made the progress that American Negroes have made in so short a time.” Ownership of automobiles was an oft-used measure of blacks’ standard of living. Black Americans owned four and a half million automobiles, one for every five of them in the United States. The Soviet Union, by contrast, had just “one car for each 350 people,” most of which were owned by the state or Communist Party elites. “With political power in his grasp,” U.S. News summed up, “with more money in his pockets than any worker outside the North American continent, and a chance for a good education . . . , the American Negro today is the central figure in an amazing success story.”78 But the magazine skewed the results by not measuring gains made by black Americans against those of their white countrymen. Much was made of the desegregation of southern schools, especially in Atlanta, which boasted it was a “city too busy to hate.” As late as 1960, however, image trumped substance, and Atlanta remained essentially a Jim Crow city that “had desegregated its buses and golf course, but nothing else.” In 1961, however, a coalition of the more enlightened elites put pressure on the reactionary state legislature until it “scuttled its massive resistance laws.”79

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In Newsweek’s analysis, white Atlantans, even segregationists, were “braced . . . to accept the inevitable,” and to integrate schools. Atlanta’s mayor, William B. Hartsfield, welcomed school desegregation as a chance for “the whole world [to] witness how a proud . . . city is obeying the law of the land.”80 Even hard-core racists were made into living evidence of progress. Roy V. Harris, identified by Time as “a top racist” from Georgia, paid a tribute to King and integrationists because of their willingness “to go to jail for their beliefs.” From opposite ends of the political spectrum, the conservative U.S. News and the liberal Reporter agreed that the segregationists were about to give up the struggle. “Segregated public schools here are doomed,” said a “top-ranking segregationist” in New Orleans who believed the “only alternative is to take up arms”—which no one wants to do “or believes . . . would solve anything.” Reporter magazine was taken by the analysis of Bill Hendrix, who had quit the Ku Klux Klan he once had led in Florida: “I see no way to stop racial integration, and it looks to me like the best thing to do is to accept it.”81 But a good many other southerners did not share those sentiments in the period leading up to the greatest campaign of the civil rights movement, which King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference would set in motion in 1963. The battle would be joined in the largest city in Alabama, the toughest city in the South—Birmingham.

Chapter 10

Snarls Echoing ’Round the World

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r. Martin Luther King Jr. won his greatest victory—one that would bring him the Nobel Peace Prize—practically on the heels of one of his most humiliating defeats. The victory resulted, of course, from his 1963 civil rights campaign in Birmingham. Defeating Jim Crow there, King knew, would signal that it could be done anywhere in the South. Furthermore, only Birmingham might provide the sort of resounding victory needed to eradicate the stain of King’s disastrous defeat the year before in Georgia, where his opponent, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, had stolen several pages from King’s book of nonviolent tactics. Most critically, Pritchett directed his officers to avoid public acts of violence against the demonstrators, thus denying them the sympathy of press and public that would make all the difference in Birmingham. Frustrated, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference complained that Pritchett had become “the darling of the press” for merely refraining from brutality. And it wasn’t only the press that applauded him. Attorney General Kennedy wired congratulations to the police chief for adhering to nonviolence, even though success for Pritchett meant failure for establishing racial justice there. The Albany campaign ended as “King’s biggest and most public defeat” (until he encountered the even cannier opponent Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago in 1966), and it made the venture in Birmingham all the riskier since he and his supporters “believed that they could not endure two major defeats in a row.”1 King’s sights were set higher than status, his own or the SCLC’s. But without a “crisis to bargain with,” insisted SCLC executive director Wyatt Tee Walker, white opponents would “nail you to the cross.”2 Emulating Gandhi, King set out to create a crisis. His goal was not just to achieve a limited, local victory, but to bring pressure to bear on President Kennedy to back the black cause with more than words. While sympathetic to black 156

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civil rights, Kennedy was keenly aware of the narrowness of his victory over Richard Nixon in 1960 and of the power of southerners in Congress to wreck his legislative program, so Kennedy wanted compromise, not conflict, in the streets of Alabama’s largest city.3 The campaign was begun on April 3, supposedly in order to capitalize on the symbolism of the Easter season. But King and his men were counting more on immediate—if unwitting—assistance from Police and Fire Commissioner Eugene Connor. “Bull” Connor would be unable to maintain discipline over himself or his men, unlike Laurie Pritchett, King was informed.4 There was another reason for King to press the matter: Birmingham then had two administrations, the city commission and a new mayor-council form of government. While the Alabama courts pondered when, in 1963 or 1965, the commissioners would have to surrender the keys of power to the new government, the old set of officials retained effective control of city government, including the police and fire forces. The most propitious time to strike, King had to have known (unless he were a fool, and he certainly was not), was when the enemy was divided. King’s presence stimulated participation in campaign rallies, but the initial demonstrations were inconclusive. Protest marches in early April brought a number of arrests, but the number of volunteers willing to step forward, be arrested, and pack the jails dwindled, partly because many had already done so, and partly because of resistance to King in the black community, where sharp divisions made cooperation, much less reconciliation, difficult. Lacking dramatic incidents to rally supporters and capture the attention of the news media, King decided to provide one; on April 12, he and his deputy Ralph David Abernathy went on a march and maneuvered the police into arresting them. During his incarceration, King wrote his great Letter from the Birmingham Jail, but his time in jail yielded little advantage otherwise. Once released, King and Abernathy exhorted a crowded church for more than an hour but managed only to secure a dozen or so volunteers to be incarcerated.5 Converting the campaign into a children’s crusade set the trap into which Bull Connor blundered. The SCLC sent waves of schoolchildren, most of whom were teenagers, on a march May 2. Hundreds of children were jailed, the New York Times reported, but the soon-to-be infamous fire hoses and dogs were not in evidence. The next day Connor lost control of himself and the situation, and “out came the billy clubs, the police dogs, and the fire hoses.” Twenty-five hundred children were arrested, and there were more arrests to come.6 King now had his crisis, and it would lead to victory for his cause. The local gains actually proved to be quite modest—an agreement to desegregate some downtown shops, to hire and promote a few blacks, and to form

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a biracial committee. Those meager results grew into a great deal more, because King had made the crisis Kennedy’s crisis, one that spawned approximately seven hundred demonstrations across the nation and negative reactions across the globe because of the violence directed against demonstrators, especially Birmingham’s black children. Forced to act, Kennedy announced he would ask Congress for civil rights legislation.7 Receiving the news from Alabama required no extraordinary system of international communication: mass media brought news from thousands of miles away even to isolated societies. The African kingdom of Burundi, for example, had no newspapers and only one radio station, making “the penetration of attitudes expressed in mass media probably as limited” there as anywhere in the world.8 Yet imported papers, magazines, radio, and newsreels kept news flowing into Burundi. More than 250 media representatives, most no doubt from domestic operations, but some from Europe and Asia, were in Birmingham covering the campaign at one time or another. Generally, however, the press overseas probably relied on the news agencies for articles and especially pictures. Western agencies dominated press accounts printed in Latin America and in the Far East (except for major Japanese dailies)—and almost certainly Africa as well, because of the economies of collective newsgathering that was the raison d’être of the wire services.9 Television was too rare in Africa and Asia to have much impact there. There was perhaps one set to every thousand Africans in 1963, most of which were found above the Sahara, not in black Africa; some African lands had no television at all. The situation was much the same for the hundreds of millions of Asians (except Japan and a few other states).10 Television also had a major disadvantage: It was agonizingly slow as a global medium of communication. Radio and wire service stories and still photos flashed across thousands of miles to international destinations via cable and shortwave in seconds or minutes. But before satellites were parked in geosynchronous orbits, film and videotape meandered from the United States to most points overseas on air flights lasting hours or days, even a week or more, depending on the destination and transport.11 Even after satellites were put in orbit, their unreliability and cumbersome operation discouraged their use for TV signals, as did the expense. Between May 7 and November 6, U.S. networks used Telstar II just thirty times, and the Europeans only seven; the first transpacific transmission to Japan did not occur until November.12 Nevertheless, some foreign television stations or systems used television snippets from Birmingham. Canada, which shared a border and one language with the United States, probably had the most timely and complete televised coverage from Alabama. Havana Television, ninety or

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so miles offshore, aired “a film of troops training dogs . . . ‘to kill human beings’”—an obvious (but incorrect) reference to Birmingham’s corps of police dogs. Nairobi television showed a “vile clip” of dogs and fire hoses, reported one U.S. diplomat, but since Kenya had just 9,400 television sets and a population nearing nine million, the clip probably was little noted. Nigeria, which had the most extensive system below the Sahara, also televised the infamous scenes, but its almost 14,000 sets reached only an estimated 125,000 of the fifty-five million Nigerians. The situation was much different in industrialized nations; the French, for example, televised (albeit belatedly) “an extensive pictorial account” of the hoses and dogs, as did, undoubtedly, Europe’s other systems.13 Radio, not television, reached the largest audiences. There were an estimated one hundred million radio sets, standard and shortwave, outside the United States and Europe; some shortwave stations commanded audiences into the hundreds of millions.14 U.S. monitors found numerous radio broadcasts touched on Birmingham.15 Yet radio had a severe limitation: It could not show the powerful visuals that caused the greatest controversy. Much of the international controversy can be traced to still photographs, which did greater damage to America’s image than had pictures of the mobs at Little Rock or Ole Miss. In the earlier crises, the New York Herald Tribune reasoned, “the resentment toward the United States . . . was assuaged” by the knowledge that the federal government’s military, moral, and legal power was “applied to the redress of Negro rights.” In Birmingham, by contrast, black Americans were “checkmated day after day with dogs and fire hoses while the Federal Government took no overt action.”16 Newspapers in Africa, the Far East, and Latin America made extensive use of photographs from Birmingham, the USIA informed President Kennedy. The stills were printed by newspapers read in Australia, Belgium, Britain, Burundi, Canada, Chad, Chile, Egypt, France, Guinea, India, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Madagascar, New Zealand, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda— and, no doubt, other countries not specifically cited in official reports. The picture given the widest play by Norwegian papers (and probably those of other countries as well) “was an Associated Press telephoto showing a police dog biting a Negro while [the dog was] held on a leash by a white policeman.” Following Soviet practice, Pravda “seized several opportunities to reprint sensational pictures picked up from the American press.” The USIA found that Communist and non-Communist media alike in Latin America used stories and photographs from Alabama.17 The photographs had powerful effects, U.S. diplomats judged. The impact on readers of a picture of “a white man using a dog against a

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Negro” gained strength from “the worst aspects” of Burundi’s history as a colony. Photos of (and commentary about) dogs being set upon on blacks in Alabama stimulated anti-American sentiments in Guinea, despite its government’s instructions to downplay the news. Black Americans teaching in Guinea were struck by the “apparently deep impression [that] pictures [of] dogs attacking Negroes have made on educated Guineans,” a phenomenon also noted in the Cameroons. From Bombay came the assessment that the damage from pictures of “dogs being set on rioters, of Negro women being kicked” by a white policeman “can hardly be overestimated . . . because of [their] immediate emotional impact,” and the fact that the pictures were viewed by many more people than read the articles. The Consulate in Madras advised Washington of a striking commentary of the Hindu, India’s most serious English-language daily: “Setting dogs against demonstrators” was as “savage as it is revolting.”18 Negative reactions were found even among those with reason to esteem America. Most New Zealanders thought highly of Americans because of the assistance the Yanks gave them in World War II. Even there, however, pictures of police dogs, high-pressure hoses, and clubbings of blacks “somewhat tarnished our image.”19 The temptation is to ascribe the furor to the police dogs, hoses, clubs, and race, but it was not so simple. Dogs, hoses, and clubs had been used before against African Americans with equal brutality but did not generate a great clamor. Policemen in Mississippi attacked a hundred demonstrators in 1961 with “clubs, guns, and police dogs,” but the pictures of the incident brought no more than a whisper of protest. Fire hoses even received an endorsement of sorts from the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, which demanded, in the wake of the bloody Sharpeville massacre of 1960, why South African police did not follow the civilized practices of employing water hoses and tear gas “instead of mowing down men, women, and children” indiscriminately with gunfire. However disturbing the images from Birmingham, as Diane McWhorter wrote, the hoses and dogs caused minimal physical injuries, and much deadlier weapons resulted in no great hue and cry when put into action against African Americans during the riots later in the 1960s.20 Thus the outrage was due less to dogs, hoses, and clubs than to their most visible and affected victims, above all the black children. Judging from reports of radio monitors, the children and the police dogs were the dominant symbols in foreign news channels. Sometimes they were mentioned in the same breath. The conservative newspaper Skànska Dagbladet of Sweden wrote of innocents singing movingly of their faith in the victory as “they were forced into the city jails with dogs and fire hoses.” Havana Radio decried the “monstrous and horrible practice” of

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“setting trained dogs against Negro schoolchildren, . . . many of whom have had to be hospitalized.” The Morning Post of Nigeria denounced “The Brutes of Alabama” for creating “a hunting ground where dogs attack demonstrating Negroes like a pack of hounds hunting for game.” From Belgium the Catholic Gazet van Antwerpen commented icily: “Freedom loses its significance when in its shadow people are hunted with dogs.”21 Highly charged symbols, the police dogs received much more press attention than lethal weapons—submachine guns, shotguns, and bombs—until four young black girls were slaughtered in the bombing of a church well after the Birmingham campaign ended. There was a marked difference between domestic and foreign views of enlisting the youngsters in the campaign. By sending children in harm’s way, King temporarily became a prophet without honor in his own country—even though black children had been in that position before at, for example, Clinton, Little Rock, and New Orleans. Time targeted King with this remark: A “dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.” Newsweek (and Malcolm X) caustically questioned both the decision to put children on the front line and King’s manhood: “And if the man’s work of fighting for freedom fell to children, so be it,” snapped Newsweek, while Malcolm sneered: “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.”22 But foreigners reserved most condemnations for those who harmed children (potentially or actually) rather than the leader of what became a children’s crusade. In addition to the children and the police dogs, Kennedy, King, Connor, and Alabama’s Governor George Wallace were featured prominently abroad. The Communists accused the president of tolerating or being in league with bigots. To this Beijing added that Kennedy was a hypocrite and liar who pledged to “take measures to bring about racial equality and protect the Negroes’ rights” but secretly assisted their tormentors. Havana Television aired the view of a black U.S. journalist that Americans should have elected Castro as president because, unlike Kennedy, he would have sent brutal policemen packing to South Africa, which welcomed their kind.23 There was a paucity of references to King in Communist sheets in 1963, partly because his international visibility would not be greatly augmented until the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1964. There also was an ideological reason. In Marxist theory, Birmingham should have been a rising of the underclass, but it was led by middle-class clergymen, chief among them King. The Chinese avoided this awkwardness by listing King merely as one leader, or, later, as a Quisling who attempted “to soften the Negro people’s militancy.”24 Connor was rendered as a savage racist who “demanded continued segregation,” according to China’s Xinhua News Agency. Radio broadcasts

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from Panama presented him as the jefe who loosed upon children (and others) “dogs [trained] for tearing the flesh of the dark-skinned humans.” Beijing skewered Wallace as an unalloyed racist, who sent into Birmingham “more than five hundred state troopers armed with submachine guns, tear gas, and shotguns,” and as the author of the canard that Communists created the black struggle in order to increase the persecution of blacks.25 America’s prestige suffered internationally, but not in all countries, nor uniformly. Ignorance of or apathy about foreign affairs also limited the response in some lands. No significant problems were created for the United States by the crisis in such widely separated nations as Indonesia, Bolivia, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, Nepal, Libya, Thailand, and Brazil, because of preoccupation with other affairs, lack of identification with African Americans, or (in Nepal), the paucity of available media.26 Where sentiments were favorable, they were linked to the belief that the government (but not the American people) was striving to bring about racial justice.27 U.S. information officers scrambled to lessen the damage, but the New York Herald Tribune doubted, probably accurately, that “all their pamphlets, all their words and books and motion pictures” had even one-tenth of the impact “of the reports of the actual events.”28 One U.S. diplomat even suggested the liability for America would linger as long as racism persisted. Even in countries where the news from Alabama was ignored or received with apathy, some dispatches warned, the situation could worsen if incidents flared up again in the United States and a foreign government chose to whip up anti-American sentiments. One such incident arose before the echoes died down in Alabama: Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in that state on June 12. Radio Baghdad likened his killing to murderous Nazi atrocities, while former Ugandan prime minister Benedicto Kiwanuka thought this “wicked murder” showed the “torture to which black people are being subjected.”29 Appalled by the events in Alabama, some leaders of African nations denounced the United States. Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta cabled Kennedy, excoriating the “continuing oppression of Negroes,” expressing “solidarity with American Negro Freedom Fighters in their struggle for human rights,” and deploring the jailing of King, “whose only crime” was demanding equality.30 Harsher still was an open letter to Kennedy from Ugandan prime minister Milton Oboté, who wrote that “our own kith and kin”—African Americans—had been attacked by dogs, and “blasted with fire hoses” set to such pressure as to “strip bark off trees.” And what were their offenses? The color of their skin, said Oboté, and their demand to be free and equal.31 Newsweek, protective of Kennedy’s image, fired back a disparaging and condescending retort, accusing Oboté of responding to the president’s

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“goodwill message” by rudely issuing an open letter on the “‘inhuman treatment’ of Negroes in Birmingham.” The magazine also snidely accused his regime of such ineptness that U.S. diplomatic personnel had to help his aides with “press releases and cabling the text to Washington.”32 The press of Africa (less so above the Sahara and in francophone regions) handled the United States roughly.33 Even before King opened his campaign, Nigerian papers vilified “‘Southern Devils’ in Congress,” and prodded white Americans to accept their black countrymen as equals. As the crisis intensified, so did the sentiments below the Sahara. Ghana’s Daily Graphic reminded Americans that they, not southerners alone, bore responsibility for the outrages inasmuch as their government was “hurling abuse” at South Africans for apartheid at a time when African Americans were “persecuted for . . . their color.” Certainly, the Graphic reiterated the oft-heard catchphrase, “the United States cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality at home.” Nigerian media became “extremely exercised” over the “dogs in Birmingham [and] the murder of Medgar Evers.”34 The furor was intense in Kenya and Ghana. Washington was told the nation’s “image [was] suffering greatly” in Kenya from “inflammatory headlines” such as one about the jailing of children, and Ghana’s press administered such a “heavy beating” that the embassy in Accra feared “serious effects . . . on our influence” there.35 White colonialists produced some of the acrimony coming out of Africa. They seized upon U.S. racial turmoil in order to make their record seem less odious. Belgian colonial interests still resented the U.S. assistance to the United Nations to put down the secession of the Katanga province from the Republic of the Congo. A “virulent anti-American editorial” in Essor du Katanga imputed hypocrisy to the Americans, for pretending “to love Africans, when they hate black Americans with whom they have lived for centuries.” (A U.S. consul observed dismissively that whites in Southern Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe, and South Africa were “in great need of others on whom to blame their difficulties.”) The Rhodesians (who, in two years’ time, would sever ties to Britain in order to avoid granting political rights to black Africans) argued that the excesses of Birmingham had stripped the United States of the right to criticize Rhodesia for white rule since Rhodesia was “more tranquil” than America. The Afrikaans press of Capetown responded similarly. The daily Die Burger said Birmingham was racked with turmoil, implying that apartheid preserved racial peace. The weekly Die Landstem made a rejoinder to G. Mennen Williams, assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, who had perturbed the paper by advising that white racism made southern Africa “fertile ground for communism.” Die Landstem advised Williams sharply to “clean up the mess in Alabama . . . before poking his nose in our affairs.”36

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The Soviet Union and Communist China were at each other’s throats ideologically, but they agreed more than disagreed about Birmingham. Their ideological differences started in muted form during the late 1950s but had become glaringly apparent by 1963. The Soviets’ drift away from a Stalinist line infuriated the Chinese, who remained devoted to Stalin and Stalinism. To Moscow’s displeasure, the Chinese pushed the dispute into the arena of race and colonialism by designating Russia as one of “the ‘white nations’” but aligning “China with the nonwhites.” The parties to the Sino-Soviet dispute, Newsweek quipped happily, “displayed about as much comradely solidarity as rival schools of piranhas.”37 Their quarrel did not work to the advantage of the United States when it came to racism in Alabama.38 In the Soviet organs, there was the usual conflation—as when a Pravda commentator conflated the United States and South Africa as racist states, and a month later sneered: “Racists at home, the American preachers of ‘freedom’ . . . remain the bulwark of racism in Africa.” Izvestia put a similar idea in a cartoon: A “two-faced American” pats an African on the head while shooting a black American.39 Moscow’s broadcasts pumped out propaganda greater in quantity and virulence than its papers, U.S. officials said. Radio Moscow devoted a quarter of its output to Birmingham, much of it beamed to Africa. U.S. monitors figured the Soviet Union sent to foreigners 1,420 anti-U.S. commentaries about Birmingham between May 14 and May 26, much more than during Little Rock. Though less voluminous, print propaganda nevertheless denigrated Americans as racists.40 While baying after the Soviets as heretics, Beijing’s messages on Bir­ mingham were almost identical to Moscow’s. Both sides emphasized the “guns, clubs, police dogs, and high-pressure water hoses.” But this was no collaboration: The themes merely coincide—as when each separately charged the federal government supported segregation; maintained that Birmingham exposed the hypocrisy of Americans’ bleating about democracy; and warned people of the Third World to expect mistreatment at the hands of Americans who, after all, conducted themselves as if they were slave masters to millions of their own people.41 The Chinese pulled out the stops when Mao Tse-tung made an “unprecedented appeal” in 1963 for “the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie, and other enlightened personages of all colours in the world . . . to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and to support the American Negroes.” While Mao gave due credit to the black struggles in Little Rock, the sit-ins, and Ole Miss, he awarded special distinction to Birmingham, where “unarmed, bare-handed Negro masses were subjected to . . . the most barbarous suppression.” More rhetorical barrages followed.42 Leaders

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in Beijing had stepped up their efforts to use the U.S. “racial issue as a prop­aganda platform” from which they “can pose as the champions of the oppressed,” the Christian Science Monitor said in mid-August. The paper also reported a propaganda shot fired at Beijing at the behest of Moscow; a Finnish Communist, writing in Pravda, accused Beijing of attempting to instigate a war with the United States, “which Communist China is too weak to fight itself.”43 Communists elsewhere matched the invective of Moscow and Beijing. Cuban television and the Belgian Communist Le Drapeau Rouge argued that the brutal incidents in Alabama proved the consanguinity of U.S. racists and German Nazis. A wickedly effective cartoon in Warsaw Szpilki depicted a beefy sheriff, armed with shotgun and pistol, grinning malignly as he blocked black and white children from a school. The Hungarians “gleefully” ran photos of dogs, electric truncheons, and black children being jailed.44 Magisterial British and French papers had recurring coverage. Le Monde of Paris and the Times of London each published more than a dozen articles, commentaries, and photos about Birmingham from May 4 to May 17.45 On May 4, for instance, the Times correspondent reported that as 2,500 demonstrators took to the streets, “police turned fire hoses” on them, then sent in “dogs on leashes” against protesters, including young children. (Given that the story carried a Washington dateline, the details were doubtless sopped up from the U.S. press.) It included a concession that conceded almost nothing: The police “refrained from using the hoses on the smallest children.” On May 6, the London paper reported, Kennedy was dismayed “at the use of dogs and water hoses.” A week later, an editorial found another cause for his dismay: This was “the first major Negro action to be taken in conscious disregard” of his administration’s counsel to delay demonstrations until a new mayor took office in Birmingham.46 The effect was to make Kennedy appear weak. Some diplomatic reports warned of unfavorable comment. A Russian broadcast that claimed the Soviet Union was “ahead of [the] U.S. because of the ‘moral strength of Socialist society’” vexed Ambassador to Finland Rowan. Another claim, that the future belonged to the Communists, he complained, was “already too prevalent [in] Finland and elsewhere.” So complete was Belgian press coverage, concluded another diplomat, “that one would almost think that the catastrophe were occurring in a Belgian province.” Norwegian papers gave more prominence to Birmingham than any crisis since Ole Miss, the USIS judged. Pictures and headlines put particular stress on the police dogs and the arrests of hundreds of children. The publicity eventually subsided, but new bombings soon pushed Birmingham back onto the front pages.47

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Even Japanese papers that praised the U.S. government for combating racism were less than sanguine. Sankei and Tokyo Shimbun raised the possibility that all of America “might become a Birmingham.” Nihon Keizai combined the harsh judgment (for the circumspect Japanese) that segregation “is a disgrace” with a prediction that few Asians or Africans would ally themselves with America unless it eliminated its color bar.48 The U.S. press was chagrined, to be sure, by the spectacle of America’s dirty linen flapping before a disapproving world. None was more appalled than Time. “Communism was having a field day,” Time said, quoting this damning statement of Radio Moscow: “American authorities both cannot and do not wish to stop outrages by racists.”49 Moscow “splashed the story at home and abroad,” reported Newsweek, which contrasted the greetings that astronaut Gordon Cooper broadcast from orbit to Africa to the “news of police dogs, fire hoses, and Negro rioting”; not only did Birmingham detract from a U.S. triumph in space, but also America’s image took “some bad whacks.” Newsweek listed some of them: “In Paris, the left-wing Liberation ran a photo of police dogs attacking Negroes under the black-bordered head: ‘Savages.’” The Indian Express snidely questioned whether Alabama even had “any reputation left to be besmirched.” Ghana’s government-run paper belittled U.S. democracy as reserved for “only white men.” It was a measure of the severity of international criticism in the past—or how intensely Newsweek wished to play down present racial problems (or both)—that Newsweek somehow managed to conclude that “world opinion [about Birmingham] was remarkably gentle.” The magazine gave lip service to the proposition that ending racism was something the nation ought to do because it was right. But this idea was overshadowed by the consequences for the United States as it competed with the Reds “for the allegiance of men.”50 Readers of the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times also could learn of what foreigners thought of the crisis. The Monitor printed several dispatches, some on the front page, from its writers abroad. A dispatch from London minced no words: “Once more Alabama is defacing the image of American democracy,” and quoted British press headlines such as “Hundreds of children arrested in Alabama and Police use dogs to scatter Negro marchers.” Still, the Monitor thought the British had neither overplayed the story nor pointed “an accusing finger at an embarrassed friend and ally,” that, if anything, the Brits reported the events straight. But Americans should not count on British restraint continuing, the Monitor warned.51 The “heavy foreign criticism” was taken so seriously by the government, the Times informed Americans, that the State Department and USIA singled out racism as the nation’s “chief propaganda problem abroad,

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especially in Africa.” Much of the problem was traced to press photos, especially those that featured snarling police dogs. A sharply worded editorial predicted Birmingham would be “immeasurably costly,” since new nations regarded skeptically “our pretensions to stand for democracy and individual worth.”52 Yet the U.S. press also sought to balance the story with less-negative or positive expressions. The Monitor quoted Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s praise for Kennedy’s “vigorous attack to eradicate” racial discrimination. And the Times reported the prediction of Gunnar Myrdal, the Swede who led the classic study of race An American Dilemma, that victory over segregation would be achieved within a decade.53 The conservative U.S. News included both negative elements and material that relieved the bleak outlook: The British were impressed by Washington’s determination to abolish segregation; most West German papers reported U.S. racial progress and favorably contrasted black civil rights to citizens’ rights in Communist states; the Japanese were derogatory about Jim Crow, but their society was “so riddled with racial and class discrimination that they do not regard such things as disqualification for world leadership”; Latin Americans gave wide support to Kennedy; French carping was dismissed as partisan; and a “strong reaction” in Italy was ascribed to a misapprehension that America was in “a situation similar to that in South Africa.”54 By contrast, one black paper insisted that Americans had only themselves to blame for this mess. The Pittsburgh Courier issued the blunt challenge: “No Russian propagandists can conjure up or create pictures of bestiality more harmful to the United States than those we provide ourselves.” It singled out Bull Connor for making “a mockery of our boasts of democracy and brotherhood.”55 But the domestic press also used a variation of the theme of racial progress in order to relieve the bleak picture. As Clinton, Tennessee, had been for Little Rock, Little Rock became for Birmingham proof that racial harmony would be achieved. Little Rock had long since desegregated public facilities, and the school integration that was once “fought with mob violence” was now so widely accepted that a journalist wondered “what all the fighting was about six years ago.” The implication was that the same would be true of Birmingham. If that were the case, some accounting was needed about why such improvements were not widely recognized. The New York Herald Tribune ascribed the failure to the “quiet progress” being obscured by too much attention to the latest trouble.56 International public opinion started swinging toward the side of the United States in May. It could be seen in Ethiopia, where thirty heads of state met to found the Organization of African Unity. They adopted a

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two-part resolution, the first of which expressed “‘deep concern’ . . . over racial discrimination throughout the world,” especially in the United States, while the second voiced appreciation for U.S. efforts to end the intolerable practices. Plainly, the New York Times asserted, “the Africans had in mind” events in Birmingham.57 The Kennedy administration regarded the resolution as mild; it could have been much harsher. The resolution was even helpful, the State Department advised the White House; since the OAU had answered Oboté, it was unnecessary for Washington to do so, which would have given “renewed currency” to his attack.58 Prodded into action by the crisis King had created, Kennedy announced on June 11 that he would ask Congress for civil rights legislation. Kennedy’s address acknowledged the international aspects of the black struggle: “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. . . . But are we to say to the world . . . that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?”59 Kennedy’s words and actions helped moderate “the critical and often highly inflammatory tenor of media comment” into “widespread acclaim and support,” according to the USIA. Some foreign leaders and newspapers did an about-face on Kennedy. Oboté retreated from his harsh open letter and lauded the president.60 So did the U.S.-educated editor of the Ethiopian Herald, who previously had used “vicious and vulgar prose” in an editorial titled “Apartheid America.” After the broadcast, the editor “unreservedly praised” Kennedy and urged Americans to support him.61 Kennedy’s stock also rose elsewhere, for instance, in Mexico, Belgium, and South Africa.62 Kennedy responded to both domestic and international pressure after Birmingham; the latter was evident in his cable to all U.S. diplomatic and consular posts, in which he announced the new legislation and directed them to inform host governments of racial problems and administration policies. “The way our government deals with the struggle of our Negro citizens for full equality has a direct bearing on the principles on which our foreign policy rests,” Kennedy cabled. “By making a clear and candid presentation, you can enlist sympathetic understanding and support of free world leaders,” many of whom took part in “struggles to change the status quo and improve their societies.” In turn, Kennedy said, support abroad would assist him domestically to bring about racial reforms.63 The 1963 March on Washington and the murders of four young black girls grew out of the campaign in Birmingham. And like that campaign, those news events would continue to reverberate in American culture. The march became a placid celebration of American ideals that united blacks and whites, but it was originally intended to include confrontational

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elements, including sit-ins in Congress. Kennedy convinced black leaders not to create problems for pending civil rights legislation, and the march was converted into an event too respectable—even stuffy—to set off an explosion, as some had predicted.64 The government attempted to wring propaganda advantages from the March—and to block adversaries from exploiting it for their purposes. The government’s ventures included a film, The March, which Secretary Rusk had foreign posts evaluate for propaganda value and possible venues. Learning of plans by Mexican and American Communists to raise funds to pay for gathering petitions and demonstrating against American racial bias, Rusk directed U.S. diplomats to discourage Mexican authorities from permitting those activities as intrusions into a U.S. “internal political matter.”65 The administration did not object, however, to other actions abroad that fit into its plans. Some expatriate or visiting Americans, for instance, deposited at embassies petitions supporting civil rights, which were forwarded to Washington. There were some demonstrations abroad supporting the march, though measured against the quarter-million people marching in the nation’s capital, the number of participants overseas were quite few in number, and most of the demonstrations were as sedate as the march itself. (One that was less tranquil started when the colors were lowered at the close of day at the embassy in Ghana; “rowdies began to hoot and to cry ‘shame, shame!’” and shout, “‘Down with the Kennedy administration!’”)66 The march frustrated the Communists’ “inevitable twists of propaganda,” according to the Rome embassy. Even in Pravda’s account, ideology was almost eclipsed by the stirring scene of hundreds of thousands of “honest Americans”—Pravda’s phrase—marching in Washington. Pravda called particular attention to “the Birmingham heroes,” who had stood up to police clubs, fire hoses and dogs, and now raised a great cry,— “Freedom! Freedom!”—that rattled windows in government buildings. More intensely ideological, Izvestia beheld a revolution being born, one that Washington wanted to subdue and impair. Beijing’s propaganda was shriller. Xinhua contended that Kennedy had controlled the demonstration “by sheer brute force,” and although the government pretended “to be ‘sympathetic’ with the Negro people’s movement,” it provided no concrete support. Shrillest of all, the North Koreans flailed against “Kennedyled U.S. racists who are barbarously repressing the Negroes.” Indeed, the actions were portrayed as somewhat worse than barbaric, since the Koreans identified them as “cannibalistic barbarities.”67 While taking note of the “holiday carnival atmosphere” of the march, Ghana’s Radio Accra balanced it with images of the police dogs and raised

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the issue of economic inequality that prevented even wealthy blacks from realistically aspiring to jobs held by whites, or even to rent a dwelling in a white neighborhood. Ghanaians would judge Kennedy “not by his words but by his deeds,” it added. “Either he is on the side of the liberation of his country from racism or he is not. . . . He cannot have it both ways.” Unquestionably, it thought Kennedy was attempting to do just that.68 The front pages of leading non-Communist papers featured stories that emphasized the orderliness of the demonstration and what it signified about the past and future of black Americans. Praise for Kennedy, some of it effusive, characterized a number of articles. The march enjoyed “heavy favorable press play” in Kenya, where Kennedy was exalted as a new Lincoln, and there were statements pointing to great improvements in the racial climate—one sign being that such an event “would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.” The march enjoyed heavy and favorable press play in newspapers of differing stripes in widely separated points such as New Delhi, Dublin, and Stockholm, whether as wire service photos, articles, or commentary. The march even reminded the Press Trust of India “of pre-independence India.” Stories and editorials about the march ran in “every major Irish paper.” The Irish Times opined that the U.S. civil rights movement had entered a new revolutionary phase, holding that “Today will decide whether it is to be bloodless or not.” Stockholms Tidningen praised the march as within “the American tradition of peaceful protest as a means of redressing grievances.” Should Congress pass the Civil Rights bill, U.S. racial problems would still persist, the paper observed, but that was also true of other nations.69 The U.S. press welcomed much of the foreign response, which was positive in tone. Opinions expressed overseas made the front page of the Christian Science Monitor. “Sympathizers in Western, neutralist, and Communist countries alike expressed support for American Negroes in their big freedom march on Washington,” reported the Monitor. A dispatch from Bonn proclaimed: “European Press Lauds Negro March.” The New York Times saw a mixed situation in Moscow. The initial comments there were said to have been mild, but the time difference between Moscow and Washington had required the stories be written “before the March got underway,” which may have skewed the tone. Perhaps more indicative, the Times noted, was Moscow’s decision to cancel a television broadcast of the march, via Telstar, just five minutes before its scheduled airing. TASS hectored Washington about the “repulsive . . . racial oppression and exploitation of twenty million American Negroes.” Interest varied in sub-Saharan Africa, from considerable in Kenya and Rhodesia, to little in Nigeria and South Africa. In Arab lands, “enthusiasm was more widespread.” Western Europe praised the “perfect discipline” of the demonstrators in Washington.70

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The mostly favorable opinions abroad about the march, however, quickly became expressions of shock and horror after the massacre of innocents. Four black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, were killed on September 15 in the explosion of a bomb planted in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the starting point of a number of marches during the campaign. Thirtyeight years after the fact, the New York Times described their murders as “the most shameful act” of racial violence of the era, a characterization that encapsulated the powerful effects of the deaths at home and abroad.71 Demonstrations were conducted in Africa—in Uganda, for instance— to denounce the atrocities. Another protest was being readied in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, by “ten African refugee groups,” but the government stopped it on the ground that there was no justification for it since U.S. policy was “firmly against such outrages.” Deputy Premier Fani-Kayode of Western Nigeria was so moved by the deaths that he felt a personal gesture was required, and he arranged to send two hundred Nigerian pounds to the children’s kin.72 The Soviet press was even more biting than during the Birmingham ­crisis. Pravda printed an especially vituperative passage: “The bloody events . . . are an indelible disgrace to the rampaging racist misanthropes, who have demonstrated . . . the worth of the vaunted American democracy.” TASS had already distributed a condemnation almost as scathing: “When an American city is ruled by the police dog, the high-pressure fire hose, the shotgun, and the bomb, it can no longer be considered a city ruled by law,” and went on to characterize the “massacre of innocents” as “bestial acts.” TASS borrowed that accusation from a New York Times editorial. Lest it confer legitimacy on the notion that the lickspittle capitalist press might actually perform like a free press, TASS contrived an explanation of loud damns to drown out faint praise. “So monstrous” were some crimes “that even the bourgeois publications are occasionally obliged to publish material condemning the crudest forms of racist and police terror.”73 A good deal more came from Moscow. New Times blamed racists in Alabama, especially Wallace, for the atrocity. But that assignment of responsibility was too narrow. It did not reach to Moscow’s main target, the American government, so the magazine expanded it to cover the “hesitation, indecision, and procrastination in Washington.” Radio Moscow regretted that the government did not consider “the Birmingham ‘massacre’ sufficient reason to send federal troops to that city,” adding slyly that the inaction was to be expected because the “racists have many patrons in Washington.”74 Pravda published at least nine other articles and two editorial cartoons, and Izvestia four articles and a cartoon. Izvestia printed a commentary later by American leftist Henry Winston that American extremists

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had escalated from killing “Negroes one-by-one” to slaughtering numbers of them at one time with dynamite explosions.75 As harsh as these statements were, the embassy in Moscow judged the Soviets fell “far short of ChiCom attacks” in vituperation. The black American expatriate Robert Williams, then visiting Beijing, accused the Kennedy administration of refusing to “lift a finger” to protect the children from being killed. Williams declared the U.S. government to be “a government of savages, and . . . the greatest threat to peace and happiness of the people.” Some weeks later, his rhetoric bordered on incoherence: The government was “the world’s greatest hypocrite, greatest enslaver, and dehumanizer of [the] human race, [and a] disgrace and horrible shame to all mankind.”76 The non-Communist press gave the deaths of the children prominent display. Dutch journalists published front-page stories, complete with illustrations. “Editorials used stronger language [on] this subject than ever before in condemning the cruel outrage,” a U.S. diplomat cabled from The Hague. “Influential Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant called attention to utter failure of the police and the responsible authorities in Alabama and their complicity” in attacks on peaceful black protesters. Algemeen Dagblad printed a photograph of a demonstration at the U.S. Embassy and wrote of the “feelings of horror [aroused] in the Netherlands.” Shocked by the “slaughter of innocents,” L’Osservatore Romano denounced the “racist conception . . . that absurdly denies equality and brotherhood with other men,” and it predicted the bloody crime would spur an “irresistible impulse to . . . prevail in [the] just battle for integration.” Swedish papers went after Wallace and others of his ilk. Stockholm’s Tidningen spurned Wallace’s expression of regret for the deaths of the girls “as mere hypocrisy” because “he and his accomplice” did so much to stimulate “fanaticism and open violence.” The liberal Dagens Nyheter, in contrast to some Communist papers, wrote approvingly of Kennedy’s pledge to take “strong action in support of the Negroes.”77 Most Americans had little or no direct access to the foreign press, but they could learn from the domestic press of the horror people in other lands felt about the deaths. The Pittsburgh Courier, as blunt as ever, joined Birmingham’s grim sobriquet, Bombingham, to an inculpatory phrase in a bitter headline: “Bombingham, the Unrepentant.” While “indignation over these atrocities has swept the world,” charged the Courier, segregationists residing in the vicinity of Birmingham “were secretly pleased” with the “bloody blow for white supremacy, and cared not what the civilized world thinks.”78 Concerned about the reactions of the civilized world, Time designated Wallace an “international symbol of the demagogic segregationist.” The

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Christian Science Monitor illustrated the impact of the bombing with a sketch showing shock waves radiating across the globe. The “infamous . . . stain” left on segregation was mentioned by the London papers. President Kennedy won praise from British journalists “for his handling of the American Negro question,” but his youngest brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, ruffled feathers across the Atlantic by faulting Britain’s handling of its racial troubles. (When black children were being murdered in Alabama, the senator had little right to assail “race prejudice in Britain,” the Daily Express snapped.) The New York Times printed a collage of headlines from London about the atrocity. It also reported Senator Kennedy’s promise that “we are determined to clean our hands of racial prejudice so we can go before the world with deeds to match our words.” To demonstrate that bigotry would be laid low by the inexorable progress toward social justice, the senator volunteered the experience of his Irish American family. “Neither I, nor the President,” he observed, “would hold the positions we do if America had not taken down the sign that said, ‘no Irish need apply.’”79

Chapter 11

Summer of Shocks

A

s the 1964 civil rights bill neared passage in Congress, Secretary of State Rusk sent a reminder to all U.S. diplomatic and consular posts about the intertwining of race and foreign policy. “Administration keenly aware,” he cabled, of the “impact of domestic racial problem on U.S. image overseas and on achievement U.S. foreign policy objectives,” and directed them to “inform all audiences” of the government’s resolve to act on racial issues, and specifically of the bill, which “represents national consensus and national will to end discrimination.” Rusk anticipated the legislation would be a U.S. propaganda victory but insisted that the envoys explain candidly that the “new law . . . will not dispel all effects of prejudice or end all discriminatory practices in the U.S.”1 If anything, Rusk understated the need for candor: Domestic racial controversies produced shock after shock in the South and the North in the summer of 1964, news of which proceeded with alacrity to points abroad. Jim Crow made its presence felt, for instance, in St. Augustine, Florida, the nation’s oldest city, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was campaigning against segregated public accommodations. So violently did the white mobs respond to King’s initiative that a federal judge admonished the attorney general of Florida sternly that his state should impose “rigid law enforcement, arrests, and real charges against the hoodlums” in order to rectify the state of near anarchy.2 The commotion inevitably caught the attention of the Soviets, who “continued to spotlight incidents such as those in St. Augustine,” the USIA reported. The racist outrages that Pravda and Izvestia publicized included the arrest of King and assaults on blacks who went swimming at a whitesonly beach. News of the incidents shocked friendly nations, such as Mali in Africa.3 174

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Far bloodier than St. Augustine was the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, which was designed to increase the number of black voters. Press coverage, foreign and domestic, focused on the disappearance of three young civil rights workers, two whites from the North and a black Mississippian, on June 21 near the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. It was widely assumed they had been murdered. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to enter the case. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover traveled to Mississippi (that trip was an indicator of how important the case was regarded in Washington), where he informed his agents of “the President’s desire for results” and ordered that “no amount of material, manpower or expense . . . be spared” to produce them. The bodies of the missing men were found on August 4. In December, FBI agents arrested twenty-one persons, including the Neshoba County sheriff, and charged them with violating the civil rights of the activists. (Seven defendants were later convicted.) The Klan and other hate groups committed numerous other acts of terrorism: six murders, eighty beatings, the torching of thirty-five churches, the bombings of thirty homes and buildings, and thirty-five shootings.4 The campaign had the potential to cause the government international and not just domestic problems. The former difficulties were recognized by the State Department, which had learned that foreign students were being trained by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to register black voters. The hazards they faced might endanger “relations with various countries whose nationals might be involved in unpleasantness” or even be seriously injured, Rusk was informed. With no good alternative available, the State and Justice departments settled for asking American organizations to try to “dissuade the foreign students from going to Mississippi.”5 The expectation that there would be unfavorable publicity became an established fact as news of the search went overseas. L’Essor, the organ of Mali’s ruling party, declared: “Holocaust, murder, and massacre are appearing on the horizon.” The editorial (which the government ordered reprinted) might arouse “public opinion . . . against us,” a diplomat informed Washington. The discovery of the bodies triggered a protest demonstration in Denmark, whose participants asked the embassy to forward to state officials a resolution “urging legal action against the suspected murderers.”6 New Times (Moscow) used the atrocity in its propaganda campaign. It introduced as evidence the vehicle driven by the victims. The “fire-blackened wreck” had two crosses torched as a warning to civil rights workers and included photos of “Negroes hanged by lynch mobs.”7 There was also serious violence outside Dixie. Rusk’s cable had predicted, accurately, that racial turmoil would spread across America. As

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white mobs ran unchecked in St. Augustine, friction between blacks in Harlem and New York City policemen flared into rioting on July 18. Other disorders followed elsewhere in New York City and other municipalities. The arrest of a black man on suspicion of molesting a black woman precipitated disorders on July 24 in Rochester, New York, and there were outbreaks of trouble in the New Jersey cities of Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Paterson, and in Dixmoor, Illinois. Philadelphia experienced the last riot of the summer, at the end of August. The toll was eight dead, more than a thousand injured, and two thousand arrests.8 Another casualty of the rioting was the notion that racial conflicts would be confined to the South, as they had mostly been thus far. The coverage of Pravda and Izvestia was notable less for length or prominence of display than for the inclusion of so many incidents.9 The nonCommunist press of Mexico City gave the riots prominent play, using “straight wire service accounts and photographs”—including pictures of policemen and rioters clashing in New York City—almost exclusively. Most items probably emanated from the American news agencies, which dominated the news flow to Latin America. Those incidents were treated as “highly newsworthy,” the USIS cabled, but no widespread indignation was evident, perhaps because of the “general realization” that the federal government was committed to eliminating racial discrimination. El Universal Grafico believed the Communists were exploiting the disorders; the influential Excelsior agreed that the Communists were indeed “fishermen in the rivers of social revolt” but doubted they had actually stirred up the “racial violence in New York.”10 Added to the usual swarm of international problems plucking at the sleeve of the State Department were diplomatic incidents, a victim of which was the Nigerian vice consul in New York. The department apologized to the Nigerian embassy, which chose to make no official protest. Less easily placated were two prominent Ugandans whose hair barbers in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania refused to cut. The incidents became front-page news in the Uganda Argus, which gave space to Prince Godfrey K. Katanywa’s profession of shock that this not only happened to “guests of [the] U.S. Government,” but also occurred in the nation’s capital.11 New Times, ever alert for opportunities to harass the United States, collected the incidents under the headline, “African Diplomats in the American Jungle.” “American racism,” it said, was practically ubiquitous; “its victims” were stalked at “cinemas and restaurants, on highways and railways, in the streets and parks, in stores, barber shops, and hotels.” New Times credited the Washington Post, New York Herald Tribune, and United Press International as sources of the details to bolster the credibility of

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its story. After all, if the American media were printing such information about their own country, then the situation must be bad.12 Social coaching returned again to the U.S. press. U.S. News printed an informal tutorial in early 1964 about why this mattered. Its lecturer was Elspeth Huxley, who was identified as an expert on Africa. The magazine anticipated this question of readers: “Does it really matter who wins out in black Africa?” Huxley responded with asperity: No more so than “if the Communists take over Latin America”—a prospect likely to alarm Americans who ingested the Monroe Doctrine with mother’s milk. The consequences were couched to remind Americans of World War II and its great invasions. If the Communists secured bases in North Africa, readers were reminded, “they would be within a few miles of Europe”; for good measure, Huxley dangled before them a vision of the Treasures of Africa. “After all,” she said, “Africa is one of the [continents] richest in raw materials,” implying that only fools would willingly yield its resources to a foe.13 Also developed was the theme of racial progress.14 Even Birmingham, Alabama, that powerful international symbol of racism, underwent a transformation into a symbol of America striding inexorably toward racial equality and harmony. This thesis marked Time’s report of a “remarkable demonstration” that took place seven months after the massacre of innocents—the four black girls slaughtered in the bomb explosion in the church in Birmingham. In 1964 an integrated audience of thirty-five thousand people streamed into a stadium to hear the evangelist Billy Graham, who, awed at the turnout, exclaimed: “What a moment and what an hour in Birmingham!” Time identified the significance of the moment: “If it could happen in Birmingham, it could happen anywhere.” Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reached a like conclusion based upon Birmingham’s acceptance of integrated public accommodations. It was this: “New laws . . . make progress possible.”15 Another columnist, Raymond Moley of Newsweek, believed “distinct progress” had been achieved since King defeated Bull Connor—specifically the desegregation of three schools, parks and lunch counters, and the municipal golf course. Newsweek took a more critical view, grumbling that such changes were mostly “skin-deep,” but even it signaled that progress was under way. An example was that when the Civil Rights Act was inaugurated, “Birmingham, incredibly, complied with . . . hardly a whimper”; another was the 27,075 to 15,029 vote against reverting to the old commission form of municipal government that was closely identified with segregation.16 The progress theme also featured a black defender of America. A column written by the syndicated labor journalist Victor Riesel was published by the Columbia State of South Carolina. (It was reprinted in the Congressional

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Record at the request of Senator Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina segregationist, because it illustrated “what great strides the American Negro has made in . . . America.”) The news peg was an international conference in Geneva at which Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, was to cross swords with critics of the United States from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and India. “He will speak frankly of the bitter racial battle back home,” Riesel wrote, but “will [also] speak . . . of the tremendous Negro gains. . . . He will say that he would rather live in this land and make his fight here than anywhere else.”17 The most prominent Negro gain was the Civil Rights bill that President Johnson ushered through Congress after President Kennedy’s assassination. Foreign papers followed the legislation as it moved through legislative stages. Editors outside the Communist bloc “universally and extensively acclaimed” Senate action on it, said the USIA, which, perhaps recalling the admonition of Secretary Rusk, cautioned that the “legislation will not immediately or easily bring equality for the Negro.” The Free Press Journal of Bombay, an outspoken critic of America’s racial record, hailed the Senate action as “the first major breakthrough in a hundred years . . . in applying the principles of the Constitution to African Americans.” The East African Standard believed the Senate vote “must have been welcomed with relief” by those responsible for U.S. foreign affairs. While applauding the Senate action, al-Akhbar of Cairo wrote skeptically that the rights the bill was supposed to protect would remain just “ink on paper for a long time.”18 Final passage of the statute brought expressions of gratification from governments, especially some in Africa. The reaction was “overwhelmingly favorable” in Nigeria, where almost “every U.S. policy and action is viewed” in terms of what it signified for “achieving a full measure of equality” for all Americans. Ambassador Deming sent word from Uganda that Prime Minister Milton Oboté had been “overjoyed” by the statute, which removed some of the ammunition that “Communists have used [against Americans] among Africans with telling effect.” Similar praise emanated from Latin America, where Bolivia’s President Victor Paz Estenssoro extolled the law as “a magnificent victory.”19 Passage of the bill created a problem for Communist propagandists, who generally descended to the occasion by ignoring or belittling it. Despite the “demagogy of the Johnson administration,” Peking Review sneered, racism had “not abated in the United States,” nor would the “much-heralded ‘civil rights bill’” end the grievances of black Americans—a point also made by Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda. Pravda ignored the bill. Cuba’s Prensa Latina sniffed that it was “a plaster that covers the sore but does not eliminate the purulence”; besides, the “Johnson ‘Texanocracy’” gave it only tepid support.20

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There was some truth in the Red carping: Southern resistance had limited (but not halted) the desegregation of schools, previous civil rights acts had been woefully inadequate, and the 1964 statute was long overdue. Still, the measure would become recognized as one of the major landmarks of the struggle for racial justice. Even Izvestia admitted its import. While insisting that U.S. racial problems would continue, Izvestia conceded the law was “a definite step forward.”21 Naturally, the U.S. government searched for ways to contradict what Ambassador Kohler characterized as Moscow’s “one-sided, negative presentation.” The Voice of America and American Magazine, both of which reached the Soviet Union, should be utilized, Kohler recommended, to promote the bill as a sincere “effort [to] attain and sustain freedom through law.”22 U.S. diplomats and information officers who attempted to wring propaganda advantages in Africa from the 1964 bill faced a formidable opponent—not a foreigner, but an American—Malcolm X, formerly of the black separatist Nation of Islam and one of the most gifted speakers and effective proselytizers of his time. Under the influence of orthodox Islam, Malcolm X had abandoned the doctrine he had once espoused that the white man was a devil doomed to extinction. Now, he was trying to line up support in Africa in order to arraign the United States as a racist state before the United Nations. The strategy was not unique—W. E. B. Du Bois had tried to do something similar more than a decade earlier—but it was audacious. As Peter Goldman wrote, Malcolm intended “to bring the plight of the blacks before the nations of the world, to rattle their chains where all mankind could hear.”23 His rattling of the chains was a discordant note in the international approbation for the United States that resulted from enactment of the Civil Rights bill. Malcolm decried the statute on Kenyan television as “a calculated propaganda move by the US to impress the peoples of Africa and Asia,” and that nothing had changed, except blacks were “persecuted more vigorously than before.” Considering the amount of effort diplomats and information officers expended to differentiate the United States from South Africa, Malcolm X must have driven them almost apoplectic when he urged upon the Organization of African Unity, meeting in Cairo in 1964, the proposition that the United States was actually “worse than South Africa.” “America preaches integration and practices segregation,” he said, while South Africa was at least open about its racist principles.24 Malcolm received ample press coverage while on tours of African countries, and African leaders received him warmly. Unsettled by the inroads he was making, American officials took steps to “dilute the venom of Malcolm.” The embassy in Conakry laid plans to undermine his activities

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in Guinea, suggesting his doctrines were “rejected by most authorized spokesmen [of] Islam as well as [by the] U.S. Negro community.” It also sought to damn him by association, asserting that his views on racial issues were identical to those of “white extremists.”25 Washington’s campaign against Malcolm received some assistance from the newsweeklies, which had portrayed him as a deviant for years. Aware of the mischief Malcolm X was stirring up in Africa, the magazines injected some venom of their own. Time sought to take him down a peg or two, by sketching him as an international gate-crasher; it jeered that Malcolm showed up in Cairo “as a self-appointed delegate to a Pan-African conference.” (George Breitman wrote, in contrast, that Malcolm was seated as an observer at a conference of the OAU and was invited to submit a memorandum to the delegates.)26 Newsweek disdained Malcolm’s role at the OAU as that of “a man with a menacing word for every occasion.”27 After his murder in 1965, U.S. News spewed vitriol on the “many African newspapers [that] pictured Malcolm X as a martyr whose death would set back integration.” Carl T. Rowan, the director of the USIA, helped the effort of U.S. News by providing a cutting riposte to admirers of Malcolm: “All this praise . . . was for ‘an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler, who became a racial fanatic.’”28 Countering Malcolm X in Africa required more than the sometimes sophomoric tactics employed by American officials. Perhaps most of all, it required the efforts of an African American with impeccable civil rights credentials. Washington thought it had the man in the person of James Farmer, who had demonstrated his militancy at the head of the Congress of Racial Equality. Farmer visited various African states under the sponsorship of the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, an umbrella organization that included, among others, the NAACP and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rusk notified nine U.S. posts in Africa that Farmer would present a “true picture of the progress of civil rights in America and . . . state the true aspirations of most American Negroes as compared with what has been said in Africa by Malcolm X and Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali].” Farmer denied he went to Africa as a stalking horse for State, but whatever Farmer’s intentions, Rusk acted as if Farmer were State’s man; the secretary directed U.S. emissaries to assist Farmer in crafting tactics to parry the thrusts of Malcolm; “to facilitate his [Farmer’s] making contact with government leaders, university students, media representatives, and other influential groups”; to compile “statements and suggestions re tactics available for Mr. Farmer on arrival” in countries visited by Malcolm X; and to arrange for Farmer to speak not only to American officials, but also “to the non-official American community.”

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Significantly, Rusk cautioned them to avoid “too close an identification” between Farmer and the embassy, which “may be counterproductive.”29 Clearly, Rusk took seriously the trouble Malcolm X was causing the United States government in Africa. Malcolm himself claimed some success in linking racial issues in Africa and those in America. His evidence was a “concerted attack on American ‘racism’” that broke out during the U.N. debate over the U.S.-Belgium expedition that “rescued Americans, Europeans, Indians, Pakistanis and Congolese from the pro-Communist rebels” in the Congo. Some African delegates at the U.N. expounded on “American guilt in the massacre of blacks [in order] to save whites, of . . . acting as a ‘white racist imperialist,’ even of genocide.” The New York Times printed some material supporting Malcolm’s claim. African delegates accused the United States of indifference to the fate of the Congolese and linked it to their reading of the U.S. attitude “toward the civil rights struggle in Mississippi.” This assertion “profoundly disturbed” U.S. delegates, who left the impression of being “caught off guard.”30 Malcolm’s death, which occasioned widespread press coverage and commentary abroad, foreclosed the possibility of determining what would have been the fate of his African venture had he survived. Peter Goldman argued that it probably would have come to naught, even had he not been killed, because African nations needed American foreign aid so greatly. “Africa liked Malcolm X,” Goldman said, “but couldn’t afford him.”31 Even if Africa’s need for U.S. dollars doomed that project, had Malcolm X lived, he might have continued to alarm Washington—as a Muslim who happened to be an African American. Malcolm X enjoyed substantial status as a Muslim among leaders of Islam. The embassy in Jidda reported to Washington that in Saudi Arabia Malcolm “seems to have been awarded the title ‘Leader of Muslim Negroes in the United States.’” He met with leading Islamic religious leaders and was received by members of the Saudi royal family, who, plainly, had no particular need of U.S. financial aid.32 Before and after the assassination, the State Department betrayed an institutional skittishness about Malcolm because of the factor of Islam. It was not only in sub-Saharan Africa that the department attempted to keep abreast of his activities (and those of his former Black Muslim coreligionists). Since Islam was one of the major world religions (it had more adherents in Asia than in Africa), the Department of State ordered posts in Muslim states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, not just those in sub-Saharan countries, to observe and report on his activities. For that matter, the U.S. government had paid increasing attention to Islamic countries for years, because of their great resources and strategic locations.

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President Eisenhower had courted King Saud of Saudi Arabia, for instance, by denouncing the “atheistic creed of Communism,” and warning that the Soviets could not be permitted to “become entrenched at a key position in the Moslem world.” President and Mrs. Eisenhower participated in the dedication of a mosque and Islamic center in Washington and even accepted a copy of the Koran from their hosts.33 The State Department even went to the length of seeking to discourage foreign visitors to America from meeting Black Muslims because of some unpleasantness for which Malcolm X bore some responsibility. A State Department interpreter had been assigned to accompany the wife of President Sékou Touré of Guinea on a visit to Harlem in 1960. The interpreter was informed, reported the New York Times, that “because she was white, she could not sit at the head table during a luncheon for Mme. Touré. (The objection was withdrawn at Mme. Touré’s request.) At a reception for Touré, Black Muslims surrounded the participants, distributed copies of a publication, and joined in the booing that forced the master of ceremonies, an NAACP official, to yield the microphone to another speaker. Malcolm X was at the forefront of the controversy, warning, for instance, “that the ‘Negro masses will never again accept Uncle Tom leadership hand-picked by the white man.’”34 The incident caused consternation at the State Department that was reflected in instructions sent out under the signature of Secretary of State Christian Herter to seventy-six U.S. posts in Africa and Asia, requiring them to impede contacts between foreigners and Black Muslims. Many of the foreigners wished to visit world-famous Harlem, the cable said, and the department did not want to refuse such requests lest it appear to be trying “to hide a ‘black ghetto.’”35 In Pakistan, Ambassador McConaughy nudged Foreign Minister Bhutto toward a posture of hostility to the sect, about which Bhutto had had only “sketchy information” before McConaughy briefed him. Bhutto took a position that had almost everything Washington could have wanted: He was indignant about the Nation of Islam’s “unauthorized preempting of the Muslim name and symbols,” and entertained the idea that Islamic countries might “publicize that this organization has no connection with or understanding of Islam and holds principles which are in opposition to the teachings of the Qur’an.”36 The American press revived the glass-houses theme again, jerking both America’s adversaries and allies up sharply for their racial failings. The motivation for the theme was put succinctly by U.S. News: Others “freely criticize the U.S. for its treatment of the Negro—but do little if anything about their own race problems.”37 An Associated Press survey included some distinctive characteristics of the theme. Various AP bureaus abroad

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contributed material to the article, which the Washington Sunday Star (and no doubt other papers as well) ran. The article asserted that the portrayal of U.S. racism was an important function of Russia’s Cold War “propaganda factories,” which seldom missed “a chance to exploit America’s racial troubles.” The article seemed designed to lessen the disconcertedness of Americans who read seemingly unending condemnations of their country from others no less guilty of the sin of racism. The survey specifically delved into racial troubles in India, Britain, Africa, France, Ceylon, Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and so on. In fact, the article explained, “With the exception of Antarctica, where there are no people, few large areas of the world have been immune to the virus of prejudice.” That passage was followed by another likely to soothe the offended sensibilities of Americans who might be willing to concede their country had its share of racial injustice, but not an exclusive franchise on it. With racism so rampant, the AP made it a point of saying, there was “little room for selfrighteousness in most of the globe’s heavily populated areas.”38 A great deal of self-righteousness had been exhibited by Communist nations over the years. But now they had highly visible racial problems themselves that had caught the attention of Western journalists because of the disillusionment of hundreds, if not thousands, of young Africans recruited to study in Soviet and other Communist universities. Racial prejudices those Africans encountered caused many of them to quit their studies, and some of them transferred to institutions of higher learning in Western Europe or the United States. One “dramatic exodus” was precipitated in Bulgaria after the authorities denied a request for an all-­African student union and deported seven African student leaders in early 1963. The young Africans lugged empty suitcases, signifying their desire to leave the country, to a demonstration in Sofia. They were arrested but were later permitted to travel to West Germany.39 Racial conflicts behind the Iron Curtain led to castigation from U.S. and European journalists. So pointed were their thrusts that Josef Mestenhauser, a scholar of international education, rebuked the writers for exploiting “the problems which the African students have had in East Europe.”40 Newsweek came down especially hard on Bulgaria, describing it as not only an unwilling host of foreign students, but as “the cultural Slobbovia of the Communist bloc.” Lured by the promise of a free education, Africans and Asians “streamed into Sofia by the hundreds,” Newsweek said, but they soon began streaming out, embittered by “classroom brainwashing and racial intolerance.” Communist prejudices, Newsweek asserted with more eagerness than evidence, promised to rank Sofia with Little Rock and Ole Miss as an epithet “in the non-white world.” Newsweek implied,

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for that matter, that Sofia was worse than either Little Rock or Ole Miss, pointing out that Africans in Bulgaria were assaulted by police and civilians and were insulted as “black monkeys and jungle people.” The author of that observation, Robert Kotey, a student from Ghana, even went so far as to claim that Bulgaria had more racial discrimination than any capitalist state.41 Time spotted the same pattern in Czechoslovakia. “Just as Radio Prague was gleefully reporting the [civil rights] battle in Birmingham, race riots exploded” in the Czech capital, Time reported with its own dollop of glee. The Czechs blamed “drunken hooligans” for the riots, but Time countered by insisting the same troubles befell Africans wherever they lived in the Soviet bloc. U.S. News accused the Reds of hypocrisy: They preached the “brotherhood of races,” but practiced the opposite, to the disillusionment of Africans once dazzled by “the promise of racial equality under Communism.”42 Change a few words, and essentially the same smear had been leveled at the United States by the Soviets. Newsweek seized on a parable of the color bar to mortify the Russians. It seemed that a Soviet newspaper had counseled Russian girls to “shun foreigners” and become farmers’ wives. Larissa was one of the girls who ignored that advice. Swept off her feet by “Mahmoud, a dark-skinned foreign student,” she married him and left Russia with him, only to end up, so the tale went, “in a harem as the sixth wife of one of Mahmoud’s friends.” Muscovites who swallowed the story whole “hounded and abused African and Arab students,” reported Newsweek, “demanding to know why Larissa was sold into a harem.”43 Moscow’s difficulties with African students boiled over again in Decem­ber. The Christian Science Monitor sketched an astonishing spectacle, partly because of where it unfolded—in Red Square—and partly because five hundred to seven hundred Ghanaian students did battle with policemen. They were protesting the death of one of their number— an accident, claimed the authorities, a murder, countered the Africans, who carried placards asking, “Is This Moscow or Alabama, U.S.A.?” Infuriated by Russian bigotry, one African even went so far as to declare that his hatred of the country was so great “that I want to contribute to the American defense budget.” The Monitor lectured the Russians stiffly—no doubt gratifying many readers—that they lived “in a glass house and the race prejudices” they accuse Americans of exhibiting were also found in the Soviet Union.44 To Western taunts about Soviet glass houses, the Communists responded with equal parts of indignation and ideology. It was simply impossible for the Soviet Union to harbor racialism, Pravda and Izvestia replied stiffly, because it would be “in radical contradiction to the nature” of a

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Socialist society. But the reality is that there was discrimination. Ironically, the Soviet coverage of America’s racial problems may well have exacerbated racism in Russia. Newspapers such as Pravda and Izvestia routinely portrayed African Americans as poverty-stricken victims of oppression. David Shipler, a USSR-based correspondent for the New York Times, later wrote about his experiences in Russia. “If someone doesn’t want to do menial chores, he may say, ‘I don’t want to be a Negro for you.’” A teenager described blacks for Shipler as “lazy, stupid, unattractive.”45 Kenyan Nicholas Nyangira wrote an article for the New York Times Mag­a­zine in 1965 that was replete with grievances that could have been expressed by almost any university student anywhere—crumbling buildings, poor food, doctrinaire professors, and so on. But he also revealed other conditions that made life in the Soviet Union especially difficult for Afri­can students: isolation from Russian girls, who feared cruel reprisals for fraternizing with the Africans; physical attacks on and thefts from students; insults such as “‘chorny,’ which literally means black but also ‘nigger’”; and, the main source of discontent, “thorough brain-washing.” The Times had already published a similar (in principle) analysis by then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who had visited the Soviet Union. Not only was racism worse in Russia than elsewhere in the world, Nixon judged, but blacks there were worse off “than . . . in . . . Alabama or Mississippi.”46 The Washington Post gave the Communists opportunities to criticize racial problems in the West, but it also exposed the Soviets’ wretched relations with the Africans. “Soviet propagandists touted Russia as a land free of racial bias and discrimination,” the Post said, but the honeymoon proved to be a short one on both sides. It traced the friction in part to Russian condescension toward Africans, and interracial liaisons for which Russian hooligans assaulted the black students and about which the authorities frowned. Still, the Post cautioned readers not to count on these factors to deter Africans from going to the Soviet Union. They yearned for an education so desperately they would take any opportunity to get one, even if that meant spending years enduring Soviet bigotry.47 Foreign students experienced similar adversity in China. The new Communist regime began recruiting foreign students in 1950, and their numbers rose to as many as two thousand within a few years. The students were pressured into denouncing the United States for “discrimination against Negroes.” Ironically, discrimination against the students themselves drove some of them out of China. Segregated from Chinese students, they had “little social life and few friends of their own choice,” and yearned for female companionship.48 The U.S. newsweeklies cast a harsh light on the Chinese. Mao, who had spoken so forcefully on behalf of the U.S. civil rights struggle, was

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challenged by Time, which borrowed a Minneapolis Tribune cartoon in which a jovial Mao reassured a stooped, sad-faced black man: “Of course, there’s no discrimination in China. Here we enslave everybody.” Less wittily, U.S. News reported the expulsion of Cameroonian students who persisted in reciting grievances about a “black ‘color bar’” and policies that isolated them from the Chinese people.49 The U.S. press did not especially misrepresent the experiences of foreign students in the Soviet bloc and China. But the journalists exhibited more eagerness to expose racial prejudices behind the Iron Curtain than to reveal similar conditions that plagued other Africans in the United States.50 Still, the U.S. press did not target Communists alone. The Australians managed to arouse the ire of the left-of-center Newsweek, the centrist Time, and the conservative U.S. News over a cause dramatized by almost two thousand Australians, half of them students, who protested the mistreatment of black Americans, burned a cross, and paraded in hoods and robes to dramatize Klan activities in America. U.S. diplomats advised Washington of the “substantial evidence” that the rally was “exploited . . . by the Communists” and left-wingers.51 U.S. News, which gave covert (sometimes overt) support to domestic racism, was infuriated that the Aussies had the gall to find fault with the United States for racism when their country had a long-standing “‘whitesonly’ policy” for immigrants. Those hypocrites (the word was absent, but the sentiment was plain) did not raise their voices against the exclusion of nonwhites, which has “been denounced by Asian and African nations.”52 Time derided Australians’ disclaimer that they did not discriminate racially. While only a few hundred Asians were allowed in Australia each year, Time pointedly observed, 150,000 Europeans were admitted. Superimposing an appealing human face on statistics, Time related the story of six-year-old Nancy Prasad, who, with her family, had managed to get into Australia from Fiji on tourist visas. The police tracked down little Nancy and put her on the next flight to Fiji. Publications across the world responded with indignation to her fate. One Australian journalist recounted the “horror and astonishment” at the sight of the bewildered child being “loaded onto a plane [and] deported.”53 The U.S. press also directed rhetorical fire at Britain, where both major political parties, Conservative and Labour, had essentially reversed themselves and come out in favor of clamping down on the once unrestricted immigration of citizens from the Commonwealth. En route to Oslo, where he would receive the Nobel Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stopped over in London in December 1964 and gave the British what Newsweek regarded as a deserved scolding for “a rapidly growing problem in race relations.”54

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The shoe was now on the foot of the Brits—never ones to keep their thoughts about the U.S. color bar to themselves—and the newsweeklies made sure it was pinching. U.S. News held forth on the disorders in the English city of Birmingham, where “the problems of Birmingham, Alabama, no longer seem remote” to the Brits.55 Newsweek considered the racist rhetoric being expressed in Birmingham, England, to be even rawer than that spouted by the Alabama arch segregationist George C. Wallace. A British Conservative Party candidate, Peter Griffiths, was censured for “giving currency to the slogan: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbor, vote Labour’”; Griffiths denied uttering this slur, but he did not convince Newsweek. That periodical also ran a tart rejoinder to a Labour man who thought Britain’s racial conditions could not be so terrible, since “Good God, man, this is Birmingham, England, not Birmingham, Alabama.” He should listen to sentiments circulating in a club for London workingmen, one of whom, Newsweek shot back, voiced the sentiment that even though he’d voted Labour all his life, he would not do so again so long as it was “favoring the darkies.”56 The conservative Wall Street Journal found virtue of a sort in unconcealed racism. It quoted a black doctor who fumed, “I’d rather live in the Deep South . . . than here in Britain. At least an American Negro knows exactly where he can go and where he won’t be admitted.” By contrast, the black Briton “never knows where or when he’ll meet humiliation and rejection.”57 Journalists from across the Atlantic chastised European nations for mistreating guest workers, millions of whom had flooded into Europe after World War II. (“They call themselves ‘the niggers of Europe,’” Jane Kramer wrote of them; while doing Europe’s dirty work they were grudgingly tolerated at best, persecuted at worst.) With ill-concealed smugness, Newsweek advised the Europeans that they should learn from America’s long history of assimilating foreigners. But Newsweek maintained strategic silence about the embarrassing (and well-documented) hostility that awaited many immigrants in America, whether in contemporary or historical times.58 Brazilians had a smug sense of the superiority of their society, based upon comparisons of its racial climate with that of the United States. Specifically, Brazilians boasted that nonwhites in Brazil were far better treated than were Americans of color. That was too irritating to get past Time without a stinging response: white Brazilian racism was so extreme it would stagger “the wildest Yankee imagination.”59 Scandinavians had “great sympathy for the cause of peoples of color,” but this reflected no credit on them so far as U.S. News was concerned. To be anti-Finnish, anti-German, or anti-American was permissible, wrote

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U.S. News, but to be “anti-Negro is regarded as a sin.” Many Scandinavians conceded, to be sure, that their societies would experience racial problems like those of America if they had to integrate even “a few thousand Negroes.” But their hypocrisy showed, U.S. News implied, because they conceded this in private but refused to do so in public.60 U.S. News also acquainted readers with racial issues in Asia and Africa. In Singapore, twenty people were killed and hundreds were injured in the latest flare-up of violence between the native Malays and immigrant Chinese.61 Clashes in the Sudan revealed that racialism was entrenched in that African nation. At each other’s throats were four million blacks in the south and ten million Arabs who controlled the northern provinces and the government. Sudan, the right-wing magazine predicted, was “headed toward a bloody crisis in its long-term racial conflict.”62 U.S. News was prescient: The bloody conflicts in the Sudan would continue (in somewhat different form) into the next century. But the magazine did not simply report events; it manipulated them as symbols. Headlines such as “Other Areas Where Race Riots Flared” and “Race Riots: A World Problem” indicated that the glass-houses theme once again had become part of the symbolic transaction between U.S. News and its readers. That theme was present in provincial as well as national publications. It was time, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Tribune thought, to take a critical look at the racial records of governments abroad. Saudi Arabia led its list of offenders. The government had finally bestirred itself to offer compensation for the emancipation of slaves, but there were few takers, because “slaves, it seems, are worth twice as much as the government offered for their freedom.” The implication was that the Saudi Arabian government knew quite well what the going price for slaves was and had no wish to disturb the institution. The Ainu, residents of northern Japan whose racial characteristics were more akin to Eskimos than to the Japanese, were plagued by racist slurs, such as being mocked as dogs. The giant Japanese dailies, Asahi and Mainichi, neglected to explore the plight of the Ainu, the Tulsa paper implied, but rushed to print articles “about American race prejudice.” An editorial titled “The Blacker Pots” assailed the Russians for operating separate schools for the children of white Russians and Ukrainians, on the one hand, and native Kazakhs and others, on the other. On the subcontinent, the Indians, “long the loudest critics of America on race matters,” discriminated against “dark-skinned Dravidians”; the Filipinos regarded the hill people as socially unacceptable in Manila; the black Kikuyus of Kenya were preparing a racial massacre that would “solve Kenya’s race problem” once independence was secured from Britain; and the Australians refused to hire “a Bushman for anything except sheep herding.”63

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Americans, no less than other peoples, want to think well of themselves and of their country, and they are capable of being moved to anger when foreigners heap odium upon them. By exposing the racialism present in other lands, the U.S. press redistributed the infamy that seemed to be spattering America from all points of the compass. If so few societies were immune to the infection of prejudice, as the AP story maintained, racism could not be regarded as uniquely American, but as part of the human condition. The glass-houses theme made that idea concrete. The U.S. press also had an institutional reason to expose other nations’ racial failings. The theme said to Americans, in effect, that their press did not parrot the carping of foreigners, but defended the country by pointing out that other nations had their own grievous sins, which foreign faultfinders refused to acknowledge. As 1964 was ending, the hope was expressed in some quarters of the U.S. press that there would be a cessation of turbulence and violence in the South. As Newsweek suggested, borrowing Bull Connor’s nickname for a pun, it was time to put an end to “Bull-headed resistance to integration.”64 But Alabama had not seen the last of Bull-headed resistance. It would reemerge (though Connor himself would play no direct part in it) in the racist resistance to the Selma voting rights campaign, the last great southern campaign that King would lead. Once again, King set out to bring pressure to bear on a national administration, this time Lyndon Johnson’s, to enact federal legislation in order to guarantee the black southerner’s right to vote. As in Birmingham, King would have some unintended (but decisive) assistance from Alabama law enforcement personnel, who brutally broke up a march from Selma to Montgomery, creating a crisis that would ensure the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the greatest legal milestone of the civil rights era, which in time would effect the political emancipation of black southerners. But the act would not bring racial peace; instead, more bloody confrontations were on the horizon for many American cities.

Chapter 12

Selma and Watts

T

hree interrelated events in 1965 brought profound changes in American society. The first of them, the voting rights campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led in Selma, Alabama, was designed to help bring about federal legislation to guarantee the black southerner’s right to vote. Out of it grew the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. In contrast to the effusions of hope that accompanied the Selma campaign and the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots signaled that more and bloodier insurrections were coming, and they would occur across America. Armed with the Voting Rights Act authority, federal registrars were dispatched to the South, where they enrolled black voters in sufficient numbers to eventually bring about a political revolution in the region. Once black southerners were armed with the ballot, Jim Crow was doomed, as all but the most fanatical segregationists had to know. Yet racism would survive Jim Crow’s passing, and since de facto discrimination existed across America, it was the nation as a whole, not just the South, that would become the battleground. Even whites who had cheered on King’s campaigns against segregation had nursed hopes that reforms would quiet the anger in the hearts of their black countrymen. It was not to be. Instead, Selma created expectations of social change and improvements in the lives of African Americans that neither the events in a small Alabama town nor the Voting Rights Act could reach. On August 11, less than a week after President Johnson signed the bill into law, the Watts riot erupted. For his campaign in Selma, King returned again to the tested Gandhian strategy of creating a crisis that had served him well in Birmingham. His followers generally remained nonviolent, but their tactics were intended to prod policemen into open violence against peaceful demonstrators to unmask the brutality of segregation. After some preliminary skirmishing, the crisis was precipitated on March 7 when King’s forces—he himself 190

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was not present—refused to turn back their protest march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. Alabama state troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies charged into the ranks of the six hundred nonviolent marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and broke up the march. The confrontation came to be known as Bloody Sunday.1 Before the disrupted march could be resumed, two obstacles needed to be removed. One was cleared away when a federal judge lifted his injunction blocking the demonstration, and another was removed when President Johnson maneuvered Alabama governor George Wallace into acceding, in effect, to the federal government providing protection for the marchers. Wallace claimed that Alabama’s state government could muster only 450 of the 6,171 men he estimated would be needed for the security detail, a cost, he said, the state government could not afford. Johnson rebuked him and Alabama legislators for failing their responsibility to carry out simple police functions to protect the right of citizens “to walk peaceably and safely without injury or loss of life,” and the president ordered soldiers to accompany the march to Montgomery.2 King led the resumed demonstration, which received national and international media coverage, especially on its fifth and last day, March 25, when fifty thousand demonstrators followed him into Montgomery. The reactions to the abuses of human rights in Selma were international as well as domestic. As the journalist Jim Bishop wrote: “The sound of clubs on heads echoed all around the world.”3 News stories and pictures of lawmen charging on horseback and foot and flailing marchers with clubs were flashed to the world electronically, reaching the less-developed regions primarily in the form of wire service dispatches, still pictures, and radio news. Despite the growth of television between 1963 and 1965, that medium was mostly missing from or was scarce in most of Africa and Asia, where the United States and Soviet Union conducted their most intense propaganda struggle over race. Of the estimated 105 million television sets outside the United States and Canada at the end of 1965, Western Europe had 50,942,700; Eastern Europe 23,581,400; the Far East 23,842,300 (of which all but 592,300 were in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand). Latin America and the Caribbean had 7,548,200 sets (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico accounted for more than 5,215,000 of that total). The Near East and South Asia had 1,039,200 receivers. Last came Africa, with 313,300 sets (of which sub-Saharan Africa had a third). India and Pakistan, with populations totaling a half-billion persons, had fewer than 3,000 sets.4 Other technology necessary to make television a true worldwide medi­ ­um was also lacking. Earth stations were as essential as orbiting satellites. They beamed a signal up to a satellite, which boosted the power of the

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signal and relayed it back to points on Earth, to be received and retransmitted by other stations. Africa had no earth station until 1969, and in Asia only Japan had one earlier than that year.5 With limited global satellite reach, the medium had to circulate film and videotape at a snail’s pace to many places overseas. “News pictures are flashed electronically almost as fast as words,” the Christian Science Monitor observed. “And movie film for television is not far behind.” Actually, film for television was far behind radio and wire services for most of the world’s population. Satellite facilities were not available in 1966, for instance, when the White House tried to arrange to send television images to the United States of President Johnson’s state visit to Asia; getting “proper pictures” from Japan to the United States would require twenty-four hours, presumably by shipping them aboard jet aircraft across the Pacific.6 Shortwave radio newscasts and text and still photographs, by contrast, crossed thousands of miles in seconds or minutes via undersea cable or radio waves. Expense and time differences continued to inhibit satellite usage in 1965. Even four years later, in 1969, a ten-minute block of time for transatlantic and transpacific transmissions cost three thousand dollars, discouraging satellite use by commercial news operations or even government agencies such as the USIA. And time differences and socially dictated scheduling of television programs could create problems. London was five hours earlier than New York, and an event in the United States had to be captured on film by early afternoon in order to make prime evening news shows in the British capital. Among the earliest relays to Europe were the transmission of images in 1963 from the March on Washington in August and the funeral of President Kennedy in November. Coverage of the funerals of King and Senator Robert Kennedy was transmitted from the United States to Europe in 1968; in 1969, Americans witnessed the investiture of the Prince of Wales live from Britain, and hundreds of millions of the world’s population viewed live pictures of the moon landing. Unlike chaotic breaking news, coverage of those events could be scheduled in advance, taking advantage of technical facilities already in place or that could be easily arranged. In sum, there had to be satellites in orbit to receive signals from and relay signals to earth stations; stations on the ground to broadcast the programs; and television sets on which audiences could view them—none of which were uniformly distributed across the globe in the 1960s.7 Nor was television necessarily the most important medium of news abroad. Nigeria had four television stations by 1965. Yet the high cost of television and the oral tradition of Africa ensured that radio remained the dominant medium there for years. Polls conducted in 1963 found that almost all respondents with six or more years of formal education regarded

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radio and newspapers as the “most important sources about ‘what is going on in the world’”—and radio was regarded as the more reliable.8 The phenomenon also existed to some extent in television-saturated nations, such as Japan, where 93 percent of respondents claimed to watch television, and 89 percent of households claimed to have at least one set. While 57 percent of respondents said they relied mainly on television, and 33 percent depended primarily on print news sources, the bettereducated and the better-off had a “higher regard for newspapers than for television.” The major Japanese newspapers Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri had great impact due to circulations (more than seventeen million total among ninety-eight million Japanese) and because their operations included all media.9 During his address to Congress about Selma, President Johnson re­minded lawmakers and American TV viewers of the “grave concern of many nations” about racist acts perpetrated in the South. Pictures of “the uglier scenes in Selma” enjoyed “wide prominence” in many parts of the world, though—as in the Far East and Latin America—they often were put on inside pages rather than splashed on front pages. A diplomat posted to Rome called Washington’s attention to the “ugly photographs of Alabama state troopers . . . dispersing Negro and white demonstrators” with clubs and tear gas canisters, and of injured blacks lying on the ground or on stretchers. Communist sheets, of course, picked up and printed the appalling pictures “of . . . police brutality.” Other visuals included editorial cartoons, some from Soviet sources, others from U.S. and European outlets.10 There were some telling foreign broadcasts about Selma. Radio Indonesia sent out a daily five-minute program encouraging black Americans “to raise ‘their bloody hands and throw off [their] chains.’” What transpired on Bloody Sunday was old news by the time it was viewed on most television sets abroad, yet some images still had the power to shock in ­societies as in Sweden, where television was an important medium. Swedish television aired a horrifying “sequence [of] police brutality” on the night of March 9, and afterward the embassy in Stockholm was inundated with phone calls from Swedes “revolted by the spectacle.”11 Print coverage, which was light to moderate, included some powerful articles and pictures. Italy’s Corriere della Sera told of “white racists roaming the streets of Selma with ‘blood in their eyes.’” It also had a powerful illustration of the unfairness of Alabama’s voter registration. Even a lawyer for Alabama’s government confessed he was baffled by questions about the U.S. Constitution that were “used to disqualify Negro registrants.” King’s call for a boycott against Alabama was front-page news in Dar es Salaam, and his arrest in the early days of the campaign, Ambassador Reed advised

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from Luanda, did “more to damage [the] ‘image’ of the United States” in the eyes “of literate African people in Angola than any other single event during my incumbency.” The United States—which had censured Lisbon for denying African natives self-determination—was subjected to a withering counterblast from Portuguese colonialists, who voiced mock astonishment that such savagery could occur in the United States.12 Perhaps with this sort of invective in mind, the U.S. press assured Americans that their country remained an inspiration to the world even though it was berated for the latest racial flare-up. The Christian Science Monitor and Time magazine deftly crafted a version of the theme from the unpromising materials of an African president’s state visit. The materials were unpromising because the visitor was an international nobody, and his nation no colossus. (As Time put it, the “little (five feet, six inches) Maurice Yameogo, President of the little (105,900 square miles) new nation of Upper Volta.”) Still, Yameogo was transmogrified in a fashion that underscored the greatness of American devotion to the principles of equality and justice lately trampled underfoot in Alabama. Yameogo himself assured President Johnson that Upper Volta (and other African nations) “continued to hold the U.S. in high esteem.” But it was later that the theme registered most powerfully. In Time’s narrative, following a state dinner, Johnson took his guests to the Lincoln Memorial: “[A]s Yameogo caught his first glimpse of the massive, brooding figure. ‘Formidable! Formidable!’ he whispered in French.”13 The Monitor contributed a sketch of antiphonal homage to the great symbol of the Republic. As the motorcade returned to the White House, “President Yameogo started speaking in French . . . that ‘this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom . . .’” After it was translated, President Johnson picked it up and completed the line “. . . and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” After the Gettysburg Address, Yameogo went on to recite the second inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” with Johnson finishing, “and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”14 Thus were united as powerful national symbols the president who had freed the slaves and the president who presided over the political emancipation of their descendants—and it happened before the eyes of an awed world, as exemplified by Yameogo.15 The stories of Time and the Monitor could not have been more symbolically complete—except absent from the scenes of the motorcade leaving the Lincoln Memorial were the strains of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. As analyzed by the USIA, foreign commentary about Selma was relatively limited, but there was an important distinction from past editorials.

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Once the commentaries “condemned the brutality and condemned the U.S. for permitting it”; now they “condemn[ed] the brutality,” but not America. Contributing to the improvement in tone were the 1964 civil rights bill; the view of foreigners that the violence in Selma amounted to “a rearguard action by white supremacists”; and the demonstrations by “thousands of Negroes and their white supporters.”16 Hundreds, even thousands, of foreigners were moved to join demonstrations at such widely separated points as Ottawa, Nassau, and Amsterdam, or to sign petitions as gestures of solidarity with the campaigners of Selma. One sit-down demonstration at the U.S. consulate in Toronto lasted for eight and a half days. Two thousand French Canadian university students joined a rally in Montreal, at which they were addressed by James Forman, the executive director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose young cadres were demonstrating in Alabama. The audience donated money for SNCC’s work, then launched a demonstration by sitting down in the street.17 Another factor contributing to the improved foreign opinion was Johnson’s “uncompromising address” to Congress, in which he demanded Congress enact strong statutory protection of voting rights. In a symbolically charged moment he concluded his address with the title of the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” Johnson’s address was circulated “to all heads of state and government in Africa.”18 His speech, as had Eisenhower’s words and actions during the crisis at Little Rock and Kennedy’s at the insurrection at Ole Miss, helped blunt adverse foreign views. Among those responding favorably was President Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria. Once embittered by his past brushes with racism in the United States, Zik was now “deeply touched by . . . [Johnson’s] humanity and depth of political sagacity” and by “America’s willingness and readiness to accept the challenge” of human rights.19 Nigeria’s media “warmly welcomed” Johnson’s speech and featured it prominently. Some papers emphasized the emotional impact of the president’s words on Congress and carried Reuters’s characterization of the speech and the occasion as “Johnson’s finest hour.” Similarly, Mainichi publicized the “storm of praise” that U.S. newspapers gave Johnson, even though the Japanese daily was troubled by his Vietnam War policies.20 USIA ordered up surveys in twenty-two countries and major cities in the five-month period between the Selma campaign and the Watts riot. Foreign public opinion disapproved of the injustices inflicted on African Americans, but curiously, there were favorable views of the government’s efforts to bring about racial justice. Even the often anti-American French press was stirred by Johnson’s call to protect black voting rights and his denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan. La Nation thought his speech “worthy”

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not just of his predecessor John F. Kennedy, but of “the great Abraham Lincoln.”21 Not all views were favorable. The semiofficial Press of Togo berated the administration in three editorials for having to be prodded into action by protest demonstrations. John K. Tettegah, leader of a trade union organization in Accra, issued a particularly bitter reprimand: “U.S. mounted police” carried out the “barbarous and fascist brutality” in Selma. (Actually, those were state and local law enforcement personnel, not federal officers—a distinction often missed abroad, to the distress of American diplomats. The concept of federalism was important to the diplomats, because it allowed them to argue that racism was regional and not reflective of the United States in general. But for foreign audiences, such a distinction was irrelevant.)22 As Selma neared its crisis point, the Soviets castigated America for allowing skin color to determine who could cast ballots. Pointing to the barriers that blocked blacks in the surrounding county from registering to vote, Izvestia estimated that at this rate it would take a century to get all eligible blacks on the rolls. New Times of Moscow disagreed with that estimate—but only to object that not even a hundred years would be enough. So Byzantine was the registration process, so arbitrary the power of the local examiners, that “even a thoroughly proficient jurist” could be defeated by the four hundred questions used to reject black applicants. New Times did not overreach: Earl Warren said he himself—the Chief Justice of the United States—would have been hard-pressed to answer some of the questions. One article depicted Dallas County Sheriff James G. Clark as a new Bull Connor; he and his men waded in with truncheons and electric cattle prods and drove black youngsters on a forced march. For defying the savagery of Clark’s forces, the children won the plaudits of New Times, which pointed out that they showed up for a later demonstration in double their previous number. Ever conscious of the need to keep their handiwork from being dismissed because it bore the taint of Red propaganda, New Times salted it with material identified as originating from France’s AFP news agency.23 Yet the clarity of the symbols arrayed in Selma never quite matched that of Birmingham. The Soviets’ portrayal of Clark as a Bull Connor notwithstanding, Clark achieved neither the malevolence nor the enduring quality of Connor as a symbol of racism. It wasn’t for lack of brutishness: Clark manhandled a woman demonstrator and drove black children on a forced march, actions that were captured on film and disseminated by media. Scale was part of it: the action in Selma (save for the violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge) was much more limited than similar scenes in Birmingham, and they lacked the latter’s power to shock. Moreover, Birmingham and

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Selma differed greatly in size and reputation. Selma was an obscure municipality in an unremarkable corner of Alabama; Birmingham, the state’s largest city, had a rock-hard reputation for segregation and brutality that was known throughout Alabama, if not the South. Nor did the opposing forces line up as sharply. King was the leading adversary of both Clark and Connor, to be sure, but the situation was more muddied. Selma’s white leaders tried to bottle up Clark by persuading him to relinquish control of law enforcement strategy and tactics to the measured hand of Selma’s public safety director, Wilson Baker. The city fathers were committed segregationists, but they wanted to avoid confrontations. Had their strategy worked, King very likely would have encountered difficulties similar to those that led to his defeat in Albany at the hands of Police Chief Laurie Pritchett. Certainly, the approaches of Clark and Baker contrasted sharply: Clark used violence against demonstrators in Selma, including at least one woman and the children of the city; Baker intervened to arrest a racist who had assaulted King. Most of all, Clark was diminished as a symbol by the activism of Alabama governor George Wallace and President Johnson. Wallace, not Clark, was chiefly responsible for the Bloody Sunday clash that pushed Selma onto the national stage. Wallace prohibited the march halted at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and sent fifty Alabama state troopers to enforce his order. By contrast, Clark’s deputies were colorful, albeit brutal, bit players on Bloody Sunday. And no country sheriff—and for that matter governor of Alabama—could overshadow the president when, in his capacity as the chief magistrate of the nation, he intervened decisively in the crisis. In point of fact, the role of the national government was precisely what Soviet propagandists wanted to exploit. New Times sought to make the murders of white volunteers James Reeb, a Unitarian minister, and Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, during the campaign stand for something greater than the fact of their deaths—to make racism in Selma something for which Washington bore responsibility, and not only recently, but since Reconstruction. For the New Times, the failure of the Alabama courts to secure justice for Reeb and Liuzzo by securing a conviction of the defendants in the case mirrored the failure of the United States—“in a whole century”—to eradicate “the aftermaths of slavery and provide decent conditions for its Negro citizens.” Nevertheless, Pravda, in the person of correspondent B. Strelnikov, did not discard such useful atrocities as their deaths. He contributed a powerful atmosphere piece that included after-the-fact reportage of the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., one of the Klansmen accused of murdering Liuzzo. It was the victim, Liuzzo, not Wilkins, who, in effect, was placed on trial, Strelnikov wrote tellingly. Racists questioned both Liuzzo’s virtue as a woman and her loyalty as an

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American, Strelnikov noted in so many words, because “she was riding in a car with three Negroes.”24 But there was progress that the American press got on the record once the defendants faced justice in a federal court. The “evidence remained the same,” said Reporter magazine, accounting for the different result, but “the jury, the legal charge, the court, and the judge . . . [and] prosecution” were different. An FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, testified that he had witnessed Collie Wilkins, Eugene Thomas, and William Orville Eaton kill Mrs. Liuzzo after seeing her and a young black demonstrator driving back in a car from Montgomery after the conclusion of the march from Selma. The question, “Was it possible for a southern jury to try a civil-rights case fairly and convict on evidence of guilt?” was answered in the affirmative primarily because of the firmness and acumen of U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., who refused to accept the jury’s declaration that it was hopelessly deadlocked and ordered its members to deliberate further. They did, returning a verdict of guilty to the charge of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victim, and Johnson imposed the maximum ten-year sentence.25 Even so, Africans and Asians should not delude themselves into thinking Selma had nothing to do with them, Izvestia advised, inasmuch as the Americans exported their racism. It backed up that proposition with an incident in Nigeria involving James Meredith, of Ole Miss fame, who delivered a lecture in that African nation about U.S. race problems. Jack Jergens of the USIS, according to Izvestia, objected to a moderator’s statement that George Washington “would turn over in his grave if he knew how the freedom he fought for is now being trampled in the U.S.A.” Jergens disrupted the program, forgetting (here Izvestia added a sarcastic observation likely to resonate in a former colony) “that he was not in a southern state of the U.S.A.,” but in a sovereign country. Izvestia also disputed the USIS man’s commentary that America was making a “unique attempt to create the world’s only interracial, interethnic, and interreligious society where all have equal rights.” Meredith was the better judge of U.S. race relations, Izvestia thought, since he had been “obliged”—forced—to continue his studies in Nigeria rather than in his own country.26 Soviet propaganda also stressed the persistence and distribution of attitudes of white supremacy in America. Despite Johnson’s pledge to curb the Klan, Izvestia alleged, “Klansmen continue to terrorize not only the South, but also major cities of the West and the North,” making Johnson’s war on the Klan “a farce.” Additional evidence came from an Alabama judge who denounced Reeb and “‘niggers’ who demand civil rights.”27 The Christian Science Monitor informed readers that a “Racist Image Besets [the] U.S.” in Asia. Correspondent John Hughes offered some social

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coaching about news and isolationism: “It is no good thinking,” Hughes all but scolded readers, that “the Alabama affair is a discreet family quarrel which can be solved without people knowing about it in Borneo, Okinawa, and Macao.” Not when journalists from “India, Japan, and . . . Asian news agencies are in Alabama filing thousands of descriptive words” and photographs of “white troopers clubbing Negro demonstrators,” that cause Asians to “stop, stare, and simmer” because of the “stark . . . message of racial oppression.” (Actually, Western agencies such as the AP, UPI, Reuters, and AFP almost certainly sent more material to clients in Asia than did Asian services, continuing the dominance of Western news agencies from the colonial period. But perhaps Hughes was unaware of the dynamics of the news flow to Asia.) In any event, even papers normally friendly to the United States added dashes of vitriol. The Tiger Standard of Hong Kong ran a cartoon showing armed white troopers keeping a column of blacks at bay and another featuring two rotund cigar-smoking southerners—labeled Bigotry—who agreed about this: “They may be licking us in Vietnam, but we are sure clobbering them here.”28 Similarly, the New York Times printed a pastiche of headlines from West Germany, France, Japan, Brazil, and Canada to illustrate “the impact of the racial turmoil in Alabama.” Even so, it managed to find a bright spot: President Johnson’s “call for voting legislation was praised,” and some thought it would help offset what might develop into a “serious drop in U.S. prestige abroad.”29 Readers also could learn that the Communists were smearing the United States “with the handy tar brush of racial equality”; Renmin Ribao of Beijing alleged, for instance, that President Johnson “connived in the suppression of black demonstrators in Alabama.”30 Nor were the Chinese the only Reds hammering away at this theme. Soviet television, Newsweek reported, showed a clip of King being struck in a hotel in Selma; it was accompanied by a newsreader’s sarcastic comment: “This happened in the nation that calls itself the land of freedom.”31 The New York Times analyzed the USIA’s role in getting the Selma story to the world. In thirty-eight languages, the Voice of America sent out accounts of the crisis, including the bloodshed on Bloody Sunday. “By radio teletype to . . . more than one hundred countries, the [USIA] has been describing in ‘spot news’ announcements and in lengthy and penetrating news analyses the events” set in motion by Governor Wallace. The story illustrated the global reach of modern communication and implied that if the government took these events seriously enough to expend that much effort, Americans should do no less. Expecting readers to take a dim view of the USIA “deliberately advertising the uglier side of American life,” the Times met their objection in advance, explaining that foreigners had many

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sources of information; better the full story be disseminated, the paper said implicitly, to provide context and perspective to the events that had embarrassed the country in the eyes of the world.32 Of course, the Times did not discuss its own role in airing American dirty laundry for the benefit of foreigners. The Soviets regularly quoted U.S. journalistic sources when it suited their purposes. New Times took it further than most, reprinting almost the whole of a lengthy article the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell wrote for the New York Times Magazine. New Times established Caldwell’s credentials as an expert witness who knew firsthand “how deep the poison of racialism has penetrated.” As a boy, Caldwell had witnessed a plantation owner lashing the bare back of a black sharecropper with a thick strap, five feet long and studded with metal pieces. His offense was merely to buy a cow to provide milk for his family without first asking permission, the torturer explained. Even more useful to the Soviets—who often accused Americans of being in league with German fascists—was Caldwell’s description of the “firm belief” held by some southerners during World War II that Hitler would invade and occupy the South and bring firing squads to kill “every Negro and Jew from the Carolinas to Texas.” Some native racists laid plans to “join the Nazi landing forces,” wrote the novelist; even into the 1960s, some diehards were still clinging to the belief that Hitler was alive and would soon show up in the South.33 New Times reproduced Caldwell’s article faithfully until the last five paragraphs, at which point Caldwell wrote of moderate whites who condemned violence. New Times scanned Caldwell’s words for an ending that better fit the Soviet line. It settled on this: Racist whites would resort to anything—“guns, dynamite, [or] . . . flaming gasoline”—to deny blacks their rights.34 “In the Land of Jim-Crowism,” Peking Review reported, demonstrations were held from coast to coast against “the rampaging racialism in the rural South.” It listed the instruments of oppression—“truncheons, cattle prods, and tear gas”—and the results therefrom, “deaths and many arrests.” And Lyndon Johnson offered only glib promises of more laws to blacks “being hounded, hacked, and gunned down.” Peking Review recited a shopworn lesson to Africans, which it attributed to Ghana’s Evening News: “Americans cannot hate black men in the United States and love them in Africa.”35 What truly excited the Chinese, however, was not Selma, but Watts, which they interpreted as signaling the “American Negroes’ New Revo­ lutionary Storm.” No more reforms, no more petitions, Peking Review said, no more appeals to “the conscience of a brutal oppressor”; in effect, no more Martin Luther King Jr., who favored nonviolence over the gun.

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“American Negroes,” the Review pronounced with satisfaction, now “realize . . . that they must oppose counter-revolutionary violence with revolutionary violence.”36 The Watts riot began on the evening of August 11, when a white police officer made a routine stop of Marquette Frye, a young black man, on suspicion of drunken driving. Shortly thereafter, his mother “arrived on the scene and began berating her son, who in turn berated the police.” A crowd gathered and rock throwing ensued. The local authorities lacked sufficient forces to restore order, and fourteen thousand National Guardsmen were brought in to quell the disorders. Thirty-four persons were killed in the six days of rioting, and almost nine hundred injured; nearly four thousand arrests were made; and property damages reached an estimated $200 million. Later insurrections in other U.S. cities caused greater casualties and property losses, but the shock Watts administered to Americans was never surpassed—partly because it was the first of the great urban insurrections of the sixties, partly because its anarchical spirit clashed with the spirit of reform that undergirded King’s campaign for voting rights.37 From Moscow, Ambassador Kohler informed Washington of the Soviets’ “prominent and lurid coverage” of Watts, including items frontpaged by Izvestia, such as the cartoon of Klansmen “dancing around [a] burning cross beside Negro bodies,” and television and radio excerpts. The Watts riot was congruous with the Soviets’ propaganda message. Not surprisingly, the general line, as Kohler noted, was that the United States will never solve its racial problem “because of [the] fundamental socioeconomic defects of [the] capitalist system.”38 Pravda published its first article about the riot on August 15, four days after the rioting erupted. The three-hundred-word report was written by TASS and Pravda’s New York-based correspondent and cited both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. Two days later, a second article, of similar length, quoted an unidentified CBS correspondent and seemed to suggest that the country was about to dissolve into civil war: “The disorders continue in Chicago and Springfield. A riot is feared in New York’s Harlem. Negro actions blaze up already in other cities to the south of Los Angeles, including Long Beach and San Diego.” American press photographs, such as those from UPI, running in Pravda, reinforced the idea of a war between black and white. A longer piece on August 18 claimed the riot resulted from the socioeconomic defects of capitalism.39 New Times described “police and troops [who] brutally and mercilessly put down the Negroes,” damaging irreparably “America’s propaganda posture,” and drew a sharp contrast between “Glowing Promises and Bitter Reality.” Civil rights statutes and antipoverty programs were not bad in themselves, it conceded, but it likened them to promising a starving

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man a loaf of bread but delivering merely a crumb, thus guaranteeing the right to vote would not end blacks’ economic inequality.40 The facts of economic inequality proved persuasive outside the Communist bloc as well. Editorials published in Brussels believed the causes of civil disorders to be “essentially socio-economic” and foresaw “difficult tasks ahead” for the United States. West German papers agreed about the economic factor and doubted that many Americans supported the battle against racism.41 The East African Standard of Kenya “deplored [the] tragic, ugly, and unpardonable situation,” which it traced, in part, to civil rights legislation that was “moving all too slowly, albeit [in the] right direction.” Info Senegal referred caustically to “the detestable and ignoble situation” of millions of Americans who were “guilty only of having a different color,” and warned that Africans would not ignore “the inhuman fate” of more than fifty million people of African blood across the globe.42 South African publications tended to line up by language. Die Oosterlig, published in Afrikaans, advised the United States to learn from South Africa’s “ethnological boundaries”—in a word, apartheid. Had Watts occurred in South Africa, it continued with shrill defensiveness, “the world would have boiled over with indignation.” English-language papers favored “non-racial interpretations.” The Eastern Province Herald, for example, ascribed the rioting to the “frustrating economic circumstances” of African Americans.43 Once again, the U.S. press supplied details of what foreigners were saying, without which most readers would have been ignorant of foreign public opinion. Newsweek interjected a stinging rebuke by Remi Fani-Kayode, the deputy premier of a Nigerian province, who accused Americans of being “the inveterate enemies of the black races of the world.” To illustrate the depth of anti-American feelings, Newsweek added a yardstick: Fani-Kayode was not, “by African standards, considered particularly anti-Western.”44 Sometimes the American press addressed questions assumed to be nagging at readers. There was, for instance, the question, Why should Ameri­ cans care what foreigners think?45 The Christian Science Monitor had a ready answer: Because the color bar disturbed stout allies of the United States, such as the Republic of the Philippines. Since the United States granted it independence in 1946, the Monitor continued, America had no more loyal ally than this “fanatically anti-Communist and dashingly pro-American” nation. But even Filipinos felt Americans did not respect their country as an equal, and they identified “with the race problem.” As a Filipino put it, “you can’t expect to beat up black men in Alabama” and not cause a stir in the Philippines.46

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With a million Americans traveling overseas and as many or more foreigners visiting the United States, racial imbroglios could pop up practically anywhere. The Saturday Review alerted readers to “preconceptions, misunderstandings, and . . . bafflement” that resulted. In one particularly odd case, a physician from the Cameroons was observed keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the ground as he walked. The doctor explained that he was afraid to gaze ahead for fear of being “lynched if he looked at American women.”47 The Christian Science Monitor urged ordinary Americans to help keep their country’s reputation untarnished by practicing “personal diplomacy,” the need for which was illustrated by a contretemps in Tennessee. Upset at some poor service, a party of foreigners ascribed it to the color of their skin. An ordinary American restored amity by offering the “gently drawled” observation that white Americans had had the same poor service, before extending to the visitors a courtly expression of welcome.48 Worthy of emulation (in the eyes of Time) were average Americans who had made possible the progress of a young African named Legson Kayira from “the Stone Age to the Space Age.” Oppressed by the British in his native Nyasaland, but inspired by Booker T. Washington and Lincoln, Kayira dreamed of America “as the place one went to get freedom and independence.” He “put his finger on the first words” he found in a directory of U.S. junior colleges; he wrote one and eventually received a scholarship and plane ticket, courtesy of the people of Mount Vernon in Washington State. These Americans received Kayira warmly: “The family that ‘adopted’ him” installed him in a redecorated bedroom, and “neighbors stopped in with cakes.” Time tacked on a didactic conclusion: “Some will pin the word ‘naive’ on Legson’s wide-eyed good will and on America’s cozy, corny reception of him. But there may be more basic human realism in this naiveté than cynics”—foreign or domestic—“would concede.”49 The Christian Science Monitor told readers of exchange students gaining a new appreciation of America and of its struggle against inequality. A white South African found it much easier in America than in his homeland “to treat anybody as an equal”; and a black Ugandan knew that black Americans suffered beatings and discrimination but was unaware that they also had progressed in society. His American host even took the Ugandan on a trip to the South so that he could experience Jim Crow as part of learning about America. He was refused service in a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, but the negative impressions were counterbalanced by his acceptance as an equal by his host family and by the students at his Minnesota school.50 Embedded in such tales was the explicit or implicit message that America stood to gain if foreign visitors departed the country with warm

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feelings for it. Kayira, for instance, would help shape his countrymen’s ideas about America when he returned home, where he planned to “teach school and enter politics.”51 The press also posted signs of improvements on the racial front. Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford detected the evidence even in the “spectacle of peaceably demonstrating Negroes” being clubbed and teargassed by policemen; after all, these scenes moved Americans to action and encouraged the passage of the Voting Rights Act. There was brutality in Selma, to be sure, but there also was “the miracle of a southern President vowing that ‘we shall overcome’” and acting decisively to protect the right of black Americans to vote as freely as other citizens.52 Time found “quiet, solid, if often agonizing progress” in the South. It projected that the 1965 Voting Rights Act would add at least a million black voters to the rolls. Public accommodations had already receded as a problem in larger cities, and jobs once reserved for whites were opening up to black southerners, partly due to federal pressure, partly because the South “cannot afford to do without the full use of its Negro labor force.” Time admitted that the school integration picture was dismal, but even there, it observed, “more progress has been achieved in the last two years than most observers thought possible,” and still more was likely under the threat of federal financial aid lost if schools were not desegregated. The decisive word was left to Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. The struggle for racial justice was unfinished, he declared, but “the back of segregation is broken.” Even U.S. News made it a point of underscoring the improving economic lot of blacks—partly, in all likelihood, to convince them that since so much had been done for them they should content themselves with what they had. In any event, it observed, despite the idea that black Americans were falling behind, they were “moving up by the millions” into the middle class based on gains in education, income, and employment. It expected “more Negro progress ahead.”53 Ironically, Negro progress was strongest in that least democratic of institutions, the armed services. Since Truman had signed the order to cashier Jim Crow, the forces had achieved a greater degree of integration than was typically found in civilian life and were even pressuring civilians to erase the color line off-base in such activities as housing.54 So far ahead of other institutions was the military, Newsweek judged, that black Americans regarded enlistment as a sanctuary from discrimination. Its article included testimony along the lines of this statement by a black major: “I’ve been allowed to compete, and I’ve been given credit for what I’ve done. In the Army, it doesn’t matter if you’re blue, green, or gray.” While Newsweek did report that black soldiers preferred each other’s company off duty, it stressed that black and white soldiers were

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comrades of a single color, that of their uniforms. Taking that statement out of the abstract was an episode from the fighting in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam. “Despite fierce enemy fire, a Negro GI broke cover,” ran to a white American soldier immobilized by wounds, and began dragging him toward safety. The next day they were found “dead side by side, the Negro’s arm still outstretched to the white man he had tried to save.”55 In their eagerness to demonstrate progress, some journalists overstated the speed with which voting reforms would be felt. A front-page story in the Christian Science Monitor predicted a new political era in the South would come practically overnight, and that federal registrars sent into fifteen to twenty counties of the Deep South would “fling the doors open to Negro registration” and bring on “the beginning of a New South.” In reality they signed up fewer than fifteen hundred new black voters in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana the first day—a total notable mostly because so few African Americans had managed to get on the rolls previously. Even wider of the mark was the prediction that segregationist politicians such as George Wallace of Alabama and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina would be “hit hard by any large Negro voting bloc.”56 As it happened, Wallace and Thurmond were consummate politicians who recognized the looming political reality and trimmed their political sails, winning over many black voters. No racial progress was evident in Watts. True, much had been accomplished in bringing Jim Crow to heel, a Christian Science Monitor editorialist wrote, but the federal government “has done virtually all it can by legislation and ruling to end de jure segregation within American society.” What remained undone—the eradication of de facto discrimination—would require new reforms addressing issues much more complex than sending federal registrars to sign up black voters. As a further complication, even many sympathetic whites tended “to believe that Negro demands for rights and justice have been met” and questioned: “What . . . are they still demonstrating about?” Much of it was, at bedrock, economic, especially in employment and housing, but there was also a deeply running sense of black alienation from white society. Little wonder, then, the Monitor’s analysis that the racial climate was “entering a decidedly critical phase,” and there might be another explosion on the order of Watts unless the increasingly difficult problems were addressed.57 Actually, it understated the future consequences. More disorders, even bloodier and more costly than Watts, were on the horizon. The U.S. press not only informed its readers of the criticism emanating from abroad, but also returned the faultfinding in full measure. If anything, the comments of American journalists about the racism found in

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other societies became harsher. Contributing to the increased sharpness of tone were factors such as mounting weariness with foreigners’ condemnations of America, which had not lessened greatly despite the reforms; the realization that racial difficulties would not only continue, but also become increasingly complicated; and, perhaps most critically, the prospect that U.S. society would be shaken by future insurrections on the magnitude of Watts—with all that that implied for the opinions of mankind about the U.S. racial record. Predictably, then, the embarrassment to the United States of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma was lessened by caustic observations such as one that appeared in Time’s essay on racism in Asia: “‘If you see an Indian and a cobra, strangle the Indian first,’ the saying goes in Indo-China. Javanese peasants say, ‘When you meet a snake and a slit-eye (Chinese), first kill the slit-eye, then the snake.’ Among the Punjabis the proverb is, ‘If you spy a serpent and a Sindhi, get the Sindhi first.’” Thereafter tumbled out tales of hate returned for hate in the glass houses of the Orient: India and Pakistan, where the theft of a hair of Mohammed’s head set off sanguinary conflicts; China, where the Cantonese sneered at northerners as barbarians; Singapore, where rioting Chinese and Malaysians slaughtered “each other” with weapons ranging from daggers to bottles; and Japan, where six hundred thousand Koreans were disdained as the “equivalent of nigger.” Measured against “Asia’s endemic and murderous grudges,” Time summed up, “problems of racial discrimination [were actually] mild” in the United States, which at least allowed reforms and redress of grievances seldom matched in Asia.58 Missing from Time’s compilation, however, was an example of enmity so protracted and bitter as all but impossible to miss: centuries of struggle between the Vietnamese and the Chinese. The magazine’s silence about Sino-Vietnamese hostility was probably strategic rather than accidental; including it on that list would have undermined an article of faith for Time: that Communism was a monolithic force that would swallow much of Asia unless checked by U.S. military might. At an earlier point in history, it might have mattered less; it mattered a great deal in 1965, when the fighting in Vietnam became, irrevocably, America’s war. The Christian Science Monitor revived its glass-houses theme with a barbed editorial: “If other people’s hands were cleaner in the field of race relations,” it complained, “their harpings on United States shortcomings would be more understandable and less irritating.”59 New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger compiled a list of countries with less than clean hands. It was led by South Africa, “a hell for dark-pigmented people,” and certain free black African states where various tribes were at each other’s throats. Sulzberger’s list also included the United

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States, but America’s racial conflicts were made to seem much less appalling when arrayed with those of other lands.60 India and South Africa served admirably as foils for the press to use to improve the battered image of the United States. India practiced what News­ week described as “perhaps the most degrading form of discrimination.” So extensive was Untouchability, Newsweek maintained, that Un­­touchables had “to carry little pots around their necks so as not to contaminate the ground with their spittle,” and were forbidden to drink “from the common village well.” No doubt far more degrading indignities were forced upon Untouchables, but the exotica of spittle-filled pots dangling from their necks served to distinguish U.S. racist practices from India’s. (And the line was not that wide; drinking fountains designated “white” and “colored” had been around for decades in Dixie and were not unknown even at this late date, a fact Newsweek did not dwell on.) Discord between the United States and South Africa, which the Monitor reported, worked to America’s advantage in Africa, since a nation was known not only for its friends, but also by the enemies it made. The friction was traced to U.S. actions, such as insisting on “multi-racial diplomatic functions,” to the displeasure of the masters of apartheid. (The affront to South Africa was actually quite belated; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles blocked implementation of a similar policy during the Eisenhower era, but perhaps the American press was not privy to that decision.) South Africa banned black Americans from serving aboard planes landing at its airfields, causing further friction, and Washington canceled a scheduled port call in South Africa by the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Independence as a sign of its displeasure.61 American journalists and writers also directed some pointed words at the British about glass houses. The liberal Reporter offered this contrast: The major American political parties “are committed to erasing the injustices caused by prejudice,” but Britain’s Labour and Tory parties seemed unwilling to do that. The magazine also gave space to the black novelist James Baldwin, who reproached the British for transplanting their strain of racism to America; he traced Dixie’s racist attitudes, in part, to the heritage of white southerners, who were “almost exclusively of British stock.”62 U.S. News also contrasted the Brits and the Yanks in terms of what actions they were taking about discrimination based on skin color. The Brits discriminated against dark-skinned immigrants by restricting their entry, while the Yanks were in the process of eliminating quotas based on national origins, which raised the possibility that “West Indians excluded from Britain would be able to move into the U.S.”63 The magazine overlooked—or ignored—what had triggered the West Indian emigration to Britain: exclusion of West Indians from the United States starting in the 1940s.

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The founding of the British Klan occasioned some sharply critical U.S. press stories, even though there were probably fewer than two hundred British members at a time when American Klansmen numbered in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Christian Science Monitor did discount the British Klan “as the work of a few fanatics.” But two magazines—which were as widely separated ideologically as it was possible to be—wrung as much menace as they could from Britain’s Klan. New Times (Moscow) conceded that only nineteen persons showed up at the Klan’s first meeting, but, eternally vigilant for fascists lurking under capitalist beds, it rumbled ominously that “other dangerous developments began with small meetings in beer halls”—a reference to Hitler’s nascent Nazi Party. The British Klan was meanwhile an irresistible news hook to U.S. News. While U.S. political parties courted the black vote, it said, Labourites and Tories pursued “race policies calculated to appeal to white voters.” Having its cake and eating it too, the right-wing newsweekly berated British politicians as racists and in almost the same breath chastised their white American counterparts for craven obeisance to the demands of black Americans. U.S. News also declared ominously that Britain was “facing an explosive race problem comparable to that being faced by many U.S. cities.”64 The rioting that exploded in Watts resulted in huge numbers of dead and injured, arrests made, and massive monetary losses from property damage and looting. These were so enormous that it became all but impossible for U.S. News to suggest now that Britain’s prickly racial situation was comparable to the uprising in Los Angeles.

Summary and Conclusions

R

acial issues in the United States figured in ways great and small in the protracted and intensive Cold War between America and its Communist adversaries. Many, if not all, of the battles of that half-century struggle were not fought for military conquest or acquisition of territory, but for public opinion. As a result, symbols, words, and images became important weapons of choice in these engagements, in no small part because their impact was increased by the transformation of European colonies in Asia and Africa into new nations. Having broken the shackles imposed by colonialism, the populations of these new countries cast wary eyes on countries that tolerated or mandated the continued existence of white supremacy similar to what they had experienced for decades, even centuries. This book has examined the discourse about racism in the United States—primarily in the news accounts and propaganda of the period— for attitudes and perceptions about American racial inequities, especially those that drew power from the passing of colonialism. It explored the difficulties created for the U.S. government as a result and examined the crucial contribution of news (and to an extent propaganda) in bringing such abuses to the attention of foreign and domestic audiences around the globe. American organs of news and opinion clearly gave currency to hundreds, possibly thousands of racial controversies that they unearthed, informing tens of millions of Americans of the incidents and exporting many of the same materials overseas via wire services and other media institutions to audiences that collectively numbered in the hundreds of millions, directly and indirectly. For example, the Associated Press made its domestic wire available to Britain’s Reuters and France’s AFP, which passed on those materials to their own clients outside the United States. 209

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In addition to the worldwide wires, supplemental organizations, such as the New York Times News Service, provided news to domestic and foreign clients. And U.S. news products circulated across the oceans, to be read by an estimated seventy-five million persons. The U.S. news system made crucial contributions to the domestic and international flow of news and information about racial problems. Its effectiveness was in part a matter of numbers. Thousands of domestic daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines were in private hands, and there were also enormous broadcasting and film industries that could, and did, inform Americans of what was occurring on the color front and what was at stake because of it in the Cold War. Gathering the news entailed significant outlays for journalists, support services and staffs, and facilities. The resources possessed by the domestic news agencies dwarfed those of other journalistic organizations operating in the United States, foreign or domestic, print or broadcast. Since only a few hundred foreign correspondents were posted to the United States as late as the 1950s (most of them being based in New York City and Washington, D.C.), most domestic racial news probably originated in the U.S. press system generally, and the global agencies such as AP, UP, and the supplemental wires specifically. (Foreign media were primarily but not solely responsible, of course, for getting the news into the hands of foreign consumers of news in a given country.) Even the best-staffed U.S. newspapers and magazines relied on the wires to supplement their own staffers’ work. Strikingly, even Soviet and Chinese organs of propaganda routinely mined the U.S. press for materials to produce their recurring indictments of the United States as irredeemably racist. This was tacit recognition of the work of the American press system in reporting racial incidents that occurred on American soil. By taking materials from the American press, the Soviets said in so many words that those accounts could be trusted, since American journalists were writing about matters damaging to the interests of the United States. Paradoxically, the American news gatherers, in the act of reporting stories of race, at once cooperated with the U.S. government when they circulated such news and made the government’s difficulties from such reportage worse. Unquestionably, the government wanted the U.S. press to educate Americans about what was at stake for the country because of race and the Cold War; as Dean Acheson suggested, publicity about the racist discrimination might persuade them to root out the evil that created so much trouble overseas for the nation. On the other hand, without American journalists unearthing the latest abuses and atrocities, it is unlikely that the news about them would have reached foreign shores in the quantity they did or with the impact they had—if they had been sent to other nations at

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all. First, there were relatively few foreign correspondents in the United States to cover the entire country. And second, many of the major racial stories occurred in small cities, such as Little Rock, Arkansas, and towns or hamlets such as Money, Philadelphia, and Oxford, Mississippi—all off the beaten path of national, let alone international, journalism. Word got out in many cases because the wire services were able to mine local newspapers for stories and photos. Whatever the sentiments of individual journalists about writing articles that embarrassed the country, and which, on occasion, violated the social mores of their communities, the wires had an economic motive to sell the news where they could. They had to cover news of this ilk for domestic clients in any event and would gain extra revenue by selling it both at home and abroad. Items about race had considerable impact abroad, especially in Asia and Africa, as American diplomats reported to Washington. But there was another wrinkle. The American press circulated stories to domestic clients about what foreigners were saying about American racial difficulties and how this discourse damaged U.S. foreign policy interests. Without such articles in the U.S. press system, few Americans would have learned about foreign perceptions of their country’s racial issues— nor about what was at stake for the United States because of them. Notoriously ethnocentric, Americans were not noted for their willingness to suffer gladly the slings and arrows launched from abroad about their country’s shortcomings. But crucially, the press put those perceptions in the context of the global Cold War. America and its Communist adversaries were engaged in a struggle for hearts and minds, especially in the emerging nations in Africa and Asia, where news of American offenses against people of color could have important implications for the United States. Locating and keeping friends abroad, the press said in effect, might bring great advantages for the United States when it needed to secure vital resources, strategic locations for military installations, and even military manpower. Yet there was an obvious implication: These advantages might be lost unless America achieved a reputation for treating nonwhites equally and decently instead of as subhumans who could be humiliated, even lynched, with impunity. Furthermore, the press did the government another service by challenging the hoary notion that the nation could—and implicitly should—isolate itself from the world. In so many words, the press argued that the United States could not cut itself off from the world. Communication technology and the swift flow of news ensured that accounts of an atrocity committed even in an obscure hamlet would flash around the world, much as did news produced from the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

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Communist propagandists seized on the U.S. record of injustices inflicted upon all racial minorities. For example, Soviet wordsmiths, knowing of the antipathy that South Americans nursed for the gringos after a century or more of sporadic bad relations with the Colossus of the North, alleged that illegal immigrants from Mexico had been virtually enslaved and that even people of Mexican blood who were American citizens were denied many of the rights and benefits of their citizenship. America’s Communist foes also gave currency to allegations that the United States had practiced genocide against Indians and other aboriginal peoples, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev himself did in his response to Washington’s claim that it, unlike the Soviets, had never imposed its will upon other peoples by force of arms. What of the Indians? Khrushchev retorted with damning effectiveness. The Soviets (as well as the Chinese) also deftly mingled historical and contemporary examples of the sufferings of nonwhites at the hands of the Americans. They compiled a lengthy record of the United States breaking its word—treaties—to Native Americans. Communist propagandists likewise issued carefully crafted appeals to Asians, many of whom believed the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II but would not have done so against its white European foes, the Germans. References to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were coupled with the testing of hydrogen weapons by the United States, which caused actual or potential harm to native populations in the Pacific region. But it was the white-on-black violence that produced the most coverage nationally and internationally and provoked the greatest outcry. Some of these incidents occurred outside the South, as in the rioting against desegregation of housing in the Chicago area in the postwar period, but most of them took place in Dixie and were mounted in response to challenges to Jim Crow in public accommodations (for example, the sit-ins of 1960 and the St. Augustine, Florida, campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964); interstate transportation (the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s); elementary and secondary schools in Little Rock, in Clinton, Tennessee, and in New Orleans during the Eisenhower administration; and during the desegregation of flagship state universities in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama during the Kennedy era. Where the white-on-black violence occurred also impacted coverage. Studies have shown that the news media are “creations of the community they serve,” and that the news reflects the practices of those in power. In small, homogeneous communities such as were found in the South, newspapers are typically part of the tightly knit power structure, which they tend to support. Thus, southern editors and journalists felt some pressure not to report local racial incidents, and attempts were made to even extend that pressure to AP reporters, albeit with little success.

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Correcting misperceptions and countering Communist propaganda required the U.S. government to monitor reactions of other countries to American domestic racial problems and conduct its own propaganda in response. It typically relied on the USIS and USIA to monitor press coverage abroad and on U.S. embassies to relay the perceptions of locals. For example, embassies around the world were flooded with letters about the fate of Jimmie Wilson, the black Alabaman sentenced to death for stealing $1.95 from an elderly white woman. Other domestic racial crises produced demonstrations at embassies. By actively monitoring public opinion abroad, the U.S. government was able to determine relatively quickly the effects of these incidents and the official actions taken in response to them. To combat negative foreign opinion, the government sought to establish that while racial issues were a problem, they were decreasing in number and gravity, and that blacks and other U.S. minorities had actually made great strides toward equality despite the impressions created by racial incidents. And second, when compared to the practices of other countries, the U.S. situation was not that bad. For these messages to resonate with audiences abroad, the government, of course, had to generate accounts and evidence that things were in fact getting better. It actively sought good news regarding racial progress and distributed that information widely via its communication arms, such as the USIA and Voice of America, and through its diplomats and officials stationed abroad. The USIS, for example, persuaded Bombay-area newspapers and 409 other papers to publish material it supplied about Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The agency also promoted Brown in films and exhibits and at its libraries overseas. The government tried to wrest similar propaganda advantages from the 1963 March on Washington by creating a film, The March, which foreign posts evaluated for its propaganda value and for potential media outlets. In its reporting on racial issues, the American press developed a number of themes, which either reflected the government’s own line or gave voice to what the government hoped to achieve. But unlike the government, the media did not address only foreign audiences. Some of the themes were addressed primarily to Americans. The theme of racial progress—which was directed at foreigners—was commonly expressed at times when the United States was under attack for failing to achieve racial justice. Sometimes the progress cited appeared to be exceedingly limited, as when a black child was selected as the most beautiful baby in a beauty contest that included tots of different races, or when a black woman was employed as the first airline stewardess of her race in the country. Other breakthroughs involved politics, such as Congressman Dalip Singh Saund’s election from

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a district historically hostile to Asian Americans—and even defeated a friend of President Eisenhower in the process. Improvements in the civic climate of former racial hotspots were presented as proof that the same would happen in similar circumstances. For example, the progress in Clinton, Tennessee, where there once had been turbulence and violence over school desegregation, was converted into “proof” that the same thing would happen in Little Rock, which was then embroiled in its own racial crisis; Little Rock, in turn, supposedly demonstrated the same would happen in Birmingham, while Birmingham portended future progress in Selma. But the line of progress had to be broken at least temporarily at this point: It was next to impossible to introduce Selma as signaling progress to come in Los Angeles, where the Watts district, the site of the country’s first great urban insurrection of the 1960s, had erupted in bloody rioting. Legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act offered the press and the government other opportunities to stress the message of racial improvements. Voice of America and American Magazine promoted the act as a sincere effort to attain freedom through law. U.S. diplomats and consular posts were advised to inform all audiences about the law. Eisenhower’s televised address to Americans about the military’s efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas, gave the government a chance to show that the country was taking racial inequality seriously and, implicitly, was doing something about it. The address was translated by the administration into forty-three languages and sent abroad. Voice of America broadcast details of the 101st Airborne’s efforts. In addition, Secretary of State Dulles cabled U.S. diplomats a comparison to rebut Communist propaganda: The United States acted to ensure the education of black children, while Moscow dispatched the Red Army to crush freedom in Hungary. The U.S. government was also able to portray Americans of color as the beneficiaries of American benevolence and enlightenment. Once Hawaii was admitted to the union as a state, Eisenhower could stand before the parliament of India and exalt Hawaii as a demiparadise from which racism had been all but rooted out. To vitiate Communist propaganda that condemned Americans as colonialists, the government sponsored visits during which foreigners could observe the harmony in which Hawaii’s many races lived together. Other themes plainly were intended primarily for Americans. The press sought out examples around the world of nations that used American racial problems to demonstrate their superiority to America and its record of social injustice. (Foreigners would be likely to reject this “glass-houses” notion on the ground that the Americans were attempting to excuse their atrocious record by pointing to others with like problems.) While some of

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the targets of the theme were Communist, the press also singled out nonCommunists as well, such as South Africa. In effect, the theme provided encouragement and reassurance for American readers whose country was under attack; this was accomplished by meting out a form of symbolic punishment to those who took America to task while refusing to correct their own shortcomings. Another theme encouraged Americans to emulate the good works of ordinary Americans who did their country a service by welcoming visitors of color to the United States, whether they were diplomats, dignitaries, students, or tourists. (This theme came to the fore during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years when increasing numbers of African diplomats were taking up posts for the first time in the United States.) Visitors who suffered indignities and assaults in the United States were or would be in a position to influence foreign opinions by rising to leadership roles in their own countries, for example, or in those of institutional organizations such as the United Nations. One African envoy who was denied service at the Miami airport flew onto New York and the United Nations, where the United States asked him for his vote on a human rights issue. He later became prime minister of his country and long remembered his slight at the hands of ordinary Americans. The reverse side of the coin was to urge readers to eschew the bad works and ill will demonstrated by some Americans who, to use Time’s stinging phrase, shamed their country, and, implicitly, cost it much-needed international respect and accord. The theme of minorities as defenders and advocates of America was probably intended mostly for Americans to demonstrate their value to the United States when the world carped about U.S. racism. Most often appearing on the list of advocates and defenders were African Americans, but there also were others, such as Saund, who was born in India but later became an American citizen. Some, like the former governor of Oklahoma Johnston Murray, combated Soviet propaganda in Mexico, home to many Mestizos of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, as evidence that Indians could indeed find success in America. Murray’s visit generated press coverage in Mexico that repeated that message of racial opportunity and accord. Not too dissimilarly, thousands of Americans went abroad on cultural and athletic tours for the U.S. government. There also was a reverse side of the coin for this theme. Obloquy was reserved for those whom the press considered too radical or too outspoken, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Malcolm X, even if their achievements were great. The press was not alone in being disturbed by Malcolm’s appeal among African leaders and students; Secretary of State Dean Rusk took steps to diminish his influence in Africa. The government tried to undermine Malcolm’s credibility by suggesting

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that most leaders of Islam and the U.S. black community rejected his doctrines. Another press theme encouraged Americans to take pride in their country as an inspiration to the world and as the provider of American largess and assistance of various kinds. Africans’ veneration of Abraham Lincoln was powerful proof that America still commanded the respect of many foreigners, no matter what the hostility abroad engendered by contemporary Jim Crow. And Americans provided practical assistance. Black civil rights activists, for instance, showed Africans the tactics they should use that had been tested out in such freedom struggles as the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides. Other Americans helped Africans found or expand educational institutions, assisted them with public works through organizations such as Operation Crossroads Africa, and (in the person of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall) taught them the tenets of American constitutionalism that helped pave the way for the colony of Kenya to achieve independence by guaranteeing political rights that would be enjoyed by diverse populations. Thus while the press certainly made the U.S. government’s job of selling the idea of American democracy to the newly developing countries more difficult by reporting on racial violence, it also assisted the government by educating Americans on what such violence did to the country’s image abroad and by tempering the racism with stories of racial betterment and progress. But by 1965, times had changed. The urban riots of which Watts was the most prominent proved that what had been a story about the South had become “a story about the national condition.”1 These findings point to the need for additional studies or extended consideration of matters mentioned obliquely. The newsreel is one medium that needs further study, not least because its audiences comprised hundreds of millions. Another is the medium of television. Television was an important domestic factor in the coverage of the modern U.S. civil rights movement. During most of the 1960s and into the 1970s, television became an increasingly important medium in the industrialized nations, but not in most of Asia and Africa, for whose friendship the United States and the Soviet Union competed most fiercely. Why racial injustice in the United States aroused such sharp reactions in Africa (and even Asia) may be ascribed to lingering antipathy to colonialism. After freeing themselves of European colonialism (with which they had had many decades, even centuries, of experience), the colonial peoples still equated colonialism with racism and decried the abuses inflicted on Americans of color as evidence of how they in turn might be treated by white Americans. And this happened even though those former colonies had little or no access to television and its wondrous visuals. It is possible to

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concede that the medium of television had a great impact on the American civil rights movement without resolving another issue, which is suggested by the overseas response to the racial injustice in America: Was television a necessary precondition to the civil rights movement in the United States? Or were other, perhaps equally important factors, at work in Africa, such as the persistence of the oral tradition in Africa? While this study was essentially limited to the Cold War, the phenomenon of international censure of the United States for its racial problems neither began nor ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Much (but not all) of the ideological friction generated during the 1940s through the 1960s faded in the 1990s, but some Communist states, such as China and Cuba, survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and found race a useful propaganda tool with which to belabor the United States. Rhetorical attacks have been launched at the United States in recent years because of abuses of human rights from the second Iraq war in general and specific allegations of the abuse of prisoners detained at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Strikingly, the revelations of the scandals began with powerful, still photographs— rather than moving images—that were broadcast on the television news magazine 60 Minutes. It may be worthwhile to compare and contrast the strategy and tactics of American propaganda campaigns that were conducted in response to foreign perceptions of American racism during the Cold War and to the broader arena of human rights abuses during the American war on terrorism in the late 1900s and into the twenty-first century. The obvious starting point is the period that encompasses the initial attack and later destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and the U.S. relief effort for victims of the 2004 tsunami disaster. That relief effort seemed to improve America’s image to some extent, especially among certain Muslim populations that nursed considerable hostility toward the United States as a result of the war in Iraq. It would also be instructive to examine the reactions and responses of the American media to rhetorical attacks on the United States from the international press in light of the war on terrorism.

notes



The following abbreviations are used within the notes:

AFP AP CC CDSP Cong. Rec. CSM DDE DSB DSJP FBIS FRUS HAR HST IA (M) JKF LBJ NA NR NT (M) NYHT NYT OF POF PPP P. Rev. PC R. Dig. RG S.E. Post SMCP Soc 14, 14–1

Agence France Presse Associated Press Christian Century Current Digest of the Soviet Press Congressional Record Christian Science Monitor Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kans. Department of State Bulletin Daily Summary of the Japanese Press Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Report Foreign Relations of the United States Hispanic American Report Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. International Affairs (Moscow) John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas National Archives, Washington, D.C. New Republic New Times (Moscow) New York Herald Tribune New York Times Official Files President’s Office Files Public Papers of the Presidents Peking Review Pittsburgh Courier Reader’s Digest Record Group Saturday Evening Post Survey of Mainland China Press Social Conditions 14 or 14–1 219

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TGNC UPI USIA USIS USN&WR

Texas Good Neighbor Commission United Press International United States Information Agency United States Information Service U.S. News & World Report

Introduction

1. “Disorders Halted in Tennessee City,” NYT, February 27, 1946; “Outbreak in Tennessee Jail,” NYT, March 1, 1946; “Tennessee Race Trouble Ends as State Highway Patrolmen Appear,” Atlanta Daily World, February 27, 1946; Nat D. Williams, “Tenn. Policemen Mow Down Two Negroes in City Jail,” Atlanta Daily World, March 2, 1946. 2. “Races in Turmoil: Reasons Why—Here and Abroad,” Newsweek, September 15, 1958, 25. 3. Ann K. Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots, 1965–1968: A Comparison of Soviet and American Press Coverage, 23. 4. Robert W. Ikard, No More Social Lynchings, 41, 70–71. The casket picture inspired an editorial cartoon in the Washington Afro-American depicting armed Tennessee lawmen invading the funeral home that contained the casket (ibid., 68). “Hitlerism Is Not Dead,” Chicago Defender, March 9, 1946. “Tragedy in Mink Slide,” Time, March 11, 1946; “Terror in Mink Slide,” Newsweek, March 11, 1946, 28–29. 5. Ikard, No More Social Lynchings, see especially 7–9, 11–28, 76–77, 102–4. See also Dorothy Beeler, “Race Riot in Columbia, Tennessee: February 25–27, 1946.” 6. Daily Worker, June 30, Columbia, Tennessee, riot file, Philleo Nash files, Box 6, HST. The Times criticized the prosecution for “flamboyant flap doodle” and others, presumably the Communists, for exploiting “the trial and the riots.” It praised the jurors for “manfully” facing up to their duty to acquit the defendants of an offense for which “the overwhelming majority of them were patently not responsible” (NYT, October 6, 1946). Vincent Sheen presented the verdict as an affirmation of Americanism (NYHT, October 11, 1946, reprinted by the Nation, October 14, 1946, 472–73). Time, more cynically, recorded the verdict as “a minor miracle,” requiring the questioning of 736 potential jurors to find “twelve reasonably unprejudiced” individuals for the jury. Still, it ended on an idealistic note, using Sheen’s praise for the effect of the verdict— making “us realize the full splendor of our destiny as a nation” (“Mink Slide: The Aftermath,” Time, October 14, 1946, 29). 7. Daily Worker, March 9, 1946, Columbia, Tennessee, riot file, Philleo Nash files, Box 6, Harry S. Truman. 8. An AP dispatch was the first Columbia story that the Times ran (NYT, February 27, 1946). 9. Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots, 36.

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10. For a sample of the civil rights/Cold War literature, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy; Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960; Renee Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity: African Diplomats, the State Department, and Civil Rights, 1961– 1964.” Some, such as Justin Hart and Thomas Guglielmo, have argued that the struggles of Mexican Americans for civil rights affected U.S. foreign policy as early as World War II; see Justin Hart, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during World War II”; and Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas.” 11. Hart, “Making Democracy Safe,” 52. 12. N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian–American Relations, 1775– 1815, 46. 13. Charles P. Cullop, Confederate Propaganda in Europe, 1861–1865, 26–27, 54. 14. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 157, 189, 216–17. 15. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 26, 244. 16. Hart, “Making Democracy Safe,” 52, 56. The analogy is adapted from Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 14. 17. Some media organizations “transformed certain exiled Nazi collaborators of World War II into . . . heroes of the renewed struggle against communism,” and powerful media figures helped “suppress critical news concerning the CIA’s propaganda efforts” (Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Re­ cruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, 5, 127). 18. The Eisenhower administration convinced DeWitt Wallace, editor and co-owner of Reader’s Digest, to kill an article that “was extremely critical of American operations on Taiwan” (Undersecretary of State Christian A. Herter to Secretary of State Dulles et al., October 31, 1957, Herter Papers, Chronological File, October 1957 [2], DDE). The administration failed, however, to get Time to recant its story that a U.S. diplomat in La Paz believed that “Bolivia should be split up and given to its neighbors,” thus creating a situation in which American lives and property were put “in serious danger” (Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, Memorandum of Telephone Conversation with Allen Grover of Time-Life Inc., March 3, 1959). Time’s owner Henry Luce did express regret that the article “caused expressions of unfriendliness towards the United States.” For the statements of Herter and Luce (on March 3, 1959), see Herter Papers, Chronological File, March 1959 (3), Box 7, DDE. Democratic administrations also put pressure on the press. President Kennedy attempted, for example, to stop the reporting of preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. 19. George V. Allen, “Propaganda: A Conscious Weapon of Diplomacy,”

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DSB, December 19, 1949, 941–43, and Stanley Frank, “How to Heckle Stalin,” S.E. Post, July 7, 1951, 22–23, 90, 92, 93. U.S. newspapers and magazines allowed the United States Information Service (USIS was the overseas name of the United States Information Agency [USIA]) to circulate their items for republication by the press abroad (“Role of American Magazines in Campaign of Truth,” DSB, November 27, 1950, 857). 20. Acheson to U.S. Consul, Kuala Lumpur, September 4, 1952, 811.411/9– 352, Box 4438, RG 59, NA. 21. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion; D. D. Smith, “Mass Communi­ cations and International Image Change”; Wayne Wanta, G. Golan, and C. Lee, “Agenda Setting and International News: Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Foreign Nations”; D. K. Perry, “The Mass Media and Inference about Other Nations”; L. Willnat, J. Graf, and P. R. Brewer, “Priming International Affairs: How the Media Influence Attitudes toward Foreign Nations.” 22. This approach was impracticable, however, for foreign media and their audiences because of the existence of hundreds of cultures and subcultures across the world. 23. Stuart Hall, introduction to Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 11, 13, 22. 24. On a sit-down strike by black GIs at a bar in Misawa, Japan, see Yomiuri, August 22, 1963; and DSJP, August 30, 1963, 12–14. On racism in the U.S. Army abroad, see Y. Pashenny, “Americans in Austria,” NT (M) no. 14 (1948), 22–23. 25. Ruth Adler, A Day in the Life of the New York Times, 103. In 1945, the AP supplied one hundred thousand words and United Press seventy thousand words to the Times (Edwin L. James, “The Organization of a Newspaper,” 8). 26. David Randall Davies, “An Industry in Transition: Major Trends in American Daily Newspapers, 1945–1965”; Xiaoling Zhang, “Breaking News, Media Coverage and ‘Citizen’s Right to Know’ in China”; Shuhua Zhou, “China: Media Systems,” 462. 27. Davies, “Industry in Transition,” 60; Lester Markel, “The Newspapers,” 373. 28. Davies, “Industry in Transition.” 29. President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad, “Conclusions and Recommendations,” December 1960, PCIAA Study no. 35, VI–12, Box 13, White House Office files, NSC Staff Papers, DDE. For Berding’s remarks, see “The Press and America’s Image Abroad—an Official Criticism,” USN&WR, December 5, 1960, 128. 30. See Dennis Russell and Richard Lentz, “Project Kingfish, 1951–1967: The U.S. Information Agency’s Clandestine Distribution of American Propaganda Newsreels to Foreign Movie Theaters.” Propaganda and news are not always easy to distinguish. The government stocked libraries and information centers overseas with many thousands of American magazines. Were these magazines propaganda or news? Most American journalists would insist on the latter, but their Soviet-era counterparts would scoff at any attempt to distinguish between them. The term propaganda is used in this book as communication carried out

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unapologetically as a routine function of government to distinguish it from news as a journalistic enterprise that insisted on maintaining an adversarial stance toward government, even if the practice often departed from principle. 31. Berding, “Press and America’s Image Abroad,” 130–31. Actually, items about racial progress in America appeared as early as the Truman administration. 32. “Troubled Route,” Time, October 13, 1961, 26. 33. For circulation and readership of magazines, see statement of Harry C. Thompson, the director of Newsweek International, on behalf of the magazine industry, to the House Appropriations Subcommittee, 1959, U.S. Congress, House Committee Hearings, 86th Cong., Vol. 1722, 1244. On domestic and foreign clients of the AP (in 1983) and UPI (in 1977), see Jonathan Fenby, The International News Services, 82–83. The estimate of audience sizes is ours. 34. Harrison E. Salisbury mentions the death of the French journalist in Without Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising Look at the New York Times, 365. An early story on Gandhian nonviolence and the bus boycott is K. Balaraman, “Satyagraha in Alabama,” Hindu, February 27, 1956, 1. (Balaraman was the Hindu’s New York correspondent.) The article was sent as an enclosure in Fleck to State Department, February 28, 1956, 811.411/2–2856, RG 59, NA. 35. Editor & Publisher’s 1957 compilation lists approximately 235 foreign news organizations represented in the United States. A separate compilation covered the United Nations Correspondents Association. There was some overlap between representatives in the two cities, as well as between representatives in New York and those assigned to cover the United Nations. TASS assigned seven members to its New York staff, as did Reuters. By comparison, the Associated Press listed thirty-six staffers at its London bureau (Editor & Publisher International Yearbook—1957, February 28, 1957, 320–22). On the New York Times news staff, see the memoir of its executive editor, Turner Catledge, My Life and the Times, 188. 36. There were also supplementary news agencies; the largest and most prominent, the New York Times News Service, had 119 client papers in fortytwo countries by 1972 (Oliver Boyd-Barrett, The International News Agencies, 144). 37. Ibid., 43–44. Boyd-Barrett cautions, however, that such figures are notoriously inexact. 38. Ibid., 21, 44–45, 111. There were 159,000 nonproduction employees of 1,745 English-language newspapers in the United States in 1958 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1960, 210). The estimate of editorial employees is ours. 39. The lengthy hiatus was created because the Times kept its reporters out of Alabama on the advice of its lawyers, who were challenging Alabama’s jurisdiction in a lawsuit, and did not wish any representative of the paper available in Alabama on whom legal papers could be served (Salisbury, Without Fear, 384). 40. The AP and United Press were pioneers in supplying translations of

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English-language dispatches to foreign clients (Fenby, International News Services, 82–83). Agency dispatches were often received four to five hours sooner than State Department cables and sometimes a full twenty-four hours earlier; the Defense Department and White House often got news first from the wires (ibid., 162–64). 41. International Press Institute, The Flow of the News, 173–75, 179. A New York Times staffer opined (though an Indian editor denied) that India’s press conspicuously distorted U.S. racism (ibid., 180). 42. Esperanca Bielsa, “The Pivotal Role of News Agencies in the Context of Globalization: A Historical Approach”; Fenby, International News Services, 83. 43. Bielsa, “Pivotal Role,” 358. 44. Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, 671. 45. On public diplomacy, see H. N. Tuch, Communicating with the World. On the Cold War as symbolic action “intended to forward the accomplishment of strategic goals,” see Martin J. Medhurst, “Rhetoric and Cold War: A Strategic Approach,” 19. 46. Taylor, U.S. Embassy, Bern, to Secretary of State, September 12, 1957, 811.411/9–1257, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 47. Chester Bowles, “Africa: ‘We Had Better Mean What We Say,’” Reporter, July 12, 1956, 34. The treasures of Africa fascinated communists and capitalists alike. See, for example, L. Ghukasyan, “The United States and Africa,” IA (M), no. 1 (1958), 31; Pittsburgh Courier, May 12, 1947; and “Struggle for Africa’s Wealth,” USN&WR, September 12, 1952, 32. 48. Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots, 120. 49. Anne S. Y. Cheung, “Public Opinion Supervision: A Case Study of Media Freedom in China.” 50. Zhou, “China: Media Systems,” 463; Won Ho Chang, Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. 51. “The Lash,” Newsweek, July 2, 1956, 34.

Chapter 1: Civil Rights and World Affairs

1. “Georgia Mob of 20 Men Massacres 2 Negroes, Wives; One Was ExGI,” NYT, July 27, 1946; “Farmer Describes Slaughter of Four,” NYT, July 27, 1946; Geo. H. Andrews, “Bullet Torn Bodies of Lynch Victims Horrible Sight,” Atlanta Daily World, July 27, 1946. See also Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944– 1956, 59; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 18–20. 2. “Georgia Mob of 20”; I. Taigin, “Reply to an American Reader,” NT (M), no. 16 (1946), 14. 3. Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples, 4, 30–31. 4. Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson provided a statement to the

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chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Committee about the “adverse effect” of discrimination against minorities. It was used in lawsuits against racial covenants and segregated railroad dining cars (quoted in Attorney General James P. McGranery to Acheson, November 13, 1952, 811.411/11– 1352, Box 4438, RG 59, NA). 5. From SIB 1945 Annual Report, f. 17, op. 128, d. 870, I. 77. “The Organization of British Foreign Propaganda,” report by D. Kraminov, October 2, 1945, f. 17, op. 125, d. 383, I. 65–85. Both quoted in Vladimir Pechnatov, “Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945–47,” 3. “On the Work of the Sovinformbureau,” VKP(b) CC Politburo Resolution, October 9, 1946, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1062, II. 34–37, reprinted in Dzhahangir G. Nadzhafov, “The Beginning of the Cold War between East and West: The Aggravation of Ideological Confrontation,” 168. 6. Pechnatov, “Exercise in Frustration,” 6, 13. 7. “On the Work of the Sovinformbureau,” reprinted in Nadzhafov, “Beginning of the Cold War,” 171, 168. 8. “Minutes of the Session of the CC’s Commission on Sovinformbureau Work,” June 28–July 8, 1946, f. 17, op. 125, d. 387, I. 20, 15, quoted in Pechnatov, “Exercise in Frustration,” 15. 9. Pechnatov, “Exercise in Frustration,” 4. In June 1947, the SIB was put under Agitprop’s supervision and given a new boss who adopted a more aggressive anti-Western stance: “By 1948 the SIB became a reliable Cold War mouthpiece” (ibid., 23). 10. Wilson P. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service, 36–38; Robert E. Elder, The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy, 36; Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989; “Cuba: Red Beachhead,” Newsweek, February 3, 1947, 46–47. The United States Information Agency itself was not established as an independent agency within the executive branch until 1953. 11. “U.S. to the World,” Newsweek, August 16, 1948, 51; Ernest J. Simmons, “Anti-American Propaganda in the USSR,” NR, July 17, 1950, 15–16; “Russia’s Campaign to Discredit the U.S.,” World Report, June 24, 1947, 22–23. On U.S. racial problems and American and Soviet propaganda, see “U.S. Broadcasts to Soviet Union Mark Shift in Overseas Policy,” World Report, March 11, 1947, 10– 11; “Trends and Changes,” Newsweek, February 21, 1949, 69; “Russia’s War of Words against America,” World Report, January 6, 1948, 22–23; “Creating InterAmerican Ties: Steps to a Hemisphere League,” United States News, February 7, 1947, 23; “Mr. Benton’s Expanding Job of Advertising the U.S. through Facts,” United States News, March 14, 1947, 64, 66, 68; “U.S.-Russian Accord Ahead? Pressure for Cooperation,” United States News, March 28, 1947, 12; and “U.S. to the World,” Newsweek, August 16, 1948, 51. 12. “Justice Is Asked for Minorities,” NYT, April 6, 1946; “Pride and Prejudice,” Time, July 7, 1947, 94 13. “‘Color Line’ for Ethiopian Envoy at Science Session Brings Apology,”

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NYT, September 16, 1948 (the article was reprinted by the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, September 16, 1948). The State Department statement is in “Ras Imru Incident Called ‘a Mistake,’” NYT, September 18, 1948; the legation’s in “Ethiopians Reject Seat ‘Snub’ Apology,” NYT, September 21, 1948. Newsweek thought the mix-up over seating did not result from a racial snub but, at least in part, from the Ethiopian’s lack of fluency in English that misled him to conclude “he was being evicted” (“Wrong Seat for the Ras,” Newsweek, September 27, 1948, 24–25). For the editorial attack on segregation in Washington, see “More Than Apology Needed,” NYT, September 17, 1948. 14. Pittsburgh Courier, November 22, 1947; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 40–42. 15. “Justifiable Slaughter,” NR, November 17, 1947, 6. 16. “Books Are Urged as Ambassadors,” NYT, October 4, 1948. 17. Quoted in Robert K. Carr and Nancy Wechsler, “Background Notes on the Lynching Problem,” presented to President’s Committee on Civil Rights, June 10, 1947, 2, Folder 1, Box 37, Philleo Nash Papers, HST. The contradictory statistics may have resulted from differing definitions of lynchings. On postwar violence, see William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration, 38–39, 77–78. 18. A. Moskvin, “Impressions of the United States of America,” NT (Mos­ cow), no. 23 (1946), 23. On the charge of “monstrous race discrimination in the United States,” see “Human Rights,” NT (M), no. 28 (1948), 3; and “How American Soldiers Are Duped,” NT (M), no. 5 (1946), 24. New Times accused some elements of the American press (and some journalists) of racism (“The New York Herald Tribune on the National Question,” no. 10 [1947], 29; “Racism— American Style,” no. 27 [1947], 27, and “Democracy, They Call It,” no. 10 (1947), 18). The Voice of America was denigrated by L. Maximov as the “Voice of the Falsifiers,” NT (M), no. 8 (1948), 22–23, and was derided for broadcasting the “stale news” that there was racial discrimination in Alabama (“A Voice Crying in the Ether,” NT [M], no. 24 [1948], 15–16; see also “Voice of Confusion,” Newsweek, June 7, 1948, 23). A Klan rally was mentioned in V. Ozerov, “The Progressive Movement in the United States,” NT (M), no. 16 (1948), 20. Time was a more penetrating critic of the Klan than was New Times. Time pointed out that Grand Dragon Samuel Green’s diatribe against miscegenation was too narrow and too late, since sexual relations between white men and black women were seldom condemned and 70 percent of “American Negroes have some white blood” (“Sheet, Sugar Sack, and Cross,” Time, March 15, 1948, 29). 19. V. Ozerov, “Behind the Color Curtain,” NT (M), no. 43 (1948), 22, 25; “Suicide at Lincoln Memorial,” Washington Post, August 21, 1948. The suicide at the Lincoln Memorial was included in a Communist Voice of South Vietnam broadcast to Indochina, July 21, 1950, FBIS, July 27, 1950, PPP 1–3, Box 335, RG 263, NA. 20. Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 77–78. Truman’s statement is in PPP: Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington: GPO, 1963), 162. Clifford is quoted in Lee Nichols, Breakthrough on the Color Front, 83–84.

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21. Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 67–70; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 79–82. 22. “To Secure These Rights,” Newsweek, November 10, 1947, 19. See also “Current Listening,” Newsweek, January 12, 1948, 51. 23. “Deeds vs. Ideals,” Time, November 10, 1947, 24. Time also reported atrocities in “New Twist,” March 3, 1947, 25, “Twelve Men,” June 2, 1947, 27, and “Talmadge II,” September 20, 1948, 26. The conservative United States News ignored the recommendations but reported a committee finding about the “state of near hysteria [that] now threatens to inhibit the freedom of genuine democrats” (“Battle Over Rights of Individuals,” United States News, November 7, 1947, 21). 24. The NAACP petition was actually the second one to the UN on behalf of African Americans. The National Negro Congress filed the first in June 1946. The NNC’s efforts were foiled because of its Communist connections. But they also inspired African Americans, leading to the NAACP petition a year later (Anderson, Eyes off the Prize). On the NAACP petition, see Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944– 1963, 76–79. See also George Streator, “Negroes to Bring Cause before UN,” NYT, October 12, 1947. 25. Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 65–66; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 44–45; Borstelmann, Cold War, 75–77. On Du Bois, see Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois, 91. Du Bois later drafted another petition to the U.N. condemning the death sentences meted out to Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram and two of her teenage sons in Georgia. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment as a “result of the world-wide campaign”; the Ingrams were paroled in 1949 (W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, 261). 26. PPP: Harry S. Truman, 1948 (Washington: GPO, 1964), 122. On the VOA and Truman’s message, see Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 85. See also “Exposed Trickery,” NT (M), no. 8 (1948), 16. 27. Berman, Politics of Civil Rights, 76; Borstelmann, Cold War, 48–49. 28. Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948, 20, 40, 50–53, 55, 180, 219, 237. 29. See Time, “Eggs in the Dust,” September 13, 1948, 22, and “Love That Man,” September 20, 1948, 27–28. 30. See “No. 1 Pin-Up Boy,” Time, March 29, 1948, 26, and “Love That Man,” 27–28. Time was slightly less critical of Strom Thurmond than of Wallace. See, for example, “Southern Revolt,” Time, October 11, 1948, 24–27. Newsweek did accuse Wallace of cynicism. Measured against Time’s savaging of him, however, it was practically an endorsement. See “Wallace and Grandstand,” Newsweek, November 13, 1948, 25. 31. “Pravda Brands Redin Case a Plot by FBI against U.S.-Soviet Amity,” NYT, July 25, 1946. See also “Topics of the Times,” NYT, October 26, 1946. 32. Ilya Ehrenburg and David Lawrence, “A Russian Editor’s Criticism and a Reply,” United States News, April 25, 1947, 26–27. Lawrence appealed to

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memories of the U.S.–Soviet alliance as the basis for reconciliation. The U.S. racial record was a source of embarrassment elsewhere. Brazil’s O Radical suggested that the country should serve as an example to America “of race tolerance” (July 20, 1948, quoted in U.S. Ambassador, Rio de Janeiro to State Department, July 27, 1948, 832.911/7–2748, RG 59, NA). 33. “Our Civil Rights Become a World Issue,” NYT, January 11, 1948. 34. Erwin D. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor during the Cold War, felt impelled to defend the Monitor against implicit allegations that it was infiltrated by Communists by clarifying in a book about the newspaper that the Monitor’s editorial policy was one of “old-fashioned liberalism” (Erwin D. Canham, Commitment to Freedom: The Story of the Christian Science Monitor, 339). 35. See, for example, “Ghost Story,” Time, September 29, 1947, 26; “Portrait of a Party Man,” Time, June 2, 1947, 27; and “Black Is Red,” Newsweek, April 28, 1947, 35. 36. For Time’s higher education articles, see, respectively, “Ada’s Day in Court,” January 19, 1948, 62, 65; “The One Best Way,” February 9, 1948, 75; “Open Door,” September 6, 1948, 40; and “Separate but Equal,” October 25, 1948, 44. Time reported that juries in Alabama fixed sentences of forty-five years each in two rape cases, and a judge in Florida handed down a sentence of twenty years. See, respectively, “Show the Negro . . .,” December 13, 1948, 27; and “One Law,” December 20, 1948, 23. See also Time (on the real estate covenants), “A House with a Yard,” May 17, 1948, 25–26; (on the California ruling and the removal of the railing at the Arkansas school) “The Person of One’s Choice,” October 11, 1948, 27; (on Waring) “The Man They Love to Hate,” August 23, 1948, 17; (and on the commencement) “Three Harvard Men,” January 19, 1948, 65. 37. St. Petersburg Times, November 6, 1947, Congressional Quarterly news­ paper clipping file, Box 1, HST. Rankin remained in the House, where he fulminated against, for example, the “nauseating spectacle of a mixed dance of whites and Negroes at the so-called Inaugural Ball” (Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. [1949], A4099, and Cong. Rec. [House] 81st Cong., 1st Sess. [1949], 1611). His defeat in a campaign for a House seat in 1952 was listed as another sign of progress (“Demagogue Defeated,” Time, September 8, 1952, 26; “Exit John Rankin,” Newsweek, September 8, 1952, 31). 38. B. Minin, “Visit to Washington,” NT (M), no. 41 (1947), 21. Bilbo was excoriated as an American Nazi. For another example, other racists were attacked in “Georgia’s Laws,” NT (M), no. 15 (1946), 17–18. On Bilbo, see Borstelmann, Cold War, 44. 39. “These Three United States,” Time, May 26, 1947, 32; “First Lady,” Time, October 25, 1948, 25–26; “Mrs. Roosevelt and Human Rights,” NT (M), no. 42 (1948), 19. New Times continued to attack her in a book review; see B. Izakov, “Instructive Voyage,” NT (M), no. 50 (1953), 30. The Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil often directed its barbs at racism in the United States. Sometimes they were returned in kind. “The magazine sheds copious Krokodil tears,” Time punned, “for the plight of the American Negro.” Newsweek republished a

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Krokodil cartoon of a rotound, cigar-chewing southerner who proclaimed that his son Sam “is keeping up with his law studies. . . . He’s already taken part in four lynchings.” Krokodil also depicted a KKK lynching. See, respectively, “Crocodile Laughter,” Time, December 12, 1949, 30; “Red’s Eye View,” Newsweek, December 12, 1949, 57; and “American Crimes,” Newsweek, July 4, 1949, 24. 40. Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Soviet Attacks on Social Conditions in U.S.,” DSB, January 19, 1953, 117. 41. “Yes, Petkoff,” Time, June 21, 1948, 30; “Tale from Trieste,” Newsweek, August 25, 1947, 21. Newsweek jeered when Hungarian Nation of Budapest confused blackface theatrical make-up with negritude in announcing the death of the “celebrated Negro singer Al Jolson [who] . . . succumbed to the dollar lure of Broadway and became untrue to his part and his race” (“The New Jolson Story,” Newsweek, January 1, 1951, 26). 42. “Repent, Ye Sinners,” Time, May 16, 1949, 56–57; “Russian Dud,” Time, December 26, 1949, 54. For another improbable fable, see Frank Rounds Jr., “Diary of U.S. Embassy Man,” USN&WR, November 28, 1952, 101. 43. Joseph B. Phillips, “The Hanging of Comrade Abe,” Newsweek, January 19, 1948, 42. Another fable alleged that Lincoln’s widow was alive but ill and “living in poverty and squalor in Milan” because the U.S. Senate refused to give her a pension. The Saturday Evening Post gibed: “Even Soviet propagandists “ought to be able to cook up a likelier story” (“How Did We Miss This Lincoln Story?” S.E. Post, April 9, 1955, 12). 44. “Mr. President, May We Suggest. . . ?” Collier’s, June 10, 1950, 86. By 1950, there were four mass circulating magazines in the United States—Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Reader’s Digest. Each had circulations in the millions (Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, American Mass Market Magazines; James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States). 45. “Mr. President, May We Suggest . . .” 46. Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson, 215–20, 234–35, 238–39, 252–53, 296–302. 47. On Robeson and the State Department, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 61–63. See also “Robeson Suggests U.S. Test Marxism,” NYT, October 8, 1946; and “Says Negroes Shun Subversive Groups,” NYT, October 9, 1946. Emphasizing Brown’s credentials, the Times pointed out that his organization claimed 500,000 members and campaigned against racial discrimination and on behalf of antilynching legislation. Pointedly, it noted, he shunned “foreign ideologies” (“Says Negroes Shun Subversive Groups”). 48. “Either Way You Win,” Time, June 14, 1948, 18–19. 49. Revolutionary War regiments from Massachusetts and other colonies included free blacks, many of whom, one commander observed, “proved themselves brave.” Initially, George Washington opposed enlisting free blacks, but military necessity and their willingness to serve changed his opinion (David McCullough, 1776, 36–37). The quotations are from Geoffrey Perret, There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II, 426, 447–55. On

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the Battle of the Bulge units, see Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953, 99–100. For statistics on black servicemen, see George Q. Flynn, The Draft, 1940–1973, 99. 50. By 1948, the army had 129,000 fewer troops than the 669,000 soldiers it was authorized (Flynn, Draft, 100). Reynolds is quoted in Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, 139; see also Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 85–86. 51. Milton Konvitz, Expanding Liberties: Freedom’s Gains in Postwar America, 260. 52. Pfeffer, Randolph, 146–48. 53. See “Plan for Revival of the Draft,” March 26, 1948, 18–19; “Russia’s Edge in Men and Arms,” April 2, 1948, 23–25; and “Europe’s Peacetime Draft: Comparison with U.S. Plan,” May 21, 1948, 16, all in USN&WR. See also “Segregation Thorn,” Newsweek, April 12, 1948, 26; and “Face the Music,” Time, April 12, 1948, 21. 54. Extracts from Captain Mochavin, “Discrimination against Negroes in the Army of the United States of America,” Red Star, n.d., n.p., were broadcast on the home service of Radio Moscow, December 18, 197, FBIS, December 19, 1947, AA 1–3, Box 206, RG 263, NA. The article stated, incorrectly, that the Navy had no commissioned black officers (there were a few) and implied that blacks did not serve in the Army Air Force (the Tuskegee Airmen were a notable exception). 55. “Segregation Thorn,” 26. “Face the Music,” 21. 56. “Crisis in the Making: U.S. Negroes Tussle with Issue of Resisting a Draft Law Because of Racial Segregation,” Newsweek, June 7, 1948, 28–29. 57. “Face the Music,” 21; “Crisis in the Making,” 28–29. Newsweek overstated some poll results to demonstrate Randolph’s support among black college students, who were among those most likely to be drafted (“To Serve or Not,” June 7, 1948, 29). 58. Carey McWilliams, “Spectrum of Segregation,” 22–25; William Brower, 15,000,000 Americans, 2. 59. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 147.

Chapter 2: First Americans, Last in America

1. Dorothy L. Pillsbury, “Soldiers without Votes,” CSM, February 25, 1946. 2. President’s Committee, To Secure These Rights, 146, 147. 3. Paul C. Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, 114–15. 4. Julius Krug to Truman, April 1, 1946, quoted in ibid., 117. 5. See Pillsbury, “Soldiers without Votes”; “The Navajos Need School,” CSM, May 18, 1946; “U.S. Minorities: New Mexico Spanish Preserve Ancient Culture,” CSM, May 22, 1946; “A Breeze from Navaho Land,” September

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16, 1946; and “Navaho Tragedy: Liquor Threatens an Age-Old Culture,” September 25, 1946. 6. Pillsbury, “Soldiers without Votes”; “The Navajos Need Schools.” 7. “Winter of Death?” Time, November 3, 1947, 21. 8. Los Angeles Examiner, Nov. 25, 1947, quoted in Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II, 153. 9. On the letters into the White House, see Rosier, Serving Their Country, 126–28. On December 19, 1947, Truman signed into law an emergency appropriation bill for relief of the Navajo and Hopi (PPP: Harry S. Truman, 1947, 503–4n). 10. On the storms, see Truman to Secretary of Interior, March 4, 1949, Truman Papers, Official File 296, Box 937 (1948–June 1949), HST. Adverse weather was not the Indians’ only problem. Arizona and New Mexico denied federal and state assistance in 1948 “to the aged and blind Indians and dependent children, who probably need such assistance more desperately than the members of any other group in the country” (“White Supremacy in the Indian Country,” Nation, August 14, 1948, 171). 11. “U.N. Group Backs Aborigines Study,” NYT, May 11, 1949. An unidentified correspondent advised Eleanor Roosevelt, n.d. [ca. May 1949], of Soviet criticism about mistreatment of Indians. She sent the message to Truman (Official File 296, Box 937, Truman Papers, HST). 12. “Statement of Secretary of the Interior J. A. Krug before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the House Public Lands Committee,” April 18, 1949, quoted in Rosier, Serving Their Country, 133. 13. Eleanor Roosevelt, “To Arms, Indians! The Congressmen Are Coming!” October 5, 1949, My Day Project, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?_y=1949&_f=md001402; “An Ancient Minority,” NYT, Sep­ tem­ber 27, 1949. See also Rosier, Serving Their Country, for a discussion of the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Bill. 14. TASS, “400,000 Indians in USA Doomed to Extinction,” Pravda, July 19, 1950. 15. See, respectively, N. Vasilyev’s articles in NT (M): “A Trip through Florida: 1. Miami,” no. 27 (1948), 25; and “A Trip through Florida: 2. The Road to Tampa,” no. 28 (1948), 21. The Soviets ridiculed U.S. broadcasts that presented “the oppression of the Negroes, Indians, and other national minorities as positive features of American democracy” (L. Rovinsky, “How American Soldiers Are Duped,” NT [M], no. 5 [1947], 24). They also scoffed at U.S. boasts of universal suffrage, since tens of thousands of Indians and millions of blacks and white paupers were denied the vote (L. Maximov, “Voice of the Falsifiers,” NT [M], no. 8 [1947], 22). Racial discrimination also afflicted “Indians, Mexicans, Jews, Slavs, Puerto Ricans, and Chinese” (Pravda, July 20, 1951, 4, CDSP, 3, no. 29 [1951], 32). 16. “400,000 Indians,” Pravda. 17. “Their Plight Is Our Worst Disgrace,” Look, April 19, 1955, 32, 36; “‘Emancipation’ of the American Indian,” NT (M), no. 47 (1956), 23–24. A

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Red Army publication accused the government of planning to enslave “the indigenous population” (Red Star, July 30, 1958, 3, CDSP, 10, no. 34, 19). Smaller publications were also tapped. The comment of the Gazette and Daily of Pennsylvania that “the Indians are an oppressed [domestic] colonial nation” was quoted by Pravda, July 22, 1959, 6, CDSP, 11, no. 29, 17. 18. Carlos B. Embry, America’s Concentration Camps, 28; A. Borisova, “Fate of U.S. Indians,” NT (M), no. 10 (1957), 31. Some details of the victimization of Indians were taken from Illustrated History of the American Indians for use in Red Star, July 24, 1957, 4, CDSP, 9, no. 29, 16. 19. “America and Colonialism,” Mercure, December 23, 1956, n.p., reprinted by IA (M), February 1957, 137, 139–40. 20. “The American Indians,” NT (M), no. 16 (1955), 24–25. 21. Ruth Muskrat Bronson, “Plundering the Indians of Alaska,” CC, October 8, 1947. 22. Milton D. Stewart and Rachel Sady, Civil Rights in Our Dependencies, report prepared for the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, n.d. [ca. June, 1947], Philleo Nash Papers, Folder 2, Box 37, HST. Natives in Alaska numbered 22 percent Eskimo, 15 percent Indian, and 8 percent Aleut (President’s Committee, To Secure These Rights, 40). 23. “U.S. Is Charged before U.N. with Tolerating Slave Labor,” NYT, March 3, 1950. 24. Harold L. Ickes, “Alaska’s Natives Need Help,” NR, July 24, 1950, 17. See also Harold L. Ickes, “On Frisking the Alaska Indians,” NR, May 9, 1949, 19–20. 25. Paul C. Rosier, “‘They Are Ancestral Homelands’: Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945–1961,” 1301. 26. A. Chivilikhin, “From the Genealogy of American Fascism,” Literaturnaya Gazeta, June 30, 1951, 2, CDSP, 3, no. 26 (1951), 27; Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots. See also Izvestia, August 22, 1952, 3–4, CDSP, 4, no. 34 (1952), 29. States that defined Indian identity based on the percentage of Indian ancestry gave Moscow grist for propaganda. Such definitions recalled Hitler’s “jabbering about ‘pure-blooded’ Aryans and ‘inferior’ Slavs!” (“Scalping the Indians,” NT [M], no. 44 [1950], 22). 27. The East German commentary, n.d. (ca. November 5, 1950) is summarized in “European Roundup,” FBIS, November 6, 1950, AA 9, Box 353, RG 263, NA. I. Sotnikov, “The Theory and Practice of Genocide,” NT (M), no. 23 (1954), 17. See also E. Zhukov, “Colonialism: The U.S. Brand,” NT (M), no. 17 (1954), 11. G. Savin, “Colonialism in the Dock,” IA (M), October 1961, 107–8. 28. Xinhua News Agency, June 4, 1955, SCMP, no. 1062 (1955), 14; Chin Yuan-hsun, “American ‘Democracy’ and ‘Freedom’ as I See Them,” Hsueh Hsi, no. 17 (1957), n.p., SCMP, no. 111 (1957), 11. Beijing used children’s comic strips about the slaughter of Indians to show that racism was thriving in the United States (Kuang Ming Jih Pao, June 15, 1956, n.p., SCMP, no. 1322 [1956], 25). 29. Don Eddy, “How We Scalp the Indians,” American Magazine, January 1950, 87–88.

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30. Ibid.; “Scalping the Indians,” NT (M), no. 44 (1950), 22. 31. “Election Mechanism of the U.S.A.,” NT (M), no. 42 (1948), 28; United Press, “Arizona Indians May Vote,” NYT, July 16, 1948; Borovik and Rumyantsev, “Tragedy of Indians,” 28. 32. Associated Press, “Indian Girl Drops Scholarship Trip,” NYT, October 3, 1948. 33. Pittsburgh Courier, September 8, 1951, 6. 34. “Guide to U.S. Racism,” NT (M), no. 31 (1959), 31. The Russians also lifted from AFP the fate of another Indian war veteran, George Nash, who was denied burial beside his white wife in a Detroit cemetery (“Segregated Kingdom Come,” NT [M], no. 34 [1960], 24). 35. See “4 Idaho Indians Win in Sheep Case,” NYT, June 29, 1950; and “Four Boys in Idaho,” NYT, June 30, 1950. 36. Eleanor Roosevelt’s column in the New York World-Telegram, April 26, 1949, n.p., is quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. (1949), A2929. Roosevelt’s October 1949 column is quoted in Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960, 13. See also “Paper in Lithuania Scoffs at U.S. Life,” NYT, May 20, 1949. 37. On the withdrawal of federal funds, see “U.S. Drops Arizona in Children’s Aid,” NYT, January 4, 1950. Truman vetoed a bill “because amendments slipped into the measure threatened the Indians’ water rights [and] brought the tribesmen under state courts” (“Justice for the Indians,” NYT, April 21, 1950). The land judgment is recorded in “Ute Indians Win $31,700,000 Judgment against Government for Land It Seized,” NYT, July 14, 1950. 38. Louis R. Bruce Jr., “Indian Trail to Success,” R. Dig., November 1949, 77–80. The migration of Indians from reservations to Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis, for factory jobs was recorded by the Wall Street Journal, December 28, 1955, 1, 4. 39. “Navajos Sponsor Girl at Barnard,” NYT, September 26, 1954. The Times several years earlier listed statistics showing “tragically high death rates . . . in infancy and childhood, and, among older Indians, from tuberculosis” (“Justice for the Indians,” NYT, April 21, 1950). The continued saliency of Indian health is demonstrated by an editorial in the Denver Post, which suggested that Americans be “more acutely aware of the plight of the aboriginal Americans. . . . We are under a moral obligation to see that justice is done to the survivors of [an] American invasion” (Denver Post, n.d. [ca. July 1954], quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess. [1954], A5330). Newsweek examined Indian health in “Hapless—and Hopeless,” April 2, 1954, 82. 40. See Feest, “Indians and Europe?” 612, 617, 622. 41. Rosier, “They Are Ancestral Homelands,” 1304. 42. A. M. Rosenthal, “Indian Tribesmen Call at U.N. in Vain,” NYT, May 9, 1950; October 24, 1950; “Scalping the Indians,” 22–23. See also Borovik and Rumyantsev, “Tragedy of Indians,” 28–29. 43. See Thomas F. Brady, “South Africa Bars Segura, Net Star,” NYT, August 2, 1953; and “The Segura Episode,” NYT, August 3, 1953.

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44. “From Troubled South Africa—A Candid Talk to the West,” USN&WR, November 7, 1960, 109. The magazine let the accusation stand unchallenged. 45. Benjamin Bradlee, “The Bitter Choice,” Newsweek, February 27, 1956, 41–42. 46. “Statement of the Council of the Pueblo of Isleta,” January 27, 1954, folder “Emergency Conference Bulletin,” Box 257, Records of the National Congress of American Indians, quoted in Rosier, “They Are Ancestral Homelands,” 1316. 47. “One Continent Where Reds Are Busier Than Ever,” USN&WR, November 2, 1959, 60. 48. Eisenhower to Secretary of State Dulles, June 21, 1954; Dulles to Eisenhower, August 10, 1954, both in Dulles-Herter Series, Box 4, DDE. Murray also offered his services for the same purpose to USIA director Edward R. Murrow during the Kennedy administration, but the negotiations apparently failed to bear fruit (Murray to White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, March 12, 1963, and March 28, 1963, Subject Files: IN/C, Box 380, WHCF, JFK). 49. U.S. Department of State, Partners in International Understanding: 13th Semiannual Report of the International Educational Exchange Program, 19–20. “Glowing comments” on the success of the tour were forwarded to Murray by Harold E. Howland of the International Educational Exchange Service (Howland to Murray, April 14, 1955, 032 Johnston Murray, 4–1455, Box 108, RG 59, NA). On Murray’s tour, see his ten-page report, Murray to Howland, November 29, 1954, Folder 3, Box 84. For the article in the News of Mexico City, August 28, 1954, n.p., see Folder 6, Box 84, Johnston Murray Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library, Norman. 50. Evan Hill, “How to Answer Our Overseas Critics,” R. Dig., December 1956, 85–86. 51. I. Graveh, “American Simpletons Abroad,” NT (M), no. 13 (1958), 27. 52. “The Natives Are Restless,” Time, January 27, 1958, 20; “Indians Rout the Klan,” Commonweal, January 31, 1958, 446; Pravda, February 3, 1958, 3, CDSP, 10, no. 5 (1958), 48. 53. Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois, 126, 135, 138–39. 54. “The Last of the Tuscaroras,” NT (M), no. 12 (1960), 23; Times (London), July 12, 1960, 11. 55. Bertrand Russell, “Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev,” New Statesman, November 23, 1957, 683. See also “Mr. Khrushchev and the West,” New Statesman, December 28, 1957, 866. 56. John Foster Dulles, “Mr. Dulles Replies to Russell and Khrushchev,” New Statesman, February 8, 1958, 158–59. 57. Nikita Khrushchev, “Krushchev Writes Again,” New Statesman, March 15, 1958, 320. 58. “Paper in Lithuania Scoffs at U.S. Life,” NYT, May 20, 1949.

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Chapter 3: Color, Caste, and Colonialism

1. Robert M. MacIver, “What to Do about Group Prejudice in U.S.,” USN&WR, July 6, 1956, 108–9. 2. Paul Blanshard, Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean, 238. On the nationalities, see Frank J. McSherry, “Report to the Governor of the Panama Canal,” June 1, 1947, 1, OF 1285–B, Canal Zone, 1947, Box 1616, Truman Papers, HST. 3. Borstelmann, Cold War, 80; John Biesanz, “Race Relations in the Canal Zone,” 24. See also John Biesanz and Luke M. Smith, “Race Relations in Panama and the Canal Zone.” 4. McSherry, “Report to the Governor”; Paul Blanshard, “Jim Crow at the Canal,” 289. See also Milton D. Stewart and Rachel Sady, “Civil Rights in Our Dependencies,” a report prepared for the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, June 19, 1947, Folder 2, Box 37, Philleo Nash Papers, HST. 5. Blanshard, “Jim Crow at the Canal,” 314. 6. McSherry, “Report to the Governor,” 4, 5; “Double Standard,” Time, June 23, 1947, 34, 36. An anonymous correspondent predicted that racism in the Canal Zone had “built up a venomous hatred for ourselves, which will probably never be dispelled” (“The Cross of Gold,” NR, December 8, 1947, 35). 7. “Double Standard,” 34, 36. 8. Robeson, after visiting the Canal Zone at the end of May, delivered a critical speech in Miami. He joined W. E. B. Du Bois and others “in establishing a committee to fight Jim Crow social and economic discrimination in Panama” (Duberman, Paul Robeson, 320–21, 680 n12). Robeson and others wrote President Truman on September 8, 1948, urging him to issue an executive order abolishing the Gold-Silver system (OF 1285–B, Canal Zone [1947], Box 1617, HST). 9. See, respectively, FRUS, 1947, 8, American Republics (Washington: GPO, 1972), 910–62, passim; and Marshall to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, September 7, 1948, FRUS, 1948, 9, Western Hemisphere (Washington: GPO, 1972), 681. 10. Bonsal to State Department, August 20, 1956, FRUS, 1955–1957, 7; American Republics: Central and South America (Washington: GPO, 1987), 299. 11. “Shift in Defense Plans for Panama Canal,” World Report, January 6, 1948, 18. 12. Radio Moscow, home service; XEQQ, Mexico City. For the broadcasts of December 23, 1947, see FBIS, December 24, 1947, AA 3 Box 206, RG 263, NA. 13. Vincente Lombardo Toledano, “American Imperialist Intrigues in the Latin-American Labour Movement,” NT (M), no. 2 (1948), 12. M. Danilevich, “The Working Class of Latin America in the Struggle for Independence and Democracy,” Problems of Economics, no. 11 (1949), 91–103, CDSP, 2, no. 8 (1949), 8. The Soviets did not dwell on the action of the assembly, possibly because Latin America was then a “very low priority” for them. The Soviet Union had diplomatic relations with few states in the region; indeed, Stalin would berate

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“the twenty American republics in 1951 for being the ‘most solid and obedient army of the United States’” (Leon Gouré and Morris Rothenberg, Soviet Penetration of Latin America, 1; Stalin’s statement in Pravda, February 17, 1951, 1, is quoted by Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959–1987, 6). On Toledano, see Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981, 112. 14. Times (London), December 24, 1947; James Reston, “Troops Pulled Out,” NYT, December 24, 1947, and C. H. Calhoun, “People of Panama Stop Canal Pact,” NYT, December 28, 1947; Neal Stanford, “Bow to Panama: Will It Enhance U.S. Prestige?” CSM, December 24, 1947; “Panamanian Jitters,” December 26, 1947. See Time for “Knives and Bases,” December 29, 1947, 26, and “No Breath,” January 5, 1958, 21. See also “How Not to Treat a Neighbor,” Newsweek, January 5, 1948, 15. Two weeks earlier, Newsweek treated the bases controversy without mentioning the Gold-Silver system (“Safeguarding the Canal,” Newsweek, December 22, 1947, 42). Pittsburgh Courier, January 10, 1948; Pittsburgh Courier, January 3, 1948. 15. NYT, December 24, 1947; Roscoe Drummond, “State of the Nation: How Can the Panama Canal Be Defended?” CSM, December 26, 1947. 16. Biesanz, “Race Relations in the Canal Zone,” 23, 27, 30. 17. See Sydney Gruson, “Guatemala Snubs Anti-Red Speaker,” NYT, March 10, 1954, April 10, 1954; Dulles to Ambassador to Panama Seldin Chapin, March 17, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, 4, American Republics (Washington: GPO, 1983), 1437. Remon’s resolution was adopted by a vote of nineteen to zero (Paul S. Lietz, “Discrimination in Panama,” America, May 15, 1954, 180). The Pittsburgh Courier, which had backed Eisenhower for president, called upon him to eliminate Jim Crow in the Canal Zone, which had “greatly embarrassed this country” (Pittsburgh Courier, May 15, 1954). Panama complained to the International Labor Conference that the United States was perpetuating racial discrimination in the Zone (“U.S. Accused of Bias in Canal Zone Jobs,” NYT, June 8, 1954). 18. Merrill Rippy, “Panama and Suez,” Nation, September 29, 1956, 260. On the complaints, see (for 1957) “America’s Troubled Canal,” Fortune, February 1957, 129, 132. See also NYT, March 20, 1959; and Conniff, Black Labor, 119. 19. “Transcript of Secretary Dulles’ News Conference,” August 28, 1956, DSB, September 10, 1956, 408, 411. For Eisenhower’s response to the issue, see Dana Adams Schmidt, “President Calls Suez Vital to U.S., but Urges Caution,” NYT, August 2, 1956. The London Daily Express interview with de la Guardia was summarized by HAR, 10, 4 (April 1957): 182–83 (HAR did not supply publication data). An American professor who was in Panama at the time noted that every Panamanian newspaper “declared that Panama had been insulted” by Dulles’s claim about U.S. sovereignty (Rippy, “Panama and Suez,” 261). The Soviets supported Panama’s claim of sovereignty; see “Panama Next!” NT (M), no. 17 (1957), 22; “Dulles’ News Conference,” 407; “Retreat,” NT (M), no. 44 (1956), 15; and “Playing with Fire,” NT (M), no. 39 (1956), 1. On the Soviet government’s rejection of nationalization, see

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NYT, August 10, 1956. Berlin, Deutschlandsender, in German to East and West Germany, August 5, 1956, FF 1-2; that point also appears in a TASS dispatch from Buenos Aires, August 4, 1956, A 3. Both reports are in FBIS, August 6, 1956, Box 736, RG 263, NA. A new treaty in 1977 provided for ceding the Canal to Panama after a period of transition, during which Panamanians would have increasing authority over the operations. Despite acrimonious debate over it, no later American administration nullified the treaty. In 1989, there was a brief reversion to the old relationship when President George H. W. Bush sent in a military force of twenty-four thousand to seize Panama’s ruler, General Manuel Noriega, who was taken to the United States and was tried, convicted, and imprisoned. At the end of 1999, the Stars and Stripes came down, and the Canal officially became Panama’s (Linda Robinson, “Yankees to Go Home, Finally,” USN&WR, December 6, 1999, 52). 20. Michael E. Latham, “Imperial Legacy and Cold War Credibility: Lyndon Johnson and the Panama Crisis,” 500. 21. Ibid., 509. 22. Ibid., 511; Johnson telephone call with Russell, January 10, 1964, Tape WH 6401.10, Prog. 26, LBJL; Johnson telephone call with Russell, January 25, 1964, Tape WH 6401.21, Prog. 12, LBJL; Joseph A. Loftus, “Nixon Says U.S. Must Keep Zone,” NYT, January 17, 1964; “Panama: Semantics, Politics, and Passion,” Time, January 24, 1964, 17; “Goldwater Says U.S. Compromises,” NYT, February 14, 1964. 23. “Panamanian Semantics,” NYT, February 28, 1964; “Panama: The Third Force,” Nation, March 9, 1964, 226; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Panama Crisis,” NR, February 1, 1964, 5; Latham, “Imperial Legacy,” 517. 24. Margot Hornblower, “Northern Exposures,” Time, March 6, 1995, 42; Milton S. Eisenhower, The Wine Is Bitter: The United States and Latin America, 326. 25. On lynchings of Mexicans, see Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States, 127–31; and Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, 25. Mexico’s Congress dedicated its session of April 21, 1949, to the memory of “the Defenders of Veracruz in 1914” (Hispanic World Report, 2, no. 5 [May 1949], 4). 26. Milton D. Stewart and Herbert Kaufman, “Civil Rights Problems of Mexican Americans,” a report prepared for the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, June 4, 1947, 1–3, folder 1, Box 37, Philleo Nash Papers, HST. See also Carey McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin, 121; and Leo Grebler, Joan W. Moore, and Ralph C. Guzman, The Mexican-American People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority, 83. 27. McWilliams, North from Mexico, 244–53, 261–62; Duplan to George I. Sanchez, April 23, 1943, Office of War Information Files, Mexican-U.S. File, Box 17, Philleo Nash Papers, HST; “Martyrs—1940,” Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 14, 1940. For the impressions of Latino visitors, see J. Manuel Espinosa, InterAmerican Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948, 286. For a discussion

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of the discrimination against Mexicans in the early war years and its effect on the U.S. image abroad, see Hart, “Making Democracy Safe,” 57–67. 28. Henry Waterman to the Secretary of State, June 11, 1943, in 811.4016, Decimal File, 1940–1944; Hart, “Making Democracy Safe,” 66. Postwar labor shortages brought as many as 120,000 Mexicans across the border legally between 1945 and 1949 (between 1942 and 1964, 4.5 million braceros—legal workers—entered under the program). The scale of illegal migration is almost impossible to ascertain, but the number is suggested by the 565,000 voluntary and forced departures during 1950 alone. On legal migrants between 1945 and 1949, see James L. Sundquist to Roger W. Jones, March 30, 1950, re: appointment of a President’s Committee on Migratory Labor, Box 1234, 407–E, Office Files, HST. On the twenty-two years of the bracero program, see Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954, 23. On deportations in 1950, see Mary Heaton Vorse, “America’s Submerged Class: The Migrants,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1953, 90–91. A Mexico City radio station reported that arrests and deportations totaled twenty-one thousand in April 1950, up from sixteen thousand in March, but noted that the totals did not include tens of thousands of others deported along the border with Texas (XEWW, in Spanish to Mexico, May 3, 1950, FBIS, Box 434, RG 263, NA). 29. Thomas S. Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” S.E. Post, January 12, 1952, 64. On the incidents involving the Medal of Honor recipients, see McWilliams, North from Mexico, 261; and Daniel L. Schorr, “‘Reconverting’ Mexican Americans,” NR, September 30, 1946, 412. Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico declared after the incident: “Texas ought to be ashamed” (Cong. Rec. Appendix, 80th Cong., 2nd Sess., A2889). 30. Beatrice Longoria to Lyndon Johnson accepting his offer to arrange the reburial of her husband in Arlington, January 12, 1949, Box 2, and [Dallas Morning] News, February 17, 1949, Longoria case press clippings, both in prepresidential confidential files, LBJ; “‘No Discrimination,’” NR, May 2, 1949, 7. The Longoria incident was also covered by Sutherland in “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” 22–23. 31. Stewart and Kaufman, “Civil Rights Problems of Mexican Americans,” 3–8, passim. 32. Robert E. G. Harris, “Nation in Ferment: II—Mexico’s ‘Struggle for Peace and Bread,’” Frontier, November 1955, 15. U.S. news media carried much less news about Mexico and Latin America. Eisenhower, Wine Is Bitter, 58–59, and Ray Josephs, “Behind the News,” Mexican Life, July 1947, 32, 56–59. There was consternation among Mexican publishers about a Spanish-language edition of Life joining five other U.S. magazines with significant circulations in Mexico (HAR, 5, no. 7 [July 1952], 10). On the article in the magazine 1945, see David Thomasson, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Mexico City to Secretary of State, November 26, 1945, 812.917/11–2645, RG 59, NA. The inflammatory headline is mentioned in Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” 64. Significant numbers of Mexicans believed their countrymen were mistreated

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in the United States. A poll found in 1957 that 25 percent of respondents in Mexico City thought Americans behaved badly toward legal workers, and 17 percent that the same happened to Mexicans generally. See also “Opinions of Mexicans about Recent Developments in Race Relations in the United States,” a poll conducted by International Research Associates for the USIA, October 1957, 10; and Mexican Reaction to Little Rock, Box 73, RG 306, NA. 33. On the notoriety of Texas in Mexico, see Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” 64. 34. The story is in the press clippings of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, 1989/59–24, TGNC. The newspaper was not identified nor was publication information provided. Internal references indicate the article was published in 1950 or 1951. The Mexican press also published articles about racial injustices against blacks. See Hispanoamericano for “Truman Proposes Laws against Racism,” February 13, 1948, 18; “The Battle against Racism: 1850–1940,” March 5, 1948, 16–17; “The Exasperated Racists of the South,” February 20, 1948, 16–17; and “The Racists vs. Truman,” March 12, 1948, 14. Mexican papers gave considerable space to desegregation in Little Rock. While sympathetic to blacks, Mexicans linked “anti-Negro feeling . . . with discrimination” against its nationals (Marion Wilhelm, “Mexico Watches U.S. on Integration,” CSM, November 1, 1957). 35. The press release of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, April 28, 1953, cites “a circular just issued by the Foreign Office of Mexico.” 1989/59–19, Folder 16, TGNC. On the blacklisted Texas counties, see Vaughn M. Bryant, Executive Director, Texas Good Neighbor Commission, to U.S. Ambassador William J. O’Dwyer, Mexico City, August 13, 1952, 1989/59–19, Folder 35, TGNC. Many complaints were brought to the attention of state or federal authorities; see Folders 1, 3, 30, 35, 1989/59–19, TGNC. 36. “Wetbacks in the River,” Newsweek, September 12, 1949, 22; Beth Biderman, “America Has DP’s [Displaced Persons] of Its Own,” NR, April 24, 1950, 13. Later accounts were as bleak. From 1953, see, for example, Vorse, “America’s Submerged Class,” 91. Illegal workers were blamed, however, for an “utterly demoralizing effect on wage levels and working standards” of legal U.S. farmworkers (“‘Wetback’ Invasion,” Nation, August 20, 1949, 168). 37. CGV dispatches in Spanish Morse to specified Mexican papers, March 19, 1952, in FBIS, March 21, 1952, I 2, Box 441, and July 23, 1952, in FBIS, July 24, 1952, I 1, Box 463, both in RG 263, NA. The leftist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano sharply criticized the United States because Mexican workmen there “suffer humiliation and ill treatment in exchange for a few dollars” (CGV, in Spanish Morse to specified Mexican papers, February 17, 1952, FBIS, February 19, 1952, I 1–2, Box 435, RG 2673, NA). Years earlier, an English-language magazine in Mexico City wrote with feeling of the Mexican worker who “reluctantly abandons his birthplace because he wants a better life” in the United States, only to find low wages, hard menial labor, and segregation that bars him from restaurants, theaters, and other public places (“A Drain of Man-Power,” Mexican Life, June 1947, 10).

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38. Aguilar is quoted in V. Harwood Block, U.S. Consul, Mexico City, to State Department, December 14, 1950, 811.411/12–1450, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. The Mexican consuls were not exempt from mistreatment. Consul Cosme Hinojosa and two friends were refused service in a café near Boerne. The owner claimed that Hinojosa and his companions created a disturbance; the three Mexicans denied this, saying the proprietor had said: “I serve even white trash in my place, but no Mexicans” (HAR, 5, no. 6 [June, 1952], 9). See also Austin Statesman (AP), June 12, 1952, 1989/59–24, TGNC. Newspapers on both sides of the border reported the incident, and U.S. Ambassador William O’Dwyer apologized to Mexico. 39. “Neglecting the Good Neighbors,” Business Week, June 6, 1953, 188. 40. Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” 22, 66. U.S. News wrote candidly of the “‘Jim Crow’ rule” that some Texas restaurants enforced against Mexicans. Mexican papers played up incidents of bigotry and the bitterness it caused (“Latin America: Poor Relation?” USN&WR, July 11, 1952, 34–35). 41. Pravda, July 20, 1951, 4, CDSP, 3, no. 29 (1951), 32. See also Moscow Radio’s Spanish-language service to Latin America, FBIS, March 9, 1952, CC 9, Box 585, and Moscow Radio, home service, March 1, 1952, FBIS, March 4, 1952, AA 10, Box 438, both in RG 263, NA. 42. “Slaves of the Soviet State,” Newsweek, September 15, 1947, 94; see also “Soviet Slaves,” Newsweek, September 29, 1952, 36; and “Pot to Kettle,” Newsweek, December 15, 1947, 30. Pravda used the offenses against Mexicans (and blacks) to deflect “President Eisenhower’s charge that the Red Army’s suppression of the Hungarian revolt violated the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights (Pravda, December 15, 1956, 4, CDSP, 8, no. 49 [1956], 44). Similarly, NT used deportation of Mexicans to counter “U.S. spokesmen . . . upset by the ‘infringement’ of people’s rights in . . . Hungary and Tibet,” but not human rights violations at home (“Second-Class Democracy,” NT [M], no. 50 [1959], 31). 43. “Forced Labor in the United States,” NT (M), no. 16 (1951), 19–21. Earlier, L. Sedin attacked American critics’ “hue and cry about ‘forced labor’ in the Soviet Union.” See “A New Fabrication of the Modern Slave Owners,” NT (M), no. 10 (1949), 9–12. See also M. Kremnyov, “On the Other Side,” NT (M), no. 22 (1960), 30–31. New Times attacked U.S. corporations in Latin America: Y. Kalugin, “Forced Labor on American Plantations,” no. 48 (1953), 30–31; and Y. Arbatov, “Race Discrimination—Weapon of Oppression,” no. 34 (1952) 29; and it recorded a petition to the United Nations condemning U.S. abuses of Mexicans (“Our Badge of Infamy,” prepared by the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born in 1959). See also “Second-Class Democracy,” 31. 44. N. Shmelev, “American Paradise in Saudi Arabia,” NT (M), no. 2 (1948), 30–31. 45. The TASS article ran in Izvestia, October 6, 1955, 1, CDSP, 7, no. 40 (1955), 12. “Mexican Independence Day,” NT (M), no. 38 (1960), 10–11. 46. Barry Bishop, U.S. Press Attaché, to Vaughn Bryant, TGNC Executive Director, June 2, 1952, 1989/59–46, press attaché file, TGNC. Flora Lewis, “Why There Is Anti-Americanism in Mexico,” NYT Magazine, July 6, 1952.

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47. Stewart and Kaufman, “Civil Rights Problems of Mexican Americans,” 8; “Straight Talk from the Armed Forces,” America, February 7, 1948, 508. For O Mundo, n.d., n.p., see U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, to State Department, March 4, 1949, 832.911/3–449, RG 59, NA. 48. The Mexican government expressed its “gratification” for Truman’s gesture, but there were some objections to “reawakening one hundred year old hatreds,” and some college students expressed skepticism about American motives (HAR, 3, no. 10, October 1950, 12). 49. “1847 Flags Return to Mexican Hands,” NYT, September 14, 1950; “Flags across the Border,” Newsweek, September 25, 1950, 48. United Press emphasized the “unprecedented ‘good neighbor’ gesture” and observed there had been talk in Mexico of reciprocating by returning eleven captured U.S. flags (“Mexican Honor Guard Stands as U.S. Returns Battle Flags,” CSM, September 14, 1950). 50. “Flags across the Border.” The U.S. Communist Party used the flags story to belabor the United States for the “huge territories stolen” from Mexico (Daily Worker, September 20 [1950], n.p., quoted in [Fort Worth] Press, September 22 [1950], 1, 12, 1989/59, Box 24, TGNC). 51. Policy Statement Prepared by the Department of State: Mexico, October 1, 1951, FRUS, 2, United Nations; Western Hemisphere (Washington: GPO, 1979), 1489; Rejection by Mexico of United States Requests for Permission to Use Mexican Territorial Waters for Defense Purposes, FRUS, 9, Western Hemisphere (Washington: GPO, 1972), 645. On the deployment of the 201st Fighter Squadron of the Mexican Expeditionary Air Force, see Maria Emilia Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II, 224. On the hemispheric defense council, see Roderic Ai Camp, Generals in the Palacio: The Military in Modern Mexico, 57. 52. Acheson, Memorandum of Conversation, April 6, 1951, Acheson Papers, Memoranda of Conversations, January–July 1951, HST. Tello denied that Communists shaped Mexican public opinion, arguing that the opinions of the few Communists “did not amount to much” (ibid.). The need for troops was so pressing that the State Department persuaded Truman to personally request Brazil send an infantry division to relieve exhausted U.S. combat forces (James E. Webb, State Department, to Truman, April 9, 1951, and Truman to Brazilian President Getulio Vargas, April 9, 1951, White House Central Files, State Department Correspondence, Box 42, HST). Nothing came of this effort (Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, 498). The U.S. Embassy denounced reports published in Mexico that U.S. agents were recruiting Mexicans “to serve in [the] U.S. [A]rmy in Korea” (SEWW, Mexico City, FBIS, July 28, 1950, 0 1, Box 335, RG 263, NA). Some Latin American countries offered forces; for example, Colombia agreed to provide a battalion of infantry and a naval frigate (“Colombian Infantry Units Join U.N. Forces in Korea,” DSB, November 27, 1950, 870). 53. See, respectively, Sydney Gruson, “Mexican Communists Open Attack on Negotiations for U.S. Arms Aid,” NYT, February 11, 1952; and Sydney

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Gruson, “Military Aid Pact with Mexico Near,” February 13, 1952, 11. On the approbation for the rejection of the pact, see Sydney Gruson, “Mexicans Applaud Rebuff Given U.S.,” NYT, February 24, 1952; this story added that Communist propagandists had “fan[ned] into flames the suspicions of a large part of the Mexican populace toward United States intentions.” A U.S. government analysis cited suspicions of American motives arising “from past incidents, the peculiar course of Mexican history, the fear by the weak of the strong, and the activities of groups interested in fomenting discord” (Background Information [for President Eisenhower’s] Meeting with President of Mexico, October 19, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, IV, American Republics [Washington: GPO, 1983], 1350–51). The Mexican military welcomed the pact; it was “the civilian-dominated administration” of President Miguel Aleman that rejected it (Camp, Generals in the Palacio, 57). As late as 1960, there had been no progress on revising the Mexico–United States Defense Plan; Mexico was reluctant even to discuss “mutual security matters” in the joint Mexico– U.S. Defense Commission (“Special Report on Latin America [NSC 5613/1],” FRUS, 1958–1960, V, American Republics [Washington: GPO, 1991], 47). A position paper prepared a year earlier complained that the joint commission had not met for eighteen months, and that Mexican representatives would not allow any references to the “business of the Commission [to] be brought up at informal social gatherings.” A host of concerns of the U.S. military appear in the document, among them air defense arrangements for early warning and interception (Position Paper on Military Cooperation, n.d. [ca. February, 1959], White House Confidential File, Mexico, Trip by President, 1959, Box 36, DDE). 54. E. Nabatov, “Latin America under Washington Control,” NT (M), no. 12 (1951), 8 (Mexico was not mentioned; presumably, the Soviets were unaware of the conversation of Tello and Acheson). An earlier broadcast from Brazil said Mexico had informed the U.N. secretary-general that it could not furnish military aid for the armed conflict in Korea because “the Mexican Armed Forces are sufficient to take care of national defense needs only” (ZYB8, Sao Paulo, Brazil, August 1, 1950, FBIS, August 1, 1950, O 1, Box 3l36, RG 263, NA). See also CGV, in Spanish Morse to specified Mexican papers, February 23, 1952, FBIS, February 25, 1952, I 1, Box 436, RG 263, NA. 55. Gruson, “Mexicans Applaud Rebuff”; “Another American Diplomatic Reverse,” NT (M), no. 10 (1952), 20. See also these Radio Moscow broadcasts on the issue: home service, February 29, 1952 (Box 438); in English to North America, March 1, 1952 (Box 437); in Spanish to Latin America, March 4, 1952, CC 12–14 (Box 438); for these broadcasts, see, respectively, FBIS, March 4, 1952, AA 10; March 3, 1952, CC 7–8; March 5, 1952, CC 12–14; all in Box 438, RG 263, NA. TASS also commented on the loss of U.S. prestige, February 28, 1952, FBIS, February 29, 1952, AA 10–11, Box 437, RG 263, NA. A radio broadcast in Chile also noted the “wide publicity” that the “official Argentine press” gave to “the rupture of these negotiations” (CE1174, Santiago, March 5, 1952, FBIS, March 4, 1952, I 1, Box 438, RG 263, NA). Acting Secretary of State Webb ordered the negotiations kept alive; see his cable to the embassy, February 13, 1952, FRUS,

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1952–1954, 4, American Republics, 1328–29. Mexico rejected a series of “minor requests regarding continental defense” even though “similar suggestions made by the U.S.” were quickly accepted by Latin American countries not on friendly terms with the United States (HAR, 6, no. 7 [July 1953)], 10). 56. Leonard Engel, “Mexican Oil and American Dollars,” Nation, December 3, 1949, 1351; Lev Slyozkin, “‘Good-Neighbour,’ History,” NT (M), no. 51 (1958), 29. Slyozkin was reviewing a book written by the Mexican journalist Mario Gill, Our Good Neighbor, which was published in 1958. 57. “Background Information for [President Eisenhower’s] Meeting with President [Ruiz Cortines] of Mexico, October 19, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, 4, American Republics, 1351. Other factors included reluctance to export unprocessed raw materials and unwillingness to become involved in an atomic weapons race (ibid.). See also “Mexican Independence Day,” NT (M), no. 38 (1960), 10–11. 58. Grebler, Moore, and Guzman, Mexican-American People, 521; García, Operation Wetback, 198. Compare with Manuel García y Griego, who argues that Operation Wetback deportations were approximately 165,000 between mid-June and mid-August of 1954 (“Policymaking at the Apex: International Migration, State Autonomy, and Societal Constraints,” 101). Attorney General Brownell reckoned that the “influx of illegal entrants to the United States over the Mexican border” amounted to “literally hundreds of thousands each year,” but he did not estimate the number of deportations (Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell, 151). 59. The rumor “shocked” Brownell. See HAR, 5, no. 6 (June 1952), 10; and HAR, 7, no. 5 (May 1954), 8. For the indignation over the drownings, see HAR, 9, no. 9 (September 1956), 8; and HAR, 9, no. 420 (August 1956), 371. Brownell commended a federal official “for his fine handling of the movement of large numbers of wetbacks into Mexico.” There was cabinet-level concern about the need to improve U.S. relations with Mexico; the difficulties were partially ascribed to unhappiness in Mexico about the forced repatriations (Minutes of Cabinet Meeting of January 28, 1955, Box 4, Cabinet series, DDE). 60. For Kennedy’s article, see Pravda, February 8, 1953, CDSP, 5, no. 6, 24. Pravda also quoted La Voz de México to the effect that Mexican farmworkers were treated like slaves (Pravda, July 25, 1953, 3, CDSP, 5, no. 30, 41). See also B. Vronsky, “American ‘Democracy’s’ Ways,” Red Star, July 24, 1957, 4, CDSP, 9, no. 29, 16. 61. Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film, 37, 86. 62. For Jackson’s remarks, see Cong. Rec., 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1953), 1371– 72. Jackson’s request to block Salt of the Earth from completion and exhibition abroad elicited responses from Howard Hughes of RKO Pictures, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, and Assistant Secretary of State Thurston B. Morton (Cong. Rec., 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. [1953], 2127). 63. “In Defense of the Actress,” Hispanoamericano, March 13, 1953, 47. The article recounted sympathetically the difficulties encountered by the Mexican

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actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played the lead character, Esperanza; immigration authorities claimed she lacked proper documents, but Hispanoamericano judged the authorities wanted to prevent her from finishing the film. 64. “Reds in the Desert,” Newsweek, March 2, 1953, 27–28. Newsweek reported opposition from residents of the area, including mob violence, without sympathy for the filmmakers. See “Silver City Troubles,” March 16, 1953, 43– 44. See also Time, “I.U.M.M.S.W. with Love,” February 23, 1953, 102, and “Salt of the Earth,” March 16, 1953, 108. 65. “Salt and Pepper,” Time, March 29, 1954, 92. 66. Pravda, May 8, 1957, 8, CDSP, 9, no. 19 (1957), 28. See also Izvestia, January 4, 1953, CDSP, 5, no. 9 (1953), 44. The strike itself was featured earlier by Moscow Radio—which took some details from World Youth on discrimination against Mexican workers in the United States—for a broadcast in Spanish to Latin America, February 12, 1952, FBIS, February 18, 1952, Box 435, RG 263, NA. 67. “Conservative leaders of American unions, and the people of Western Europe, the Communists of Prague and Moscow and the conservative London Times” praised the picture (Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 198). The scenario was translated in 1955 for publication in China (Hung Chiu, “Foreign Films in Chinese Cinemas,” People’s China [Beijing], February 16, 1955, 25). The film was exhibited in Beijing in 1961 (SCMP, no. 2462 [1961], 31). 68. NYT, May 20, 1955.

Chapter 4: Pursuing the Dream

1. “‘Jim Crow’ Is Down but Not Out,” USN&WR, June 16, 1950, 18–19; “Negro Exclusion Banned,” NYT, June 27, 1951. 2. “Negro Exclusion Banned”; “Clashes in Illinois Bring Out Troops,” NYT, July 13, 1951; “Barbed Wire Bars Rioters in Chicago,” NYT, July 14, 1951; “Terror in Cicero,” Newsweek, July 23, 1951, 17. Similar violence occurred in Cicero in 1946, 1947, and 1949. See Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, 52–53, 57, 79. 3. Fred L. Israel, ed., The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1905– 1966, 3:2997, 2998–3000. 4. Robert Coe, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to State Department, February 13, 1950, 811.411/12–1350, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. 5. Peter V. Curl, ed., Documents on American Foreign Relations, 1953, 11–12. 6. Lillian Craig Harris, Libya: Qadhafi’s Revolution and the Modern State, 5–11; Robert B. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible, vii–viii. 7. Associated Press, “Racial Clash Erupts at Beach in Virginia,” NYT, August 6, 1950; “What’s Natural in Cairo,” Time, February 18, 1952, 67–68. Chicago also experienced recurring racial problems; see William Peters, “Race War in Chicago,” NR, January 9, 1950, 10–12; and “Mob Rule in Chicago,” NR, April 10, 1950, 12–13. 8. On the bombings, see John N. Popham, “Racial Rifts Tied to Slums in

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South,” NYT, December 7, 1952; for the bombing of the Moores’ home, see “Bombing Kills Negro Leader; Wife Hurt in Florida Home,” NYT, December 27, 1951. For the shootings of the inmates, see “The Sheriff Shoots,” Time, November 19, 1951, 27. A concurring opinion of the Supreme Court took note of prejudicial influence of such force that the trial was “but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which [it] generated”; see Shepherd v. Florida. 9. Acheson to U.S. Consulate General, Lagos, August 29, 1951, 811.411/8–3051, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. Elie Abel, “Cicero Riot Scored as Defeat for U.S.,” NYT, November 15, 1951. The Cicero rioting was covered by the NYT; see “Clashes in Illinois Bring Out Troops,” NYT, July 13, 1951. The “damage to the democratic standing of America in the world community” was cited in “Fear and Loneliness Haunt Negro Family in Chicago’s Race War,” Ebony, June 1954, 18. 10. Thomas E. Dewey, Journey to the Far Pacific, 283. The Straits Times serves Singapore and nearby Malaysia. In 1956, its circulation was 80,000 (John C. Merrill and Harold A. Fisher, The World’s Great Dailies: Profiles of Fifty Newspapers, 305–8). 11. Dewey, Journey, 283; “Victim Undaunted by Cicero Rioting,” NYT, July 15, 1951; “Justice in Cicero,” NR, December 31, 1951, 6. 12. Dewey, Journey, 279. Dewey was unclear about the source of the story in the Straits Times. Dewey blamed the distortion on the Straits Times and Reuters news agency: Because Reuters sent unfavorable news such as the Cicero riots to the world, the Associated Press and United Press believed they had to do likewise. 13. “Singapore Sling,” 71; Associated Press, “Dewey Urges Asia to Understand U.S.,” NYT, August 1, 1951; “Justice in Cicero,” 6. 14. “The Sheriff Shoots,” 26–27. See also these articles in NT (M): “Genocide,” no. 47 (1951), 16–17; and Stetson Kennedy, “Behind the Scenes of the Ku Klux Klan,” no. 42 (1954), 23–27. 15. “Upholding the Law,” NR, December 31, 1951, 7; “The Shape of Things,” Nation, November 24, 1951, 433; Stetson Kennedy, “Florida: Murder without Indictment,” Nation, November 24, 1951, 444–45. Irvin’s second death sentence, covered by Pravda, was broadcast on the home service of Radio Moscow, February 21, 1952, FBIS, February 25, 1952, AA 24, Box 436, RG 263, NA; see also Radio Moscow, in English to North America, February 15, 1952, FBIS, February 18, 1952, CC 3, Box 435, RG 263, NA. 16. “The Bomb Heard around the World,” Ebony, April 1952, 15, and in the same issue, “Communists Use Bombings for Effective Propaganda,” 22. William A. Rutherford, Paris correspondent of the Associated Negro Press, asserted that the atrocities and terror against African Americans discredited “our nation in the eyes of the entire world”; see “Jim Crow: A Problem in Diplomacy,” Nation, November 8, 1952, 428–29. 17. See Lewis Wood, “Supreme Court Rulings Bar Segregation in 2 Colleges, Also Void Bias in Rail Diners,” NYT, June 6, 1950; and these Time stories: “Busy Monday,” June 12, 1950, 20; “We Must Go Along,” October 9, 1950, 70; “After

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125 Years,” September 18, 1950, 52; “New Opening,” July 10, 1950, 65; and “Concession at Chapel Hill,” April 16, 1951, 85. See also “The Segregation Issue,” December 22, 1952, 13. 18. Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life, 158–60, 177–79, 199– 231, passim. See also “Peacemaker,” Time, October 2, 1950, 24. In an effort to counter accusations of racism, the International Information Administration, a precursor to the USIA, produced a documentary titled Workers for Peace that highlighted Bunche (Cull, Cold War, 76). 19. But Hampton had to disavow the possibility of being elected mayor, lest it alienate white supporters (William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom, 54–55). 20. “Convictions in Cicero,” Newsweek, June 16, 1952, 34–35; “Klobbered in Karolina,” Newsweek, August 11, 1952, 24; “A Flogging for the Klan,” Time, August 11, 1952, 21. 21. “The Case of Silas Rogers,” Time, January 5, 1953, 50–51. 22. Ralph de Toledano, “It’s New Now,” Newsweek, December 17, 1951, 27; “Lynch-Free Year,” Newsweek, January 12, 1953, 25. 23. “The Case of Silas Rogers”; P. H. [Philip Horton], “The Negro’s International Vote,” Reporter, December 6, 1949, 2; as evidence of Asia’s interest in U.S. race problems, Horton mentioned that Indian prime minister Nehru had “quiet private talks with a few Negro leaders” during an official visit to the United States. See also Negro Digest for the following: Era Bell Thompson, “How the Race Problem Embarrasses America,” November 1950, 52–53; and Roi Ottley, “The World Watches America’s Racism,” January 1951, 70–75. 24. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 31, 1949, n.p., in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 1st Sess., A4969. The NYT quoted Attorney General McGrath’s warning that “We must prove to the world that our democracy works” (“Tolerance Linked to Security of U.S.,” NYT, December 18, 1949). 25. “Good Neighbors,” Time, May 12, 1952, 27. 26. Ibid. In a variation on the theme, blacks came to the aid of whites in another incident; see Helen Ellsberg, “The Miracle of Vallejo,” Negro Digest, February 1951, 94–97. 27. “The One-Town Skirmish,” Time, December 29, 1952, 10. 28. Ibid., 9–10. 29. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital, 274–75; Brower, 15,000,000 Americans, 8–9. 30. NYT, May 14, 1948. Similar problems affected other schools; see Portland (Maine) Press Herald, March 20, 1950, n.p., in OF 93B, Box 549, HST. Jim Crow at Washington’s National Airport was exposed in “The Airport Test,” Newsweek, January 10, 1949, 23. 31. The TASS dispatch appeared in Izvestia, April 3, 1949, 4, CDSP, 1, no. 14 (1949), 53; see also M. Fyodorov, “Washington,” NT (M), no. 28 (1951), 22–24. Cited were articles published in February 1950 by Woman’s Home Companion and Holiday, and an article in American Mercury (publication details not provided). See also “Legalized Barbarism,” NT (M), no. 6 (1953), 15–16.

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32. Leon Svirsky, ed., Your Newspaper: Blueprint for a Better Press, 23–24. See also Davies, “Industry in Transition,” 191. 33. See, for example, “The Truth Stings,” NT (M), no. 47 (1952), 25, which distorts slightly an article by Peter Meyer, “The Neutralist Threat,” American Mercury, September 1952, 15–22. Poland and other satellite nations lodged similar accusations with a U.N. special committee in 1949, about “widespread racial and religious discrimination in the United States” (David Anderson, “Pole in U.N. Hits at U.S. Racial Bias,” NYT, October 6, 1949). 34. “Reply to a Questionnaire Received from an American Magazine,” NT (M), Supplement to no. 16 (1949), 15. Pravda ran 675 words on lynchings in the United States, April 2, 1949, 4, CDSP, 1, no. 14, 52–53. Lynchings also figure in a dramatization of Howard Fast’s novel Freedom Road, reviewed in Soviet Arts, November 21, 1952, 3–4, CDSP, 3, no. 48 (1952), 35–36. See also Margaret Snell James, “Letter from a Young Negro Reader,” NT (M), no. 38 (1949), 31; B. Yuryev, “Paradise Valley,” NT (M), no. 46 (1949), 31; and Radio Moscow, February 29, 1952, FBIS, March 3, 1952, BB 1, Box 437, RG 263, NA. 35. See these articles in NT (M): Y. Gromov, “Harry Haywood’s ‘Negro Liberation,’” no. 15 (1949), 28; L. Sedin, “Fishermen on Strike,” no. 23 (1953), 13–15; L. Ziman, “Tell-Tale Statistics,” no. 24 (1953), 30–31. 36. On race and sports, see V. Andreyev and P. Sobolev, “Ski Contest in America,” NT (M), no. 14 (1950), 28. On race in higher education, see Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 4, 1949, CDSP, 1, no. 23 (1949), 53. See also I. Lapitsky, “The Workings of American Pseudo-Democracy,” NT (M), no. 46 (1951), 6–10; and Pravda, September 23, 1952, 3, CDSP, 4, no. 38 (1952), 19. 37. “The Wittenberg ‘Case,’” NT (M), no. 17 (1950), 31. Pravda published accusations of forced sterilization, August 16, 1952, 4, CDSP, 4, no. 33, 23–24. It used material from France’s Communist L’Humanité. 38. See these stories in NT (M): I. Lapitsky, “The Philippine Scene,” no. 31 (1950), 12–15; N. Stratov, “Hunger in Brazil,” no. 8 (1953), 28–32; and P. Chebyshev, “Southern Rhodesia,” no. 6 (1949), 25–28. See also these articles compiled in CDSP: Izvestia, February 21, 1952, 3, CDSP, 4, no. 8 (1952), 22; Komsomolskaya Pravda, April 18, 1952, 4, CDSP, 4, no. 16 (1952), 17–18; and Pravda, September 1, 1952, 4, CDSP, 4, no. 35 (1952), 19. 39. Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956, 219–20. For the Virginia Supreme Court’s discussion of the arguments, see Hampton v. Commonwealth. On the Calcutta press, see Evan M. Wilson, U.S. Consul General, Calcutta, to State Department, February 9, 1951, 811.411/2– 951, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. C. Raja Mohan, “Balancing Interests and Values: India’s Struggle with Democracy Promotion,” 101. 40. “The Martinsville Seven,” Time, February 12, 1951, 21; Howard Fast, “Terror in the United States,” NT (M), no. 9 (1951), 13–14. See also “A Racist Crime,” NT (M), no. 6 (1951), 19. The execution is mentioned briefly in “Ameri­can Justice,” NT (M), no. 28 (1951), 30. For a Chinese statement on the Martinsville Seven, see Xinhua News Agency, February 1, 1951, SCMP, no. 62 (1951), 13.

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41. See McGee v. State (1946); McGee v. State (1948); McGee v. State (1949). 42. Carl T. Rowan, South of Freedom, 187–88. In the French West Indies, the Communist press railed about the McGee case in a “violently savage tone,” according to Vice Consul Thomas A. Cassilly; he cast doubts, however, on the persuasiveness of the propaganda; Cassilly to State Department, May 28, 1951, 811.411.5–2851, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. 43. See NT (M) for “The Legal Murder of Willie McGee,” no. 20 (1951), 22–23; and “More Lynchings in America,” no. 14 (1951), 15–16. The Chinese demand for “immediate suspension” of the death sentence appears in NYT (Associated Press, “Chinese Reds Protest McGee Case to Truman,” NYT, July 27, 1950). 44. “Justice and the Communists,” Time, May 14, 1951, 26. Horne argues persuasively that the interest of the Civil Rights Congress in McGee extended beyond propaganda (Horne, Communist Front, 95, 97). Newsweek gave the Congress credit for fighting “for a stay of execution” at no small risk (“A Stay for Willie,” Newsweek, August 7, 1950, 31–32). 45. Horne, Communist Front, 81. 46. “‘Evil-Eye’ Ingram,” Ebony, December, 1951, 33–35; “Deadlock in Yance­ ville,” Newsweek, November 26, 1951, 26; “Assault at 50 Feet,” Time, July 23, 1951, 11–12; “Assault by Leer,” Time, November 24, 1952, 22. For the ruling of the North Carolina Supreme Court, see State v. Ingram. The reversal was recorded in the NYT, February 26, 1953; and “Assault by Leer, Concluded,” Time, March 9, 1953, 23–24. 47. Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953, 61, 115; John Toland, In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950–1953, 230. 48. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 83. 49. “Mobilizing the Peaceful Forces in the Whole World to Crush the Conspiracy of War-Instigators,” Selected Documents of the Central Committee of the CCP, 18:500, quoted in Hu Lingque, “Historical Perspectives: A Chinese Perspective on Sino-American Relations in 1949–50,” 37. See also Nancy B. Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949–1950, 41. The opposing sides fought up and down the peninsula. Armistice negotiations were initiated in 1951 but soon stalemated, primarily over the issue of repatriating prisoners of war. An armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. See Richard Whelan, Drawing the Line: The Korean War, 1950–1953, 347, 349–50. 50. “Zhonggong Zhongyang Guanyu Zai Quanguo Jinxing Shishi Xuanchuan De Zhishi” [Instructions of the CCP Central Committee on the nationwide propaganda about the current events], October 26, 1950; reprinted in Jianguo Yilai Zhongyao Wenxian Xuanbian [Selection of important documents since the foundation of the PRC], 1:436–48, quoted in Wang Jisi, “From Paper Tiger to Real Leviathan: China’s Images of the United States since 1949,” 9. 51. Xinhua News Agency, November 22, 1950, SCMP, no. 15 (1950), 6; White to Special Counsel, August 31, 1950, CIA, Box 9, White House Confidential Files, HST.

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52. The provincial press praised the valor of the black soldiers. See, for example, Minneapolis Tribune, July 24, 1950, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (1950), A5531; and “Kilroy Again,” Time, July 31, 1950, 17. Cleaborn was honored by his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, which named a new housing development in his honor (“Eddie Would Be Happy,” Time, February 12, 1951, 20). 53. Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1951, reprinted as John H. Thompson, “It’s a No-Race Army Now,” Negro Digest, April 1951, 56–57. See also Blair, Forgotten War, 150, 153, 162, 242–43. On Gilbert, see “Panic under Fire,” Time, December 11, 1950, 22–23. 54. Thurgood Marshall, “Summary Justice—The Negro GI in Korea,” Crisis, 58, no. 5 (May 1951), 304. On the hospitalized soldier, see Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark, Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench, 129–30. On the reduced sentences, see Carl T. Rowan, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall, 165–66, 169. The commutation of Gilbert’s death sentence is mentioned in “Panic under Fire,” 22–23. “How to Interview MacArthur,” Time, June 11, 1951, 93, refers to the “excessive courtmartialing” of black troops. The NAACP also charged that black troops were being made the scapegoats “for the failure of Army brass,” who were “out to undermine integration . . . by discrediting Negro troops” (“Smearing Negro GIs in Korea,” Crisis, 57, no. 11 [December 1950], 715). A controversy continued for decades over the army’s charges of cowardice and desertion in the case of the 24th Infantry Regiment, which was disbanded in 1951 (NYT, May 7, 1966). Supporters of retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles M. Bussey allege that he was denied a Medal of Honor for heroism because of his race (he received a Silver Star). (Dallas Morning News [NYT News Service], May 1, 1994). 55. “A Man’s a Man,” Time, February 25, 1952, 26. 56. “The Captive Audience,” Time, August 17, 1953, 21; see also “The Tough Prisoners,” Time, September 21, 1953, 29. 57. Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War”; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 67–76; Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, 21–218. On Baker and the Stork Club incident, see JeanClaude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart, 12–18, 308, 311, 319. 58. Quoted in Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 68. 59. On efforts to discredit Baker, see Richard G. Cushing, information officer, U.S. Embassy, Havana, to State Department, January 30, 1953, 811.411/1–3053; see also John H. Madonne, U.S. Consul General, Bordeau, France, to State Department, November 10, 1954, 811.411/11–1054; Philip Raine to Haden, October 20, 1952, 811.411/9–3052; and “Conversation with Foreign Minister re Danish Press coverage of Josephine Baker’s Visit,” Memorandum from Mr. Bell for files of U.S. Embassy, Copenhagen, February 23, 1954. (In the same file sketchy notes debate the wisdom of arranging to send black figures, such as Walter White of the NAACP, to Latin America to weaken Baker’s antiAmerican message.) These documents are in Box 4438, RG 59, NA. See also Dudziak, “Josephine Baker.”

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60. “Winchell v. Baker,” Time, November 12, 1951, 47–49. Time used the word cried also to characterize the utterances of newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, who, Baker fumed, was aware of racial discrimination at the Stork Club, but, despite his reputation as a liberal, did nothing to correct it. 61. “People,” Time, November 17, 1952, 46; see also “Newsmakers,” Newsweek, November 17, 1952, 50. 62. “Conditioned Reflex,” Time, May 1949, 25; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 342; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 61–63. 63. “Conditioned Reflex,” 25. 64. “Jackie Robinson Pitching,” Newsweek, August 1, 1949, 18–19. Newsweek had reported earlier that Robinson “took exception” to what Robeson remarked: “‘Paul speaks only for himself,’ Robinson said. ‘I would fight any aggressor—and that includes the Russians’” (“In Passing,” Newsweek, July 18, 1949, 36). See also “In Passing,” Newsweek, May 17, 1948, 57; “No Help Wanted,” Time, August 1, 1949, 10; and Frank McNaughton to Don Bermingham, July 21, 1949, Box 15, McNaughton Papers, HST. More than two decades later, Robinson, “grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness,” had gained “increased respect for Paul Robeson who, . . . sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because . . . he was sincerely trying to help his people” (Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 98). Other rebukes to Robeson came from boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and orchestra leader Duke Ellington (“Salt from Sugar Ray,” Newsweek, January 15, 1951, 23; and Duke Ellington, “No Red Songs for Me,” New Leader, September 30, 1950, 4). 65. See the following Time articles: “Burden of Proof,” June 27, 1949, 36; “Journey’s End,” August 14, 1950, 12; and “Declaration of War,” July 25, 1949, 16. Time preferred those who retained their faith in America even if they had suffered racial discrimination. An example was expatriate conductor Dean Dixon, who, though denied an opportunity to conduct in America, did not speak out against it abroad (“Spreading the Word,” Time, July 21, 1952, 81). 66. “Picnic at Peekskill,” Time, September 5, 1949, 15 (see also “Robeson Ruckus,” Newsweek, September 12, 1949, 23); “Second Battle of Peekskill,” Time, September 19, 1949, 28; “Titoism Muscles In,” Newsweek, September 26, 1949, 24. New Times (Moscow) flogged Governor Dewey of New York in print for “sophistries designed to whitewash the fascist bandits” (NT [M], no. 39 [1949], 18). Novelist Howard Fast argued that the first Peekskill incident was a “carefully planned mass lynching” abetted by law enforcement officers who absented themselves from the mob violence (Howard Fast, Peekskill, U.S.A.: A Personal Experience, 44). Another Robeson concert proved successful despite some disruption (D.C., “A Day in the Country,” Reporter, September 27, 1949, 33–36). 67. Robeson led the committee that presented the petition to the U.N. Secretariat in New York, while William L. Patterson, the executive secretary of the CRC, presented it to the General Assembly at its meeting in Paris. See William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Historical Petition to the United

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Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People, xiv; and “U.S. Accused in UN of Negro Genocide,” NYT, December 18, 1951. The Washington Post also focused on Dr. Lemkin’s rebuttal, noting that the Civil Rights Congress was listed as a subversive and Communist group. The newspaper noted Lemkin’s comment that violence toward African Americans was at the individual level, not the mass level, and therefore did not amount to genocide (“Charge of U.S. Genocide Called Red Smoke Screen,” Washington Post, December 16, 1951). See also “Negro Genocide,” CSM, December 24, 1951. 68. Pravda, February 16, 1952, n.p., FBIS, February 19, 1952, AA 19; an abbreviated reference is in Radio Moscow, in English to North America, February 15, 1952, FBIS, February 18, 1952, CC 3, both in Box 435, RG 263, NA. 69. Horne, Communist Front, 167; W. J. Convery Egan, Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to State Department, December 30, 1952, 811.411/12–3052, Box 4438, RG 59, NA. 70. William A. Rutherford, “Jim Crow: A Problem in Diplomacy,” Nation, November 8, 1952, 429. For the government’s maneuvering, see Duberman, Paul Robeson, 398. On the packet, see Acheson to Mrs. Roosevelt, February 12, 1952, Department of State, 811.411/1–2852, Box 4437, RG 59, NA. 71. “People of the Week,” USN&WR, February 25, 1949, 32, 35. The identification “grandson of a slave” appeared earlier in “Partition Chief,” Newsweek, December 15, 1947, 30. However, identifying Bunche as “the first Negro to . . .” or “the grandson of a slave” was something that whites apparently regarded as “complimentary, but which Bunche and his family found obnoxious and patronizing” (Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, 431). But the power of the Horatio Alger myth transcended race. 72. Dean Rusk to Brian Urquhart, December 17, 1981, quoted by Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, 109. Also offensive to Bunche’s family was the discovery, after the death of their dog, that a pet cemetery refused to inter the pets of blacks. On the segregated Washington pet cemetery, see Kenesaw M. Landis, Segregation in Washington: A Report of the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital, 19. 73. “No Thanks,” Time, June 6, 1949, 25 (emphasis added); Pravda (TASS), June 6, 1949, 4, CDSP, 1, no. 23 (1949), 54–55. “A Room of My Own,” Reporter, July 5, 1949, 21, quoted the Post’s judgment that Bunche would have the status of a coolie outside the State Department. Other prominent African Americans singled out by the national press included White of the NAACP (“In Passing,” Newsweek, October 3, 1949, 48) and Dr. Charles S. Johnson, the president of the black Fisk University in Nashville (John N. Popham, “Racial Gains Cited by Negro Educator,” NYT, July 10, 1949). 74. “Answer to Byrnes,” Time, April 9, 1951, 92. 75. Dawson represented Chicago in Congress for twenty-seven years. See Bruce A. Ragsdale and Joel D. Treese, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–1989, 29–30. 76. “House Applauds Negro Member for Anti-Draft Segregation Plea,” NYT, April 13, 1951.

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77. Ibid. Truman to Dawson, September 24, 1951, Cross-Reference Sheet, 1951–53, Box 549, OF 93B, HST. Newsweek preserved Dawson’s tone of fervent idealism by eliding a passage about his injury while serving in a segregated unit (“UMT Dead as Law Nears Enactment,” Newsweek, April 23, 1951, 36). 78. “Answer,” Time, August 28, 1950, 14; “Primitive Subterfuge,” NT (M), no. 34 (1950), 15. Sampson’s statement appears in “Thorn in Russia’s Side,” Negro Digest, 10, no. 1 (September 1951), 6. See also Rutherford, “Jim Crow,” 428–29. 79. “Singer and Citizen,” Newsweek, April 25, 1949, 84–85. 80. Jackie Robinson, Baseball Has Done It, 93–94. 81. Radio Moscow, in English to Europe, February 22, 1952, FBIS, February 26, 1952, BB 11–12, Box 436, RG 263, NA; Irvin’s remarks, taken from a Voice of America broadcast, were published in “Newsmakers,” Newsweek, February 25, 1952, 50. 82. “High Reach, High Mark,” Time, August 11, 1952, 21. 83. Elliot E. Cohen, “The Free American Citizen, 1952,” Time, September 8, 1952, 24–25. 84. H. I. London, Non-White Immigration and the “White Australia” Policy, 8–10, 12–15. The White Australia policy was mentioned as early as 1902. See “News from Australia,” NYT, July 6, 1902. 85. “Asiatics Keep Out,” Newsweek, February 21, 1949, 37. On the two brothers, see “A Swim in the Sun,” Time, February 6, 1950, 23–24. The plight of two couples forced to separate because of the rule was treated in “Never the Twain . . .,” Newsweek, April 1, 1949, 40. Sergeant Lorenzo Gamboa, a U.S. citizen of Filipino origin who had served in Australia during World War II, was refused permission to visit his Australian wife and two children despite an appeal to the Australian government by General Douglas MacArthur. His case “became a news story in almost every nation in the globe,” few of which approved of Australia’s action (London, Non-White Immigration, 16– 17, 186–87). Of course, white American journalists tended not to discuss the problematic concept of “whiteness” in the United States. For a discussion of “whiteness,” see Borstelmann, Cold War. 86. On the Empire Windrush, see Michael Banton, “Recent Migration from West Africa and the West Indies to the United Kingdom,” 2, 5, 10. See also Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain, 35, 50, 331. 87. The boast is recorded in “More Than Skin Deep,” Newsweek, May 19, 1952, 42. See also David Lawrence, “A 25-Year Job ahead in Europe,” USN&WR, July 4, 1952, 48. 88. “Back Home,” Time, November 10, 1952, 38; “The Segregation Issue,” Time, December 22, 1952, 13 n.; see also “The Figurama,” Time, December 1, 1952, 11. 89. “More Than Skin Deep.” (A shorter version of the quotation appears in “Now England Raises a Racial Barrier,” USN&WR, November 20, 1961, 93; and in “Race Trouble in Birmingham, England, Too,” USN&WR, March 23,

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1964, 103.) See also “Britain Has a Race Problem, Too,” USN&WR, June 18, 1954, 44. For related statements, see “Back Home,” Time, November 10, 1952, 38. See also “The Segregation Issue,” Time, December 22, 1952, 13; and “The Figurama,” 11. 90. Martin Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa in the Post-War Period, 52–54. Not all developments were repressive: South African courts blocked legislation to strip colored voters of political rights exercised since 1853, and a civil disobedience campaign led to thousands of arrests and the growth of the African National Congress into a mass movement (ibid., 64). 91. Brower, 15,000,000 Americans, 2; “Jim Crow, to the Hilt,” NR, June 12, 1950, 8.

Chapter 5: A Symbol not Shattered

1. Mary L. Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case.” 2. Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae at X, Brown v. Bd. of Education; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 90–91; Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative”; Borstelmann, Cold War, 57–58. 3. Cull, Cold War, 113; C. Vaughan Ferguson Jr., U.S. Consul, Dakar, to State Department, Washington, May 26, 1954, 811.411/5–2654; George H. Owen, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, to State Department, Washington, June 2, 1954, 811.11/6–254; Wm. McK. Johnson, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Cape Town, to State Department, Washington, June 9, 1954, 811.411/6–954, all in Box 4438, RG 59, NA; Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 1954. 4. Catherine S. Scott, Acting Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Bombay, to USIA, Washington, August 20, 1954, USIA dispatches, 1954–1965, Box 1, RG 306, NA. The Times of India was the oldest of the English-language dailies in India and had the largest circulation at the time. It has always been aimed at influential English businessmen and the intelligentsia (Merrill and Fisher, World’s Great Dailies, 330–33). Asahi, May 25, 1954, DSJP, May 25, 1954, 8; Mainichi, May 20, 1954, DSJP, May 21, 1954, 4; see also Shakai Times, May 20, 1954, May 20, 1954, 16. For a discussion of Asahi and Mainichi, see Merrill and Fisher, 59–68. Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case.” On the Iraqi and Pakistani press, see State Department, “Treatment of Minorities in the United States,” 811.411/12– 458, Box 4159, RG 59, NA. Davies, “Industry in Transition,” 199. 5. Davies, “Industry in Transition,” 198; “The Fading Line,” Time, December 21, 1953, 18; “To All on Equal Terms,” Time, May 24, 1954, 21. Months later, Time reported the Supreme Court had ended an unsavory tradition by installing its “first Negro page boy” (“Implementing a Decision,” Time, August 2, 1954, 13). 6. Arthur E. Sutherland, “Segregation and the Supreme Court, Atlantic Monthly, July 1954, 33; Carey McWilliams, “The Climax of an Era,” Nation, May 29, 1954, 453; “The School Decision,” CC, June 2, 1954, 662. An interview with Walter White, the NAACP executive secretary, touches on Brown (“What Negroes Want Now,” USN&WR, May 28, 1954, 56).

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7. The New York Times provided other excerpts from newspaper reaction to the decision around the country, including the following. The St. Louis PostDispatch observed: “Had this decision gone the other way the loss to the free world in its struggle against Communist encroachment would have been incalculable. Nine men in Washington have given us a victory that no number of divisions, arms, and bombs could ever have won.” The Washington Post and Times-Herald opined that the ruling would end the “disparity between American principles and American practices, . . . and refurbish American prestige” (NYT, May 18, 1954). VOA broadcasts also were mentioned in “Supreme Court Voids Racial Segregation,” America, May 29, 1954, 238. 8. “Dilemma in Dixie,” Time, 20 February 1956, 76. Carolyn Martindale, in her examination of the coverage of African Americans and the civil rights movement in the Boston Globe, NYT, Atlanta Constitution, and Chicago Tribune, found that the coverage, or lack thereof, reflected “in some ways, white society’s indifference and distrust of black Americans” (Martindale, White Press and Black America, 107). 9. Izvestia, June 23, 1954, 4, CDSP, 6, no. 25 (1954), 19, 33. See also I. Sotnikov, “The Theory and Practice of Genocide,” NT (M), no. 23 (1954), 18; and “Racialist Excesses,” IA (M), no. 2 (1955), 107–8. A number of other articles did not mention Brown but challenged the notion that the Americans were righting their wrongs. See, for example, Stetson Kennedy, “‘Free Elections’ I Have Seen,” NT (M), no. 35 (1954), 13–15; Pravda, August 29, 1954, 4, CDSP, 7, no. 36 (1954), 12; Stetson Kennedy, “Behind the Scenes of the Ku Klux Klan,” NT (M), no. 41 (1954), 23–27; “American Justice,” NT (M), no. 52 (1954), 20–21; and “Negro Problem Again Faces U.S.A.,” IA (M), no. 4 (1956), 120–21. 10. “Historic Decision,” Newsweek, May 24, 1954, 26. 11. “When Negroes Go to School with Whites,” USN&WR, September 24, 1954, 24, 29; “Talk and the Schools,” Time, September 27, 1954, 60; “Quiet, Please,” Time, October 18, 1954, 50; “Evasive Action,” Time, November 15, 1954, 52; “As Mixed Schools Came to U.S. Capital,” USN&WR, November 12, 1954, 52. 12. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 112; Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren, 291; Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 66. Associate Justice William O. Douglas complained that “Ike’s ominous silence on our 1954 decision gave courage to the racists who decided to resist the decision” (William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939–1975, 120). Despite some achievements in civil rights by the Eisenhower administration, wrote Eisenhower’s former speechwriter and aide Emmet John Hughes, he had “profoundly reticent views . . . toward the whole struggle for civil rights” (Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years, 200–201; see also Robert Frederick Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights, 144–45). 13. Although Time probably had no way of knowing it, Senior Justice Hugo Black, a southerner, believed the court should have ordered an immediate remedy, but he “swallowed his doubts” in the interest of having a unanimous decision (Roger K. Newman, Hugo Black: A Biography, 437–40).

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14. “The Amazing Voyage,” Time, June 13, 1955, 21; “The Powerful Tide,” Time, June 13, 1955, 23; “The Tension of Change,” Time, September 19, 1955, 23. 15. Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, 130–33, 135. 16. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, 12–27, 40, 42. 17. Ibid., 12–27, 40, 42; Borstelmann, Cold War, 98–99. 18. “Treatment of Minorities in the United States”; U.S. Embassy, Paris, to State Department, October 5, 1955, 811.411/10–555, Box 4157; Le Monde, September 26, 1955, 1, is quoted in the memorandum. U.S. diplomats thought the Till case brought “increasing attention to problems of racial relations in the United States” by the Belgian press; see U.S. Embassy, Brussels, to State Department, March 20, 1956, 811.411/3–2056, Box 4157. The documents are in RG 59, NA. Strikingly, though the State Department brought a broad historical presentation about the U.S. South to the Netherlands, the Dutch were interested “almost exclusively in the contemporary history of Negrowhite relations” (NYT, April 4, 1955). 19. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, 428. 20. “The Case of Emmett Till,” NT (M) no. 41 (1955), 20–21; “Where Truth Doesn’t Pay,” NT (M) no. 44 (1955), 19–20. Much the same line was taken in “Slayers of Emmet [sic] Till,” IA (M), no. 1 (1956), 94–95. The Soviet propaganda about Till gained strength from faultfinding of U.S. racism in general. See “Racial Discrimination in U.S. Army,” IA (M), no. 11 (1955), 112–13; and “ProSlavery,” NT (M), no. 37 (1956), 17–18. 21. Pravda, December 15, 1957, 4, CDSP, 8, no. 50 (1957), 23–24. Communists elsewhere joined in the chorus. While most newspapers in Iraq played down the murder of Till and the trial and acquittal, Communist pamphleteers railed against “repressive measures and ‘inhumanity’ against minority groups in the United States” (State Department, Treatment of Minorities in the United States). 22. “The Accused,” Newsweek, September 19, 1955, 38; “The Place, the Acquittal,” Newsweek, October 3, 1955, 30. 23. “Death in Mississippi,” Commonweal, September 23, 1955, 603; Dan Wakefield, “Justice in Sumner,” Nation, October 1, 1955, 284; “Double Murder in Mississippi,” CC, October 5, 1955, 1132. 24. Benjamin Bradlee, “The Bitter Choice,” Newsweek, February 27, 1956, 41– 42. In the same vein was “‘Paris’ in Africa,” USN&WR, April 30, 1954, 64–66. State Department, Treatment of Minorities in the United States. 25. Lerone Bennett Jr., “When the Man and the Hour Are Met,” 31. 26. On Gandhi’s application of moral power for political ends in the struggle against the Raj, see Norman F. Cantor, The Age of Protest: Dissent and Rebellion in the Twentieth Century, 213–16. On King’s lending a moral quality to the movement, see Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960’s, 30. 27. E. D. Nixon interview by Stanley Smith, February 1968 (transcript of tape 139, Ralph Bunche/Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, 12). The Advertiser did not exhibit

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hostility toward the boycott in that initial story. Its heavy use of quotations from various parties and the tone of the article indicated some apprehensiveness that readers might object to publicizing a black attack on Jim Crow. See Joe Azbell, “Negro Groups Ready Boycott of City Lines,” Montgomery Advertiser, December 4, 1955. Grover Cleveland Hall won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for editorial writing crusades against the Klan, but under the editorship of his son Grover C. Hall Jr., in the delicate phrase of Time, the Advertiser saw “no integration possible in the Deep South in the foreseeable future” (“Dilemma in Dixie,” Time, February 20, 1956, 76, 78, 81). 28. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, 121. 29. Ibid. For the Times coverage in December 1955, see NYT (AP), December 6, 1955; NYT (AP), December 9, 1955; NYT (United Press), December 10, 1955; and NYT (AP), December 20, 1955. 30. “Invasion of the South,” Newsweek, April 2, 1956, 86; “Southern Hospitality,” Time, June 25, 1956, 76; NYT, March 20, 1956; “Pro and Con: Alabama’s Bus Boycott: What It’s All About,” USN&WR, August 3, 1956, 84; Daniel Webster Hollis III, An Alabama Newspaper Tradition: Grover C. Hall and the Hall Family, 106. 31. For example, the Memphis Commercial Appeal and New Orleans TimesPicayune covered Mississippi more thoroughly (and circulated heavily in the northern and southern districts of Mississippi, respectively) than did the papers of Jackson, the state capital. The legendary rivalry of the liberal Tennessean and conservative Banner of Nashville was so intense that they even quarreled over Daylight Savings Time. 32. “Pro and Con: Alabama’s Bus Boycott,” 84. 33. Remarks of L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, Cong. Rec.—House, 84th Cong., 1st Sess. (1956), 14594, enclosing Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier, July 17, 1956, n.p.; Remarks of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Cong. Rec. Appendix, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1958), A4542, enclosing Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier, May 15, 1958, n.p.; Remarks of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Cong. Rec. Appendix, 86th Cong., 1st Sess. (1959), A1502–1593, enclosing Washington Star, February 24, 1959. 34. Alfred Maund, “Monster Rally at Montgomery,” Nation, February 18, 1956, 128; Carey McWilliams, “Miracle in Alabama,” Nation, March 3, 1956, 169; “Segregation on Intrastate Buses Ruled Illegal,” CC, November 28, 1956, 1379; see also “What Is On Trial in Montgomery,” CC, March 28, 1956, 387. 35. NYT, March 13, 1956. Various other articles pointed specifically to the international attention accorded the Montgomery movement. Reuters reported a three-day fast conducted by pacifists in London “in support of Negro rights in Alabama,” NYT, April 1, 1956; the Times summarized speeches by Vice President Nixon and Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who warned that racial bias was hurting the reputation of the United States. See, respectively, NYT, October 19, 1956; and February 7, 1956, 20. There were similar articles about or written by less prominent individuals; see NYT,

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February 27, 1956; March 5, 1956; March 24, 1956; May 23, 1956; September 4, 1956; and November 25, 1956. 36. King observed, as few others did, that segregation must be destroyed, not out of diplomatic expediency, “but because it is morally compelling” (“Pro and Con: Alabama’s Bus Boycott,” 82, 89). 37. William N. Fraleigh, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Wellington, to State Department, March 13, 1956, 811.411/3–1356, Box 4157, RG 59, NA. Fraleigh ascribed the impact on New Zealanders of racial incidents in the United States to (in part) their “conscious pride in what they consider is their enlightened treatment of their own native people, the Maoris.” The reality was, he continued, that “there is a considerable degree of racial discrimination in New Zealand” (ibid.). See also Wellington Evening Post, February 27, 1956 (Fraleigh’s dispatch enclosed the article by O’Donovan). 38. Neither King nor the Montgomery Improvement Association introduced nonviolence to the United States. Gandhi himself acknowledged an intellectual debt to Thoreau. The Congress of Racial Equality opted for a strategy of nonviolence, but its demonstrations in the 1940s and early 1950s were limited. The articulation of nonviolence in the boycott was due as much to the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Bayard Rustin, as to King. See Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 37. 39. Fleck to State Department, February 28, 1956, 811.411/2–2856, Box 4157, RG 59, NA. Fleck enclosed the article by K. Balaraman, the New York correspondent of the Hindu, titled “Satyagraha in Alabama.” Hindu, February 27, 1956. 40. “The treatment of Negroes in the United States,” Turner added, “will probably long continue to be an important adverse factor” in Indians’ attitude toward the United States. William T. Turner, U.S. Consul General, Bombay, to State Department, February 27, 1956, 811.411/2–2756, Box 4157, RG 59, NA. 41. “Stop Criminal Racial Discrimination,” Tientsin Ta Kung Pao, February 25, 1956, SCMP, no. 1242, 1956; Eslanda Goode Robeson, “Middle Ground, Gradualism, and the New Negro,” IA (M), no. 5 (1956), 103. In her article, Robeson identified King as “the dynamic, popular, and courageous leader of the Negro people.” The Soviet monthly referred earlier to the bombings in Montgomery of “the homes of Edward Nixon, a Negro trade union official, and M. King, a Negro clergyman,” a sign of King’s lack of visibility at this time (“Infringement on Human Rights,” IA [M], no. 3 [1956], 99). International Affairs (Moscow) also printed several references in 1957 and 1958 to the Montgomery boycott; see Eslanda Robeson, “The American Negro Fights for His Rights,” IA (M) no. 1 (1957), 95, 96; and William L. Patterson, “Democratic Demagogy and Racist Practice,” IA (M), no. 3 (1958), 68, 70. The periodical also published material about the African American struggle without explicit references to Montgomery. See, for example, the review of Stetson Kennedy’s book, I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan (“The Ku Klux Klan Today,” IA [M], no. 4 [1956], 146–50). 42. See “A Bus Boycott in South Africa, Too,” USN&WR, March 1, 1957, 42; and “Where Integration Is Treason,” USN&WR, January 4, 1957, 54. For the

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statement on the spirit of nonviolence, see “No Law on Earth,” Time, February 25, 1957, 37. See also “The Commuters,” Time, July 9, 1956, 28. The linkage to Montgomery was absent, however, from a report that the South African government had crushed the boycott, thus sparing the Montgomery movement responsibility for the reversal (“Worldgram,” USN&WR, March 29, 1957, 98). 43. Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, 63–64. Most other accounts missed or ignored King’s intellectual debt to Gandhi. There were some exceptions, such as the Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1956; see also CSM, February 9, 1957. Initially, even the Monitor ignored King’s debt to Gandhi; see, for example, “Africans Copy Dixie Protest,” CSM, May 5, 1956. The linkage of Gandhian nonviolence to the Montgomery movement is developed in “The Passive Resistance of Montgomery’s Negroes,” and “1960 without Guns,” both in NR, March 5, 1956, 6. 44. On Banda at the University of Chicago, see “Violence in the Valley,” Time, September 14, 1953, 39. On Lincoln University, see “This Ambitious Aim,” Time, May 3, 1954, 63. Another expression of the theme is in “The World Breathes a Little More Easily Today,” USN&WR, May 4, 1956, 118; see also “Opportunity for Stephen,” Time, July 25, 1955, 36, 38. 45. On West, see “More about ‘McCarthyism,’” USN&WR, July 3, 1953, 34. Haley offered “A Few Kind Words” in Newsweek, December 3, 1956, 62. The racial progress theme also appears in “Misfire and a Majority,” Newsweek, June 7, 1954, 23. 46. “A Ghetto Destroyed,” Time, August 23, 1954, 58; “Interracial Clinic,” Time, April 18, 1955, 92. The defeat of pro-segregation forces among southern Presbyterians was recorded in “Segregation and the Churches,” Time, June 20, 1955, 54. Boston Globe, February 15, 1959, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 86th Cong., 1st Sess., 1959, A1232–1233. Time recorded the election of the first black moderator of Detroit Presbyterians (“Detroit’s Moderator,” Time, February 9, 1953, 75). 47. “As the Reds See Us,” November 5, 1956, 26. 48. “Chance Majority,” Time, November 21, 1955, 27. 49. “Life in America—As Seen by Visiting Europeans,” USN&WR, January 1, 1954, 92. Britain’s Manchester Guardian described complacency about racial discrimination in states such as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (“The Negro in the North,” Time, June 4, 1956, 82). 50. “Rome and Jesuit Bend,” Newsweek, October 31, 1955, 84–85. See also “Light in Newton Grove,” June 8, 1953, 104. On the Catholic Church’s moves to end discrimination in the postwar period, see Patrick W. Carey, The Roman Catholics, 106–7. On L’Osservatore Romano, see Merrill and Fisher, World’s Great Dailies, 230–38. 51. “Americana,” Time, December 14, 1953, 30. Similar in spirit was a favorable story about the experiences of a white woman, Mary Greta Howard, a graduate of historically black Fisk College in Nashville (“Reverse Integration,” Time, June 14, 1954, 54). 52. Robert Wallace, “Onuoha and the Good People,” Life, July 8, 1954, 155.

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Chapter 6: Reverberating Symbols

1. See Leonard Reiffel, “Sagan Breached Security by Revealing U.S. Work on a Lunar Bomb Project,” 13. See also Operations Coordinating Board, September 24, 1958, “Report to the OCB on Actions Which Might Be Taken by the U.S. to Minimize the Adverse Psychological and Political Effects of the Successful Launching by the USSR of a Moon Vehicle in Advance of the U.S.,” March 21, 1958, OCB Alphabetical Files (2, 2), Box 22, Office of Staff Secretary, DDE. Secretary Dulles alerted eighty U.S. diplomatic posts to “useful talking points on Little Rock” they could use at their discretion (Circular message, September 27, 1957, 811.411/9–2757). Acting Secretary Christian Herter reiterated the thread of Dulles’s message as one of thirteen tactics to overcome “adverse reaction to the Little Rock incident.” It was cabled October 10 to missions in Moscow, Belgrade, Bucharest, Budapest, Praha, and Warsaw (811.411/10– 1057). The dispatches are in Department of State, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 2. James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69; Burk, Eisenhower Administration, 186. A Sputnik schedule listed, for example, Honolulu, Tokyo, Khartoum, Calcutta, Berlin, and so on, and Radio Moscow gave advice on receiving the signals of Sputnik via shortwave (FBIS, USSR, October 7, 1957, BB 23, Box 809, RG 263, NA). The significance of Bandung and Little Rock was outlined in Andrew H. Berding, “Balance Sheet in the War of Ideas,” DSB, December 15, 1958, 955. The “Red Star” quote is from Asahi, October 12, 1957; see also Kyodo news agency, Tokyo, October 12, 1957, both in FBIS, LLL 12, 13, Box 811, RG 263, NA. On the Moscow Circus, see “Reddest Show on Earth,” Time, April 4, 1960, 35. 3. “Afro-Asia: Facing the Music,” Newsweek, November 25, 1957, 50, 52. On Pedoman, see Jakarta, AFP to AFP offices, October 7, 1957, FBIS, Asia, MMM 13, Box 809, RG 263, NA. 4. Maynard, Genoa, to State Department, October 21, 1957, 811.411/10–2157, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 5. Thurgood Marshall, lead attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, admitted the allegations were a serious mistake since they gave “the university an excuse for expelling” Lucy (Rowan, Dream Makers, 253–54). Lucy Foster received her master’s degree from the University of Alabama in 1992 (“University of Alabama Awards Degree to Autherine Lucy Foster, after Expulsion Thirty-Six Years Ago,” Jet, May 25, 1992, 53). 6. On the international sensation, see Carey McWilliams, “Mr. Stevenson on Jim Crow,” Nation, February 18, 1956, 130. For Lucy’s statement, see “Alabama’s Scandal,” Time, February 20, 1956, 40; and “First in Alabama,” Time, February 13, 1956, 53. See also State Department, “Treatment of Minorities in the United States—Impact on Our Foreign Relations,” prepared for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, December 31, 1958, 811.411/12–458, Box 4159, RG 59, NA; “Segregation Victory?” Newsweek, March 12, 1956, 39; and Davies, “Industry in Transition.” On the impact abroad, see CSM, February 8, 1956; and CSM, July 2, 1956, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 84th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1956), A2172–A2173.

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7. The Middletown Bulletin, n.d., quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 84th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1956), A5296. Examples of international indignation, such as a Danish newspaper that likened the mob in Alabama to the German Nazis, were provided in “Infringement on Human Rights,” IA (M), 3 (1956), 98–99. Komsomolskaya Pravda covered the expulsion of Lucy, September 22, 1957, 1, 5, CDSP 9, no. 39 (1957), 18. 8. Some of the articles published abroad are mentioned in dispatches to the State Department from the following: Benjamin A. Fleck, U.S. Vice Consul, Madras, February 28, 1956, 811.411/2–2856; Christopher Van Hollen, U.S. Consul, Calcutta, March 13, 1956, 811.411/3–1356; Ronhovde, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, February 9, 1956, 811.411/2–956; Frederick M. Alger Jr., U.S. Embassy, Brussels, March 20, 1956, 811.411/3–2056; Henry Clinton Reed, U.S. Consul, Oporto, March 14, 1956, 811.411/3–1456; and Sweeney, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Stockholm, March 7, 1956, 811.411/3–756. See also Ward P. Allen, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Copenhagen, February 9, 1956, 811.411/2–956. The messages are in Box 4157, RG 59, NA. 9. Connie Pat Mauney, Evolving Equality: The Courts and Desegregation in Tennessee, 5–8, 12. 10. Hugh Davis Graham, Crisis in Print: Desegregation and the Press in Tennessee; AP and United Press photographs appear between pages 102 and 103. 11. Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 200, 215. 12. Fenby, International News Services; Graham, Crisis in Print, 100 (Graham did not specify which newspapers printed the picture); “Tanks for the New School Year,” Paris-Match, September 15, 1956, 48–51. 13. Burk, Eisenhower Administration, 167; Robert E. Wilson, U.S. Consul, Calcutta, to State Department, September 6, 1956, 811.411/9–656; Joseph Sweeney, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Stockholm, to State Department, September 10, 1956, 811.411/9–1056; Warren, U.S. Embassy, Ankara, to Secretary of State, September 12, 1956, 811.411/9–1256, all in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 14. “Victory for Little Bob,” Time, August 5, 1957, 13; CSM, December 6, 1956. 15. Burk, Eisenhower Administration, 167. 16. Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 153–58. 17. Ibid., 159–63. 18. For Eisenhower’s notes, dictated October 8, 1957, covering his meeting with Faubus on September 14, see Little Rock, Arkansas (1), Box 23, Admin. Series, DDE. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry, 1, 10–20. 19. Burk, Eisenhower Administration, 175, 181–82, 186. On Nasser and Khrushchev making use of Little Rock and Ike’s radio and television address, see PPP: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957 (Washington: GPO, 1958), 694. For the conversation between Dulles and Brownell, September 24, 1957, 2:15 p.m., see telephone call series, Box 7, John Foster Dulles Papers, DDE. By now, Dulles had been disabused of his notion that “the segregation issue is fortunately

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not a foreign policy issue” (Dulles to Robert Houston, March 24, 1956, Box 13, Chronological series, John Foster Dulles Papers, DDE). Eight of the black students finished the school year at Central High (one graduated; another was suspended for fighting tormentors). But in late June, a federal judge granted a request of the school board and, even though the NAACP appealed the order, Faubus closed the city’s schools. Under NAACP sponsorship, the youngsters attended schools around the country. Pattillo Beals, one of the students, recalled the contrast between typical teenage obsessions with popular music and fashions and her surreal experiences of “escaping the hanging rope of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing away burning acid sprayed into my eyes” (Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry, 1). For a discussion of Little Rock and its effect on the image of American democracy abroad, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 115–51. 20. John Chancellor, “Radio and Television Had Their Own Problems in Little Rock Coverage,” Quill, December 1957, 9; Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 163. 21. Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 167. Some TV reports eventually were televised abroad, such as in West Germany (USIS, Bonn, to USIA, Washington, October 5, 1957, Department of State, 811.41/10–557, Box 4158, RG 59, NA); and on Swiss radio and television (John Stuart Jr., Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Geneva, to USIA, Washington, November 26, 1957, USIA Dispatches 1954– 1965, Box 1, RG 306, NA). As late as 1960, there were only 109 transmitting stations and 3,324,500 sets in Latin America; 17 stations and 168,800 sets in the Near East, South Asia, and Africa; and 133 stations and 7,052,800 sets in the Far East, of which 107 stations and almost six million sets were in Japan (USIA Office of Research and Analysis, “Overseas Television Developments, June 1–October 1, 1960,” October 13, 1960, R–66–60, 18, 28, Box 3, RG 306, NA). Radio sets, by comparison, totaled 23,765,800 in Latin America; 13,203,200 in the Near East, South Asia, and Africa; and 22,849,300 in non-Communist nations in the Far East (USIA Office of Research and Analysis, “World Wide Distribution of Radio Receiver Sets,” March 2, 1960, R–11–60, 3, Box 1, RG 306, NA). See also Schwoch, Global TV. 22. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–1967, 198–99; W. Mallory-Browne, U.S. Consul General, Dakar, October 30, 1957, Department of State, 811.411/10–3057, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 23. CSM, September 11, 1957; Max Lerner, “Alabama Fires,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1963, 11; “Secretary Dulles’ News Conference of September 10,” DSB, September 30, 1957, 527–8. A record of 10,581 miles was established for regularly scheduled direct radiophoto transmissions in 1948; see NYT, January 11, 1948. For a discussion of the effect of still photos on U.S. foreign policy, see Carol B. Schwalbe, “Images of Brutality: The Portrayal of U.S. Racial Violence in News Photographs Published Overseas (1957–1963).” 24. Komsomolskaya Pravda, September 14, 1957, 3, CDSP 9, no. 37 (1957), 26; Izvestia, September 13, 1957, 4, CDSP 9, no. 37 (1957), 25–26; “How Deep ‘HateAmerica,’” Newsweek, May 26, 1958, 30. Not all pictures reflected discredit on

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the United States. USIS placed a “superb warmly human picture” with the Swiss magazine Pour Tous (John Stuart Jr., Public Affairs Officer, Geneva, to USIA, Washington, November 26, 1957, USIA Dispatches 1954–1965, Box 1, RG 306, NA). A Japanese newspaper commented on the contradictory impressions left by “two impressive photographs” in the New York Times. One was of a black girl blocked from entering the high school in Little Rock; another showed a black girl entering a school in Charlotte, North Carolina, without difficulty (Tokyo Shimbun, September 12, 1957, DSJP, September 14–16, 1957, 5). 25. See, for example, AP photographs from Clinton, NYT, September 1, 1956; and September 3, 1956; from Charlotte, North Carolina, September 3, 1957, 1; from Little Rock, September 4, 1957, 1; September 5, 1957, 1; September 6, 1957, 1, 8; and from North Little Rock, September 8, 1957, 1. The Associated Press launched its Radio Photo Service to Latin America in 1951 with the El Mercurio of Santiago, Chile, the first subscriber. The service improved the quality of the photos and reduced the transmission time to newspapers in Central and South America (www.ap.org/pages/about/history/history_ third.html; accessed July 1, 2009). See also Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 197. 26. Izvestia, September 13, 1957, 4, CDSP 9, no. 37 (1957), 25–26. Hungarian and East German propagandists echoed Izvestia’s theme. See CSM (AP), September 13, 1957; and USIS, Bonn (Bruce) to USIA, Washington, October 5, 1957, Department of State, 811.411/10–557, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 27. M. Vilensky, “Incident in Ethiopia,” Literaturnaya Gazeta, September 28, 1957, 4, CDSP 9, no. 39 (1957), 17. This was not the last word the Soviets had about racism in America. See, for example, Radio Moscow, in Spanish to Mexico and Central America, October 2, 1957, BB 28, and in English to North America, October 5, 1957, BB 24–25. A TASS story also was transmitted in English to Europe, October 2, 1957. These are in FBIS, October 2, 1957, and October 7, 1957, Box 809, RG 263, NA. CDSP compiled Pravda and Izvestia articles about Little Rock or U.S. racial problems; see the following: CDSP 9, no. 37—Pravda, September 19, 1957, September 24, 1957, 4, and September 19, 1957, 3; CDSP 9, no. 38—Pravda, September 26, 1957, 4; and Izvestia, September 26, 1957, 4, September 27, 1957, 4, and September 28, 1957, 4; CDSP 9, no. 40— Pravda, October 2, 1957, 6; and Izvestia, October 11, 1957, 4; and CDSP 9, no. 49—Pravda, December 5, 1957, 6. 28. On Jen Min Jih Pao, see Xinhua News Agency, October 5, 1957, SCMP, no. 1627, 20. On the response from Italy, see “As Others See Us: U.S. and Little Rock,” Newsweek, October 7, 1957, 34. See also commentaries from East Berlin from Neues Deutschland, September 28, 1957; and from Prague, Rude Pravo in English to Europe, October 1, 1957, FBIS Europe, October 3, 1957, and October 2, 1957, respectively, both in Box 809, RG 263, NA. For a discussion of Renmin Ribao, see Merrill and Fisher, World’s Great Dailies, 264–72. 29. Burk, Eisenhower Administration, 186; Dulles to U.S. Embassy, Paris, September 30, 1957, 811.411/9–30577. See the Dulles circular message to eighty

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U.S. diplomatic posts, September 27, 1957, 811.411/9–2757. Acting Secretary Christian Herter reiterated the thrust of the message to posts in Moscow, Belgrade, Bucharest, Budapest, Praha, and Warsaw, October 10, 811.411/10– 1057; both dispatches are in Department of State, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 30. Jesse M. MacKnight, U.S. Consul, Paramaribo, Surinam, to State Department, September 18, 1957, 811.411/9–1857, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. Most of the Little Rock stories printed there originated with AFP or Reuters; articles about U.S. racial incidents were “a major item in the local daily press diet” (ibid.). 31. “Even with Little Rock the U.S. Is Still Winning the Race for Racial Equality,” Macleans, November 9, 1957, n.p. See P. Wesley Kriebel, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Ottawa, to State Department, November 11, 1957, 811.411/11–657, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. See also Robert P. Chalker, Consul General, Amsterdam, to State Department, September 16, 1957, 811.411/9– 1657; U.S. Embassy, Bern (Taylor), Joint State Department/USIA message to Secretary of State, September 12, 1957, 811.411/9–1257; Irish Times, September 20, 1957, cited in J. Alfred LaFreniere, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Dublin, to State Department, September 23, 1957, 811.411/9–2357; U.S. Embassy, Stockholm (White) to Secretary of State, September 25, 1957, 811.411/9– 2557; William H. Christensen, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Luxembourg, to State Department, September 24, 1957, 811.411/9–2457; and Vance, Brussels, October 8, 1957. These messages are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. USIA Bern to Secretary of State, “Joint State-USIA Message no. 258,” See also September 12, 1957, no. 7457, RG 59, Central Files, Box 4158, NARA, 1. 32. State Department, Treatment of Minorities, December 31, 1958. 33. Stuart, Geneva, to USIA, November 26, 1957; Sheldon B. Vance, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Brussels, October 8, 1957, Department of State, 811.411/10–857, Box 4158, RG 59, NA; Research and Reference Service, “Survey Research Studies: Public Reaction to Little Rock in Major World Capitals,” SR– 8, United States Information Agency, October 29, 1957, NARA, 4; Research and Reference Service, “Post–Little Rock Opinion on the Treatment of Negroes in the U.S.,” PMS–23, United States Information Agency, January 1958, NARA, 7. 34. Archie S. Lang, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Accra, to State Department, November 15, 1957, 811.411/11–1557. Ghana’s fledgling press and one radio station took a “generally moderate approach” (Charles D. Withers, U.S. Consul General, Nairobi, to State Department, October 2, 1957, 811.411/10–257). See also Richard S. Leach, U.S. Consul, Nairobi, to State Department, November 1, 1957, 811.411/11–157; and R. Smith Simpson, U.S. Consul General, Lourenco Marques, to State Department, September 30, 1957, 811.411/9–3057; and November 7, 1957, 811.411/11–757. Those dispatches are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 35. Mainichi, September 12, 1957, DSJP, September 12, 1957, 3; Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “America in Asian Eyes,” 1117. 36. Yomiuri, September 12, 1957, DSJP, September 13, 1957, 4; Asahi, Septem­ ber 26, 1957, DSJP, September 27, 1957, 3; Tokyo Shimbun, September 15, 1957,

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DSJP, September 14–16, 1957, 5; Sankei-Jiji, September 11, 1957, DSJP, September 11, 1957, 4; “What Orval Hath Wrought,” Time, September 23, 1957, 13. 37. Ambassador Culley, Quito, to Secretary of State, September 28, 1957, 811.411/9–2757; George W. Skora, U.S. Consul, Salvador, Bahia, September 30, 1957, 811,411/9–3057. For a translation of Moral Valverde’s statement in the September 29, 1957, issue of Adelante, see a message from Alex A. Cohen, Attaché, U.S. Embassy, San José, October 4, 1957, 811.411/10–457. See also W. Mallory-Browne, U.S. Consul General, Dakar, October 30, 1957, to State Department, 811.411/10–3057. These documents are in Department of State, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 38. USIS, India to USIA, Washington, November 4, 1958, USIA Dispatches, Box 1, RG 306, NA. Because Indians so closely associated colonialism with color and race, the U.S. position had a “fairly heavy net loss” (ibid.). Algemeen Dagblad is quoted by Young, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to Secretary of State, September 26, 1957, 811.411/9–2657; see also Young’s cables of September 26, 1957, 811.4112/9–2557, and September 27, 1957, 811.4112/9–2557. The Belgian press “warmly applauded” the intervention of federal troops; see Vance, Brussels, October 8, 1957. These messages are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 39. Young, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to Secretary of State, September 26, 1957, 811.411/9–2657; Neil M. Ruge, U.S. Consul, Cardiff, to State Department, September 27, 1957, 811.411/9–2757; William H. Christensen, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Luxembourg, to State Department, September 30, 1957, 811.411/9–3057. These dispatches are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 40. William H. Christensen, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Luxembourg, to State Department, September 30, 1957, 811.411/9–3057, Box 4158, RG 59, NA; Tokyo Times, September 26, 1957, DSJP, September 26, 1957, 1; Robert L. Ware Jr., U.S. Consul, Dar es Salaam, to State Department, September 28, 1957, 811.411/9–2857 (a similar emphasis on morality appeared in the Daily Chronicle of Kenya, quoting from the London Observer; see Charles D. Withers, U.S. Consul General, Nairobi, to State Department, October 2, 1957, 811.411/10–257); U.S. Embassy (Wallner), Rio de Janeiro, to Secretary of State, September 26, 1957, 811.411/9–2657. The dispatches are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 41. Rodger P. Davies, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Tripoli, October 22, 1957, 811.411/10–2257 (the article accurately reflected the views of relatively wellinformed Libyans); James D. Bell, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Jakarta, to State Department/USIS, October 7, 1957, 811.411/10–2257. These dispatches are in Box 4158, RG 59, NA. 42. “What Orval Hath Wrought,” 12. For L’Osservatore Romano, see NYT, September 7, 1957; and “As the World Saw It,” Newsweek, September 16, 1957, 36. Belgian, Dutch, and Swedish papers shared the sentiment; see Vance, Brussels, October 8, 1957, 811.411/10–857; Robert P. Chalker, Consul General, Amsterdam, to State Department, September 16, 1957, 811.411/9–1657, Box 4158, RG 59, NA; and CSM (Reuters), September 13, 1957. 43. CSM, September 19, 1957; for a similar statement, see NYT, September

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9, 1957. A cartoon of Soviet Premier Khrushchev planting a “Moscow News Service” flag atop “Little Rock” was printed by CSM, September 25, 1957. 44. “What Orval Hath Wrought,” 13. 45. Ibid., 12–13; “The Meaning of Little Rock,” Time, October 7, 1957, 21; “As Others See Us: U.S. and Little Rock,” 34. CSM published a Reuters roundup of world press views on the events in Arkansas September 13, 1957. The Richmond paper could not resist implying that the Kremlin’s hand was behind the integration of the races (CSM, October 3, 1957). 46. “Worldgram,” USN&WR, September 20, 1957, 87; “Eyes on the South,” USN&WR, October 4, 1957, 6; “As Others See Us,” 34. For the recurring theme of a historic crisis between federal and state authority, see USN&WR, “Mixed School Issue Comes to a Head,” September 13, 1957, 27–30. See also “Another Tragic Era?” USN&WR, October 4, 1957, 33–36. 47. “The Governor’s Broken Blade,” Newsweek, September 23, 1957, 30; “What Orval Hath Wrought,” 13. See also “As the World Saw It,” Newsweek, September 16, 1957, 36. The Times of Indonesia, which Time quoted, excoriated Faubus as “a greater traitor to their country than a small fry caught selling atomic data to foreign powers,” and urged that he “be hauled before the [House] Un-American Activities Committee for alienating half the world from the U.S.” (“What Orval Hath Wrought,” 12–13). 48. Time sketched the cynical Faubus in “Pains of History,” 23, and “Making a Crisis in Arkansas,” 25, both in the issue of September 16, 1957. “What Orval Hath Wrought,” 11–12, continued a theme from a week before. Time attributed his “disastrous grandstanding in Little Rock” to “a little sophistication being a dangerous thing.” See also “Hillbilly, Slightly Sophisticated,” Time, September 16, 1957, 4. In sharp contrast to the depiction of Faubus were favorable sketches of governors Hodges of North Carolina and Chandler of Kentucky, for upholding the rule of law; see “Strong Hand in Kentucky,” Time, September 16, 1957, 26. The Monitor accused Faubus of encouraging “mob rule,” and offered, as a positive example, Nashville, Tennessee, where “officials cracked down on violence” (CSM, September 25, 1957). 49. “Discovering the U.S.,” Time, December 1, 1958, 43. The St. Louis PostDispatch mocked the Reds for missing a peaceful integrated flag-raising ceremony at a Texas school; see CSM, October 17, 1957. 50. “Return to Integrated Clinton,” Newsweek, October 7, 1957, 37; “Cool Spot in Tennessee,” Time, September 16, 1957, 27; “Question of Mixed Schools Still Up in the Air,” USN&WR, August 2, 1957, 46–47; “Worldgram,” USN&WR, September 20, 1957, 87. CSM contrasted the actions of Governor Clement of Tennessee and Faubus, September 25, 1957. The Times pointed to racial progress achieved in the schools of Charleston, West Virginia; see NYT, May 15, 1957, Cong. Rec. House, 85th Cong., 1st Sess. (1957), 7038. 51. James P. Mitchell, “The Negro Moves Up,” R. Dig., December, 1957, 46, 48, 50, 51. U.S. News compiled a list of outstanding African Americans who had risen to prominence. Strikingly, some southern papers used the theme of black progress to argue against integration. See, for example, Times of Louisiana,

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n.d., quoted in CSM, November 4, 1957. 52. Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1958, 10. See also Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, March 16, 1959, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 86th Cong., 1st Sess. (1959), A2310. 53. “The Children of God,” Newsweek, October 7, 1957, 48–49; “Where FiftyFive Million Are Segregated,” USN&WR, October 11, 1957, 68; “Worldgram,” USN&WR, October 4, 1957, 86. On the persistence of Untouchability, see Stanley A. Wolpert, India, 118, 132. 54. Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity, 397–98; see also Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, 61, 77. 55. “Glass House, Dirty Windows,” Time, October 7, 1957, 73. 56. John Solomos, Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain, 48. On the disorders, see Hiro, Black British, 39–40. 57. “The Strange ‘Invasion,’” Newsweek, May 13, 1957, 58; “A Cry in the Streets,” Time, September 8, 1958, 23; “Now Britain Has Race Riots,” USN&WR, September 5, 1958, 39. See also “Flare-up in Nottingham,” Newsweek, September 8, 1958, 37. By reversing the usual cause and effect sequence, U.S. News effectively blamed blacks for starting the violence (“When Englishmen Get Excited about Race Relations,” USN&WR, September 12, 1958, 43). 58. “Notting Hill Nights,” Time, September 15, 1958, 24; see also “A Cry in the Streets,” Time, September 8, 1958, 23. 59. See “The Worst Punishment,” Newsweek, September 29, 1958, 34; and “Nigger Hunters,” Time, September 29, 1958, 25 (Time’s version of the judge’s statement was used). The aftermath of the rioting was treated later in “Race Issue in Britain—The Debate Grows Hotter,” USN&WR, November 28, 1958, 101–3, as were fears there would be a “second Little Rock.” See “Race Troubles and Violent Death in Britain,” USN&WR, June 1, 1959, 8; NYT, December 15, 1961; “How Can We Do This Thing?” Time, December 15, 1961, 25; and “Door Closing,” Newsweek, December 18, 1961, 44. See USN&WR for “Now England Raises a Racial Barrier,” November 20, 1961, 92–93; “Has Race Trouble Tarnished U.S. Image Abroad?” August 19, 1963, 66; “Race Riots in Britain Again—In a New Place,” September 4, 1961, 9; and “Trouble in London for Negro Diplomats,” December 11, 1961, 16. 60. See Robert Blake, History of Rhodesia, 281–82. U.S. press attacks included Time, “Teapot Tempest,” March 31, 1958, 18; and “The Ibiam Affair,” September 14, 1959, 36. 61. On the Afrikaans press, see U.S. Embassy, Pretoria, to State Department, September 25, 1958, 811.411/9–2558, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. South Africans believed the 1956 rioting at the University of Alabama made it difficult for the United States to denounce apartheid (CSM, February 8, 1956). 62. “Races in Turmoil: Reasons Why—Here and Abroad,” Newsweek, September 15, 1958, 25. See also CSM, November 23, 1957, and December 28, 1957. The Times ascribed America’s racial progress to its “evolutionary process of improvements” as opposed to South Africa’s “reactionary social

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philosophy” (NYT, February 27, 1955). 63. “Where Integration Is Treason,” USN&WR, January 4, 1957, 51, 54. The theme was briefly reiterated in “Where Racial Barriers Keep Going Higher,” USN&WR, May 16, 1958, 81. On the elements of racial separation, see Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, 75–77. 64. NYT, October 11, 1957. Flake to State Department, October 10, 1957, FRUS, 18, Africa (Washington: GPO), 380, 381n6. On the upcoming exchange of diplomatic missions between Ghana and the Soviet Union, see Flake to State Department, November 6, 1957, FRUS, 18, Africa, 381–83.

Chapter 7: The Scrutiny of Asia

1. “Secretaries of State and Defense Review Girard Case,” DSB, June 24, 1957, 1000–1002. On inflamed Japanese public opinion, see MacArthur to Dulles, May 23, 1957, 314n3, FRUS, 23, Japan. 2. Memorandum of Conversation between President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles, May 24, 1957, John Foster Dulles Chronology, May 1957 (1), Box 14, John Foster Dulles Papers, DDE. 3. Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation between the President and Secretary of State, May 24, 1957, 316, FRUS, 23, Japan. Gaddis, We Now Know, 70. Organizations such as the American Legion whipped up anti-Japanese sentiment over the case (Dulles to U.S. Embassy in Japan, June 5, 1957, 342– 43). Dulles informed members of the foreign affairs committees of Congress that if the United States did not keep its agreement to allow the Japanese to try Girard, it would raise “a storm which might sweep us out of all the Western Pacific” (Memorandum of a Conversation between the Secretary of State and Senator William F. Knowland, Washington, May 28, 1957, 334). (The memoranda are in FRUS, 23, Japan.) 4. “United States Overseas Military Bases: Report to the President by Frank C. Nash,” December, 1957, Admin., [57] (1), Box 27, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Papers, DDE. The U.S. ambassador to Taiwan advised Nash that the decision whether a host country would try U.S. servicemen for criminal offenses was one that the United States faced across the world (Ambassador K. L. Rankin to Nash, June 17, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, 3, China, 543). For Dulles’s appreciation of the significance of Japan to the United States, see his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 21, 1952. JFD/ JMA Chronology, Box 3, John Foster Dulles Papers, DDE. For MacArthur’s statement, see MacArthur to State Department, May 24, 1957, FRUS, 1955– 1957, 23, Japan, 316. Similar in some respects was the U.S. withdrawal from four major bomber bases, a naval air station, and logistics facilities in Morocco because of the “profound emotional feeling among the few thousand Moroccans who opposed the presence of foreign troops”; that attitude was traced to Moroccans’ hatred of French colonial rule. The U.S. government managed to stave off withdrawal from the Moroccan bases until the end of

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1963 (Editorial Note, FRUS, 1961–1963, 21, Africa, 240–41). 5. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961, 140–44. The Supreme Court’s ruling is Wilson et al. v. Girard. See also “Secretary Dulles’ News Conference of November 19,” DSB, December 9, 1957, 918. 6. Mainichi, February 4, 1957, 3, and February 6, 1957, 1, quoted in Meiko Yamanobe, “Portrayal of the Girard Case in Major Japanese Newspapers: A Study of Press and Culture,” 75, 76, 78. 7. Times of India, June 1, 1957, quoted by Press Trust of India, in English Morse to Tokyo, FBIS, June 3, 1957, M 4, Box 787, RG 263, NA. 8. “Girard Won’t Be the Last Sacrifice to ‘Allied Unity,’” S.E. Post, August 10, 1957, 10. Almost two months later, however, the magazine took a harsher view of Girard’s “bizarre misdeed”; see Marvin L. Stone and Kenneth Ishii, “Japan vs. Girard: The Inside Story,” S.E. Post, October 5, 1957, 32–33, 71. 9. “The Case of Sgt. Girard,” NR, July 15, 1957, 8–9; Helen Hill Miller, “1774— Status of Forces in Massachusetts,” NR, July 15, 1957, 9. See also “Girard and the Larger Problem,” Life, July 22, 1957, 46. 10. “Worldgram,” USN&WR, June 21, 1957, 77; “Why Two Shootings By GI’s Have U.S. on the Spot in Asia,” USN&WR, May 31, 1957, 34–35; “How Japan Tries a GI—What Girard Faces,” USN&WR, June 21, 1957, 86–87. Newsweek provided a global perspective: 32,059 servicemen were charged with off-duty crimes, of whom 9,054 were tried by foreign courts, 7,696 were fined, 622 acquitted, 425 received suspended sentences, and 305 were incarcerated (“The GI and the Great Issues,” Newsweek, June 17, 1957, 34). Life questioned Girard’s judgment for demanding a court-martial when foreign justice was more lenient: In 4,437 such trials the previous year, only 286 Americans received jail sentences, 178 of which were suspended sentences (“Girard and the Larger Problem,” 46). 11. Stone and Ishii, “Japan vs. Girard,” 33; “GI and the Great Issues,” 33. Newsweek agreed that status-of-forces agreements made it possible to man U.S. bases abroad. America regretted that jingoism was present in the rhetoric when what was needed was “hard-headed thinking about our place in today’s world” (“Double-Edged,” Newsweek, July 15, 1957, 27). See also “The End Is Near,” Newsweek, July 22, 1957, 23; and “The Girard Case,” America, July 27, 1957, 434. 12. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between the President and the Secretary of State, Washington, May 24, 1957, 527–28. On the prosecutor’s report, see Walter P. McConaughy, Director of the Office of Chinese Affairs, to Walter S. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, May 24, 1957, 524–25. The documents are in FRUS, 1955–1957, 3, China. 13. Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942, 5; “Girard Case May Speed Withdrawal,” CC, July 10, 1957. 14. Chiang expressed regret for the rioting and promised the guilty parties would be punished. Memorandum of a Conversation between Chiang Kaishek and Rankin, May 27, 1957, 260–61. On the riots and casualties, see U.S.

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Military Attaché Barker to Department of Army, May 25, 1957, 530–31. The documents are in FRUS, 1955–1957, 3, China. See also Robert Trumbull, “Calm Is Restored after Taipei Riot,” NYT, May 26, 1957. 15. “Communists Seek Advantage,” NYT, May 26, 1957. SCMP listed twelve stories on May 25; seven on May 26; eleven on May 27; fourteen on May 28; eight on May 29; thirteen on May 30; three on May 31; six on June 1; four on June 2; four on June 3; one on June 6; and one on June 21. Some articles reported press or public reaction from Taiwan and sixteen other nations or cities. 16. The editorial in Renmin Ribao, May 28, 1957, was carried by Xinhua News Agency in English to East Asia, FBIS, May 28, 1957, AAA 6. On outrages committed by U.S. servicemen, see Xinhua, in English to East Asia, May 27, 1957, FBIS, May 28, 1957, AAA 4. Radio Hanoi, in English to Southeast Asia, May 28, 1957, FBIS, May 29, 1957, EEE 3, covered the Girard affair. On North Korean and Viet Minh dailies, see FBIS, “Significant Foreign Radio Reportage,” May 28, 1957, back of cover. These documents are in Department of State, Box 787, RG 263, NA. See also Pravda, June 1, 1957, 4, CDSP, 11, no. 22 (1957), 19. 17. FBIS, “Significant Foreign Radio Reportage,” May 28, 1957, back of cover; Korean Republic, n.d., quoted by Radio Taipei, in English to U.S., June 1, 1950, FBIS, June 4, 1950, KKK 1. These documents are in Box 787, RG 263, NA. For Satirapharp, see “Thunder over Formosa,” Time, June 10, 1957, 87. 18. “Formosa Riots Feed Anti-Americanism,” CC, July 10, 1957. 19. “Asian Allies Turning against U.S.?” 29; see also “GI’s Everywhere— Here’s How They Get Along,” USN&WR June 7, 1957, 32; “Why the Mob Struck,” Newsweek, June 3, 1957, 49; and “‘Anti-Americanism’ Abroad,” Newsweek, June 10, 1957, 51–53. 20. “Thunder over Formosa,” 87. 21. J. J. Singh, president of the India League of America, visited Singapore and other points and was “undoubtedly effective” (Charles F. Baldwin, U.S. Consul General, Singapore, to State Department, February 28, 1952, 611.46F/2– 2852, Box 2812, RG 59, NA). 22. D. S. Saund, Congressman from India, 36, 40–41, 73–76, 83, 103–11. 23. “Living Proof,” Time, November 19, 1956, 25. Other coverage of Saund included “Lesser Lights,” Time, June 18, 1956, 27; “People of the Week,” USN&WR, November 16, 1956, 19; NYT, November 10, 1956, and November 8, 1956, 42; and Carey McWilliams, “Off the Editor’s Spike,” Nation, November 24, 1956, inside front cover. 24. Dulles cabled Saund via the U.S. Consulate, Hong Kong/Ameri­can Embassy, Manila, November 5, 1957, 033.1100–SA/11–557. Pleading other commitments, Saund declined (Saund to Dulles, November 7, 1957, 033.1100/ 11–757). See also Saund, Congressman from India, 113. On the newsreels, see Outerbridge Horsey, Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, to State Department, November 19, 1957, 033.1100–SA/11–1957. A commercial newsreel featuring Saund also was made in Hong Kong (Everett F. Drumright, U.S. Consul General, Hong Kong, November 19, 1957, 033.1100–SA/11–1957).

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(The dispatches are in Box 166, RG 59, NA.) 25. J. Campbell Bruce, “Our Congressman From India,” R. Dig., September, 1958, 175, 179, originally published in September 1958 by the Diplomat. For press coverage in Calcutta, see Gordon H. Mattison, U.S. Consul General, Calcutta, to State Department, January 6, 1958, 033.100–SA/1–658. Saund’s remark appeared, for example, in the Singapore Straits Times, November 14, 1957, n.p. See also Archibald J. Sampson, Acting Public Affairs Officer, Singapore, to State Department, November 20, 1957, 033.1100–SA/11/–057. Other newspapers whose articles were attached (or mentioned) included the Singapore Standard, November 11 and 14, 1957, n.p.; Nanyang Siang Paul, November, 9, 1957, n.p., and Sin Chew Jit Poh, November 14, 1957, n.p. Saund’s remarks in Burma were published “in the leading Rangoon papers” (Douglas R. Perry, Third Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Rangoon, to State Department, 033.1100–SA/12–457). These messages are in Box 166, RG 59, NA. After his return to the United States, the U.S. press continued to be interested in Saund (CSM, February 18, 1958; see also CSM, January 7, 1958). The Chronicle of Port of Spain put Saund in select company, including three Indians elected to the British Parliament (Douglas Jenkins Jr., U.S. Consul General, Port of Spain, to State Department, November 19, 1956, 711.111–1956, Box 2812, RG 59, NA). 26. William Adam Russ Jr., The Hawaiian Revolution, 1893–94, 3, 6, 23, 30–33, 41, 103–4. 77. Secretary of State John W. Foster rebuked Stevens, but the queen, despite her plea, was never restored to her throne (ibid., 95). 27. Opponents of annexation warned against inaugurating a policy of imperialism, arguing (inconsistently, because of the purchase of Alaska) that U.S. territory should be contiguous. Generally, mainland sugar interests fought annexation, as did labor unions that feared competition from Asian workers. Racism was a factor because of native Hawaiians and Asians imported to work the sugar plantations. See Thomas J. Osborne, “Empire Can Wait”: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898, 6, 7, 17, 29–30, 91–92, 99, 100. 28. Roger Bell, Last among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics, 5, 32, 37, 48. 29. Israel, State of the Union Messages, 3:3021, 3037, 3050; Bell, Last among Equals, 193, 203–4, 211, 223, 337n28. 30. A. Leontev, “American Expansion, Past and Present,” NT (M), May 30, 1947, 6. The thesis was restated in the continuation of the article, NT (M), June 6, 1947, 5. See also “Pawns,” NT (M), May 1, 1954, 23. Newsweek grumbled that Congress had given “no valid reason why Hawaii shouldn’t” have statehood; see “Statehood at Last?” 26. See also “Kamehameha’s Dream,” Time, January 4, 1954, 11. 31. “Pawns,” 23. Other accusations of colonialism appear in IA (M): V. Vasilyev, “Growing Resistance to U.S. Colonialist Policy in Latin America,” August 1958, 29–36; V. Vasilyev, “In the Service of the Colonialists,” November 1960, 76–80; N. Savelyev, “Archipelago in Imperialist Bondage,” November 1961, 79–84; M. Okuneva, “When U.S. Imperialism Was Young,” October 1962, 60–64; K. Ivanov, “The National and Colonial Question Today,” May

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1963, 3–10; S. Datlin, “Africa through Colonialist Eyes,” 12 (1956), 110. See also Radio Moscow, Near Eastern service in Persian, December 11, 1959, FBIS, December 19, 1957, BB 21, Box 822, RG 263, NA. 32. S. Filshtinsky, “Paradise, but for Whom?” IA (M), no. 10 (1958), 111. 33. For Butler’s remark, see “Knock on the Door,” Time, December 22, 1947, 25. Time outlined how Americans regarded Hawaii in “The Brown and White Mosaic,” February 18, 1952, 22. 34. CSM, March 13, 1953; “Stalled Statehood,” Newsweek, November 27, 1950, 21; “Brown and White Mosaic,” 22, 27; “Sun, Sugar, People, Pineapples,” USN&WR, March 30, 1959, 78. 35. James A. Michener, “Hawaii: The Case for Our 50th State,” R. Dig., December 1958, 162. Also promoting the notion of cultural affinity was Edith F. Elliot, “Hawaii Is Not ‘Foreign Country,’” American Mercury, June 1955, 1057– 107. Music lessened cultural distance between the mainland and the islands, according to “Mainland Knows about Islands’ Scenery and Pineapples, but Mostly Their Music,” 24–25; and “They Copy Us and Some of Us Copy Them,” 26, both in Life, February 22, 1954. The point about air transportation shrinking the distance between the mainland and Hawaii appeared in the NYT, July 13, 1947; May 7, 1948; February 26, 1950; February 6, 1952; and April 1, 1954. See also Ernest Gruening, “49th and 50th States: G.O.P. Betrays a Pledge,” Nation, July 11, 1953, 26. 36. “At Last, a 49th State of the Union?” Newsweek, February 15, 1954, 49, 50. 37. Washington Post, March 9, 1953, Cong. Rec. Appendix, 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1953), A1142. The southern journalist Hodding Carter pointed to “the obvious racial basis” behind some opposition to Hawaii statehood in “The Case for Hawaii,” S.E. Post, June 12, 1954, 33. See also Daniel James, “Hawaii’s Claims to Statehood,” American Mercury, September, 1946, 334; “Statehood Blocked by Racial Issues,” CC, November 29, 1950; P. H. [Paul Hutchinson], “Betraying the American Ideal,” CC, January 24, 1951; “Leaders Have Gained Political Maturity,” Life, February 22, 1954, 22; Russell H. Fifield, “Statehood for Hawaii?” Current History, December 1955, 343–44; NYT, May 12, 1955, and July 4, 1958; and Peter Bunzel, “The Pros and Cons of Island Statehood,” Life, March 23, 1959, 76. 38. “Explosive Words,” Newsweek, March 17, 1952, 26; “Tom’s Tender Toes,” Time, March 17, 1952, 19. In gratitude for the rescue of their men, Texans designated any Hawaiian Japanese who served in Italy an honorary Texan (Michener, “Hawaii,” 166). Also praising the courage of the Hawaiians was the Washington Post, July 19, 1950, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (1950), A5233. 39. Michener, “Hawaii,” 166. “The Big Change,” Time, August 10, 1959, 12; “New Faces in Congress,” Time, August 10, 1959, 13. The Times (London) praised “the Hawaiian battle honors [as] second to none,” April 2, 1953, 9. See also “Hawaii: The Land and the People,” Time, March 23, 1959, 17; and “If Hawaii Becomes the Fiftieth State,” USN&WR, February 13, 1959, 103. 40. “Aloha Shirt Set,” Time, June 29, 1953, 13 (emphasis added). On Time’s

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list in 1952 were the police chief (Chinese Hawaiian); the sheriff (full-blooded Hawaiian); the speaker of the territorial House (Chinese American); and Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, whites, and part Hawaiians in the territorial legislature. The faces were Asian, but the offices they held were reassuringly familiar (“Brown and White Mosaic,” 22, 27). 41. Kuykendall and Day, “Racial Aloha,” 186. Two years earlier, a similar statement appeared in James, “Hawaii’s Claims to Statehood,” 335. A more general statement about Hawaiians’ loyalty during World War II appears in NYT, July 13, 1947. 42. Dallas Morning News, July 8, 1949, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. (1949), A4512. Butler also sought to discredit the statehood movement on the ground that a delegate declined to testify to a congressional committee about Communist ties (Washington Post, April 14, 1950; Cong. Rec., 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (1950), 5165). 43. The rebuke to Pillion is in “Loud and Low,” Time, May 23, 1955, 25. See also “Knock on the Door,” 22, 25; and “No Peace,” Time, July 11, 1949, 21. 44. Theon Wright, The Disenchanted Isles: The Story of the Second Revolution in Hawaii, 45–60, 62, 74, 110. Michael Haas surveys racism in Institutional Racism: The Case of Hawai‘i, 1. 45. Michener, “Hawaii,” 166. See also “Stalled Statehood,” Newsweek, November 27, 1950, 21–22; and Times (London), April 2, 1953, 9. Two Uni­ versity of Hawaii professors defended the racial record of the islands but acknowledged some failures; see Kuykendall and Day, “Racial Aloha,” 185. On Hawaii practicing what America preached, see “Knock on the Door,” 22, 25. 46. James, “Hawaii’s Claims to Statehood,” 332; “Stalled Statehood,” 21–22. Newsweek also sounded the theme of Hawaii as “democracy’s bridge to Asia” in “At Last, a 49th State of the Union?” February 15, 1954, 49. That notion surfaced as early as 1947; see “Star for Good Behavior,” Newsweek, July 14, 1947, 24–25. See also “A Look at the ‘State’ of Hawaii,” USN&WR, February 27, 1953, 37; Washington Star, n.d. [ca. June 1950], in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (1950), A4359; Milwaukee Journal, January 16, 1953; and Philadelphia Bulletin, February 4, 1953, the last two in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1953), A1125. See also Washington Post, March 9, 1953, quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1953), A1142. 47. Hutchinson, “Betraying the American Ideal,” 103. Michener foresaw “real trouble” should the United States refuse either to accept or turn loose Hawaii (Michener, “Hawaii,” 170). 48. Bell, Last among Equals, 234, 239, 243–49, 271–74; PPP: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959, 588–89. Le Monde (Paris), August 23–24, 1959, 3, used AFP’s dispatch. 49. “The New Breed,” Time, March 23, 1959, 16; NYT, March 13, 1959; “We Are All Haoles,” Newsweek, March 23, 1959, 29. On the post-statehood elections, and the multicultural characteristics of Hawaii and of the politicians elected, see “The Election in Hawaii—Meaning of Republican Gains,” USN&WR,

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August 10, 1959, 58; “The Big Change,” Time, August 10, 1959, 12–24; and “Elections in Hawaii: ‘Democracy at Work,’” USN&WR, August 10, 1959, 58. 50. Radio Moscow, home service, August 22, 1959, FBIS, August 22, 1959, BB 26, 928, RG 263, NA. “Hawaii: The Land and the People,” Time, March 23, 1959, 17. The Soviets blamed the United States for the decline of native Hawaiians from 300,000 in 1782 to 11,000 in 1948 and added that “the process of extinction continues rapidly.” In 1948, Hawaii had been a U.S. possession for a half a century, which did not support the claim (S. Korolyov, “Travel Notes: Hawaii,” NT [M], March 21, 1962, 25; see also “In the Colonies and Protectorates,” IA [M], September 1958, 105). 51. For Allen’s comments to the Honolulu Advertiser, June 23, 1959, I, 15, see Bell, Last among Equals, 289. For Eisenhower’s speech of December 10, 1959, see PPP: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959, 831. Radio Moscow reported Ike’s speech briefly but elided the reference to Hawaii (December 11, 1959, FBIS, December 14, 1959, BB 5–6, Box 947, RG 263, NA). Visits sponsored by the U.S. government are mentioned in “The Races: Two-Way Survey,” Newsweek, April 11, 1960, 39.

Chapter 8: Crisis after Crisis

1. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 99, 136; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, 10–16; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 9, 16–18. 2. NYT, February 15, 1960. 3. Harold C. Fleming, “A Southern View of the South,” NYT Magazine, April 3, 1960, 23, 124. The Rochester (N.Y.) Times-Union linked the sit-ins to “the wider problem of the colored man’s struggle for equality around the world.” n.d. [ca. July–August 1960], Cong. Rec. Appendix, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess., August 22, 1960, A6265–A6266. 4. See, respectively, NYT, February 18, 1960; March 9, 1960; and March 4, 1960. For Mrs. Roosevelt’s statements, see NYT, March 23, 1960; and March 23, 1960. On the sit-ins and Gandhi, see NYT, October 6, 1960; an earlier story noted the influence of Gandhian nonviolence on the sit-ins and the Montgomery bus boycott (NYT, February 15, 1960). Gandhi’s influence also struck James M. Dabbs, president of the Southern Regional Council, who opined that the students were “illustrating the demands of all the other colonialized people of the world [for] bread and respect” (CSM, March 12, 1960). A Haitian foreign student association asked Eisenhower to intervene in the sit-ins and denounced the “‘brutal repression’ of Negro students in Tennessee and South Carolina” (NYT, April 5, 1960). 5. CSM, March 10, 1960; Ernest K. Lindley, “Races and Our Prestige,” Newsweek, March 28, 1960, 36. Florida governor LeRoy Collins rebuked those who argued that the Soviet threat could be countered “if the colored people would just stay in their place” (“Lunch-Counter Segregation ‘Legally Right,

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Morally Wrong,’” USN&WR, April 4, 1960, 88). 6. Charleston (S.C.) News & Courier, March 16, 1960, Cong. Rec. Appendix, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess., A2378. For an earlier assertion that Communists controlled civil rights organizations or demonstrations, see Clennon King, “I Speak as a Southern Negro,” American Mercury, January 1958, n.p., Cong. Rec. Appendix, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., A56. For later reiterations of the claim, see, for example, Columbia (S.C.) Record, June 2, 1961; Cong. Rec.–Senate, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. (1961), 9918–19; and Charleston (S.C.) Evening Post, August 3, 1961, Cong. Rec.– Senate, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. (1961), 15249. Eleanor Roosevelt cast doubt on these accusations in NYT, April 23, 1960. 7. U.S. Embassy, Moscow (Thompson) to Secretary of State, 811.411/3–1060, Box 2310, RG 59, NA (Pravda took excerpts from the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and the Nation, and used a photograph of an African American “with knife marks on [his] body” [ibid.]); Izvestia, April 20, 1960, 5, CDSP, 12, no. 16, 31. 8. Su Min, “Blood (Segregated) Brothers,” P. Rev., March 8, 1960 (an accompanying cartoon showed a robed Ku Klux Klansman carrying a flag labeled “Brotherhood” while an illustration on the wall showed him holding a rope from which dangled a black lynch victim [ibid.]); “Table Manners,” P. Rev., March 29, 1960; Xinhua, May 17, 1960, SCMP, no. 2263, 47; “South African People Rise in Action,” P. Rev., April 5, 1960. 9. Times (London), February 29, 1960. An earlier story had only two paragraphs (Times [London], February 23, 1960). Robert Bendiner, “No Call to Glory,” New Statesman, March 26, 1960, 435. A year later, another article commented that economics trumped all when the sit-ins targeted businesses (Anthony Howard, “Jim Crow in the Box Office,” New Statesman, March 31, 1961, 499). On Brazilian reaction to arrests in South Carolina, see Radio Tupi, Rio de Janeiro, November 22, 1960, FBIS, November 22, 1960, C 2, Box 17, RG 263, NA. 10. Marshall W. W. Swan, Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Oslo, to USIA, Washington, April 8, 1960, 811.411/4–860, Box 2310, RG 59, NA. 11. Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 132. 12. The almost clandestine transfer to the prison heightened the apprehensions. King’s father believed his son was in jeopardy because the authorities were hoping that a situation could be contrived in which King would be killed in a fight with another inmate. Martin Luther King Sr. and Clayton Riley, Daddy King: An Autobiography, 174–75. Harris Wofford argues persuasively that the transfer, if not the secrecy surrounding it, was intended to ensure King’s safety; “the last thing the governor of Georgia or the Georgia white establishment wanted was King’s blood on their hands” (Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, 18). 13. Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 22; David L. Lewis, King: A Biography, 130; Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 133. King remained neutral in the election, but his father endorsed Kennedy (King and Riley, Daddy King, 176). The phone call has been credited with providing Kennedy the boost among African Americans he

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needed to win the close election. But James Meriwether has argued that the emphasis on the call is an oversimplification. It ignores Kennedy’s efforts in other areas including Africa that were important to blacks and suggests that blacks’ votes could be influenced by just a phone call. See James H. Meriwether, “‘Worth a Lot of Negro Votes’: Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign.” 14. Izvestia, October 27, 1960, 2, CDSP, 12, no. 43 (1960), 38. Analyzing the significance of the black vote in the 1960 election, a Soviet writer did say that Kennedy “came out in defence” of King (I. Lapitsky, “Post-Election America,” NT [M], no. 47 [1960], 8). Beijing’s broadcast in English targeted audiences in India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, November 10, 1960, FBIS, November 16, 1960, AAA 5–6, Box 17, RG 263, NA. 15. Edward F. Haas, DeLesseps S. Morrison and the Image of Reform: New Orleans Politics, 1946–1961, 252–54. 16. Kim Lacy Rogers, Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement, 63, 65, 70; John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 255–56, quoted in Morton Inger, Politics and Reality in an American City: The New Orleans School Crisis of 1960, 57–58, 59. See also Stan Opotowsky, “The News Mob,” Nation, September 30, 1961, 203; and Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America, 29. 17. See America for the following: George H. Dunne, “God Bless America!” June 17, 1961, 442–43; and Charles E. O’Neill, “Europe Reads about New Orleans,” December 17, 1960, 401–2. A week earlier, the magazine complained of Soviet exploitation of the New Orleans turmoil, and observed that “in a world of many races, . . . a crime against our American Negroes is also the most explosive propaganda bomb we can hand our enemies to use against us” (“Subversive Segregationists,” December 10, 1960, 360). The same point appears in “Playing into Red Hands,” October 1, 1960, 2. On the following of the Times and the Guardian among Asians and Africans, see “Racial Ups and Downs,” December 5, 1960, 335. 18. O’Neill, “Europe Reads,” 403. The USIS concurred that the Communists gave “a deliberately distorted . . . impression of American race discrimination and hatred” (USIS, Rome, to USIA, Washington, 1960 Country Assessment Report, February 8, 1961, USIA Dispatches, Box 1, RG 306, NA). 19. Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, The United States and Africa: A History, 262, 278, 336, 339. 20. See Newsweek for “Louisiana Nightmare,” November 28, 1960, 19; and “Better Known as ‘Zik,’” November 28, 1960, 43. 21. NYT, December 18, 1960. Steinberg said she “was prepared to offer similar aid to other systems threatened with closing due to integration” (ibid., 62). See also NYT, December 23, 1960. 22. “Through African Eyes,” Time, January 6, 1961, 38. 23. “Significant Radio Reportage,” FBIS, November 17, 1960; “Broadcast Review,” November 16–17, 1960, FBIS, USSR, AA 1, Box 17, RG 263, NA. 24. TASS, in English to Europe, [December 1, 1960], FBIS, USSR, December

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2, 1960, BB 34, Box 17, RG 263, NA; E. Bagramov, “From Little Rock to New Orleans,” IA (M), no. 1 (1961), 119–20. The cartoon, titled “Daubings,” was borrowed from Scinteia of Bucharest. NT (M), no. 50 (1960), 28. For other articles, photographs, or cartoons about the turmoil in New Orleans, see Pravda, November 18, 1960, 5, CDSP, 12, no. 46, 38; Izvestia, November 19, 1960, 2, and Pravda, November 22, 1960, 3, both in CDSP, 12, no. 47, 31; Izvestia, November 30, 1960, 2, CDSP, 12, no. 48, 35; and Izvestia, February 3, 1961, 2, 30, 1960, 2, CDSP, 13, no. 5, 35. 25. Xinhua, in English to Europe and Asia, November 16, 1960, FBIS, November 17, 1960, AAA 17, Box 17, RG 263, NA (the same Chinese agency dispatch implied that circumstances forced the Supreme Court to rule as it did in Brown, and, furthermore, that desegregation had since lost ground in Dixie); Xinhua, November 19, 1960, FBIS, November 22, 1960, AAA 2–3, Box 17, RG 263, NA. 26. Anthony Howard, “The Battle of New Orleans,” New Statesman, May 12, 1961, 742–43. 27. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, In My Place, 3–4, 169–91. A quarter-century after graduating, she became the first African American to deliver the graduation address at the University of Georgia (ibid., 247). 28. CSM, January 14, 1961, and January 18, 1961. The dismay of “the free world . . . at the new outburst of racial hatred in Georgia” is also mentioned in “Rights and Race,” America, January 28, 1961, 552. 29. USIS, Rome, to USIA, Washington, February 8, 1961. Times (London), January 11, 1961; January 13, 1961; and January 16, 1961. The mail from abroad was mentioned by Hunter-Gault, In My Place, 198. Izvestia covered the admission of the black students to the university with a story and photo, January 14, 1961, 8, and January 15, 1961, 8, CDSP, 13, no. 2 (1961), 40. 30. “It Is the Law,” Newsweek, May 15, 1961, 37. On the overseas trips of Robert F. Kennedy, see his book The Pursuit of Justice, 142; and “Mission to Africa,” Time, August 18, 1961, 17–19. President Kennedy later sent his brother on a tour of fourteen countries, during which the attorney general was peppered with questions about racial issues (Robert F. Kennedy, Just Friends and Brave Enemies, 188; “Robert Kennedy Speaks His Mind,” USN&WR, January 28, 1963, 61). 31. Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, 431. 32. “West Side Story,” Newsweek, July 20, 1959, 24. The Bunche story was reported, but “only briefly in the local press” of Ghana (John J. Meagher, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Accra, to State Department, July 14, 1959, 811.411/7– 1459, Box 41, RG 59, NA). The incident was selected by the Italian weekly Il Mondo years later as an example of the problems of America’s black middle class in gaining acceptance. (Furio Colombo, “Problems of the Black Middle Class,” Atlas, August 1963, 93–94). See also “Latest Views on Touchy Issues of Race and Religion,” USN&WR, July 20, 1959, 73; and “Dr. Bunche: Welcome Now at Exclusive Club,” USN&WR, July 27, 1959, 6. 33. Dulles to Folsom, September 4, 1958, 811.411/9–458; Folsom to Dulles,

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September 5, 1958, 811.411/9–558; Dulles to Folsom, September 30, 1958, 811.411/9–3058, all in Department to State, Box 4158, RG 59, NA. “The Quality of Mercy,” Time, February 29, 1960, 22n. “Races in Turmoil: Reasons Why— Here and Abroad,” Newsweek, September 15, 1958, 25. The eminent Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo recalled that the Wilson affair was common talk among chauffeurs in Manila (Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked with Heroes, 324–25). See also “For Robbery at Night—Death,” USN&WR, September 19, 1958, 14; “$1.95 Robber Escapes Chair,” USN&WR, October 10, 1958, 16; and “People,” Time, October 13, 1958, 45. 34. “Rolling Snowball,” Time, February 9, 1959, 20. The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano also protested “a Florida jury’s verdict that spared from the death penalty four white youths convicted of raping a Negro girl,” yet many blacks were executed for raping white women. “We are not for the death penalty,” it explained; “we are for equity” (“Vatican Slap at Florida Justice,” USN&WR, June 29, 1959, 12). 35. “Will Dude Die?” Newsweek, October 16, 1961, 29–30. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cobb’s conviction, ruling that blacks had been systematically excluded from petit and grand juries in the county in which he was tried (Ex rel. Cobb v. Balkcom). Cobb was retried in a different county and convicted; the jury recommended mercy, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence (Cobb v. State). 36. U.S. Embassy, The Hague (Rice) to Secretary of State, October 13, 1961, 811.411.10–1361, Box 2311, and Rice to Secretary of State, December 2, 1963, Soc 11–3 U.S., Box 4221, both in RG 59, NA. 37. “All God’s Chillun,” NYT, February 7, 1960, and February 17, 1961, 26; Woburn Times, n.d., quoted in Cong. Rec. Appendix, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., April 24, 1961, A2757. 38. Addis Ababa Rebuffs American Racists,” NT (M), no. 32 (1960), 6–8. Zaman sniffed that “Ethiopian girls, unlike American girls, are not vulgar,” and that “where the Americans have sown weeds,” the Communist states have cultivated roses (ibid., 7). 39. Radio Moscow in English to Eastern North America, November 30, 1960, FBIS, USSR, December 1, 1960, BB 42; Radio Moscow in English to Eastern North America, November 23, 1960, FBIS, USSR, November 29, 1960, BB 35–36; Izvestia, December 15, 1960, 4, CDSP, 12, no. 50, 33; D. Kraminov, “Fear of Fate,” Za rubezhom, March 18, 1961, 7, CDSP, 13, no. 12 (1961), 21. See also “Racist Utopia,” NT (M), no. 24 (1960), 22. I. Geyevsky wrote about “Racialism in U.S. Trade Unions” in NT (M), no. 36 (1960), 20–21, and the same journal, in the closing months of the Eisenhower administration, responded to the president’s proclamation of a Captive Nations Week (for lands brought under Soviet hegemony) by suggesting, “why not an American Negro Week?” to recognize that “the Negro people [are] still . . . compelled to fight for elementary human rights” a century after the end of chattel slavery. The article quoted Look (“Another Presidential Mistake,” NT [M], no. 31 [1960], 1).

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Xinhua quoted the New York Post about “reprisals” against blacks in Fayette County, Tennessee, who voted in the 1960 presidential election (Xinhua, November 19, 1960, FBIS, AAA 30, Box 17, RG 263, NA). Other accusations of racism were leveled by Radio Peking—in English to Europe and Asia, and in English to India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (later Sri Lanka)—both on November 10, 1960, FBIS, November 16, 1960, AAA 4–5. These broadcasts are in Box 17, RG 263, NA. The U.S. government was accused of the “inhuman persecution of Henry Winston, a leading Negro member of the U.S. Communist Party” (“U.S. Persecution of Winston Condemned,” P. Rev., March 1, 1960; see also “Stop Persecution of Winston!” P. Rev., March 15, 1960). 40. Times (London), January 20, 1961; “A White Man Becomes Black,” ParisMatch, March 26, 1960, 76–83. 41. See Ernest K. Lindley’s columns in Newsweek: “Success or Savagery,” August 29, 1960, 31, and “Races and Our Prestige,” 36. 42. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma, 238–45. 43. See USN&WR for these articles. For the Powell interview, see “Red China Exposed—Not Dominant in Asia,” April 29, 1955, 43–44. “Men Who Trounced China’s Chou,” April 29, 1955, 16. In a later interview, Max Yergan faulted Powell for giving “a too-rosy” picture of black life in the United States (“Why There’s No Colored Bloc,” June 3, 1955, 96). For Powell’s later comments about Bandung, see “A Negro Congressman Speaks about the South,” October 11, 1957, 51. 44. Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., 202–3; T. R. B., “Washington Wire,” NR, May 2, 1955, 2. 45. “Dr. Bunche Goes,” NT (M), no. 35 (1960), 19; Y. Bochkaryov, “Abductors of Africa,” NT (M), no. 39 (1960), 6. See “Washington Whispers,” August 22, 1960, 33, and August 8, 1960, 24, both in USN&WR. Significantly, it carefully identified Bunche (a U.N. civil servant) as an “American Negro” who was regarded as “one of the world’s best conciliators” (“Bunche on the Congo: ‘Shoot Only in Self-Defense,” USN&WR, September 5, 1960, 10). 46. “Student Ambassadors Embark for Crossroads Africa,” Africa Special Report, 3, no. 7 (July 1958), 3–4, 14; “Working on the Crossroads,” Time, July 18, 1960, 37. For other coverage of Crossroads Africa, see, for example, “A Louisiana Girl in Africa,” Look, January 3, 1961, 26–30; Lloyd M. Garrison, “The Strong Man of Guinea,” Reporter, November 10, 1960, 30; and CSM, September 5, 1961, and July 20, 1963. 47. ”The Black Majority,” Time, February 8, 1960, 30. For a discussion of Thurgood Marshall’s work in Kenya, see Mary L. Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey; and David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget, 133–34. On the conference, see Donald Rothchild, Racial Bargaining in Independent Kenya: A Study of Minorities and Decolonization, 103. Marshall’s service in Kenya and England is mentioned by Juan Williams, “Marshall’s Law,” 153, and Glen Darbyshire, “Clerking for Justice Marshall,” 178–79, both in Roger Goldman with David Gallen, eds.,

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Thurgood Marshall: Justice for All. Marshall’s work is mentioned in “The First of the Last,” Time, February 1, 1960, 19. Marshall later traveled in Africa for the State Department to “tell the Africans about the civil rights problem in the United States and how . . . racial equality could be achieved” (CSM, July 11, 1963). Black institutions such as Howard University also were applauded for their work on behalf of America in Africa (“New Horizons at Howard,” Time, July 18, 1960, 37). 48. Time promoted King (and other prominent African Americans) during the ceremonial observance of Ghana’s independence. Vice President Nixon led the delegation. See “Nixon Africanus,” Time, March 11, 1957, 17; James A. Linen, “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, March 18, 1957, 15; and “With Pat and Dick in Africa,” Time, March 18, 1957, 23. 49. Horne, Black and Red, 215–16. Newsweek ranked King equally with others who attended what “in a sense, was a black summit”: Nkrumah of Ghana, Mboya of Kenya, Bunche of the United Nations, and Banda of Nyasaland. They assembled to honor Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s new governor-general (“Better Known as ‘Zik,’”43). 50. Bowles to Kennedy, January 31, 1961, Civil Rights–General, POF, Box 96, JFK; CSM, October 16, 1963; see also CSM, October 3, 1963. On Kennedy’s appointment of Clifton R. Wharton as ambassador to Norway, see CSM, February 21, 1961. The Monitor also ran a front-page story about the stir in Finland created by the appointment of the black journalist Carl T. Rowan as ambassador (May 20, 1963) and took note of the appointment of a public relations executive to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (August 14, 1963, 5). 51. Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie, 280. For a discussion of the tour, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War; David M. Carletta, “‘Those White Guys Are Working for Me’: Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz, and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War during the Eisenhower Administration.” 52. Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, Dizzy: To Be or Not To Bop: The Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie, 413. 53. John P. Callahan, “Jazz, Surgery Aid U.S. in Pakistan,” NYT, April 18, 1956; “Gillespie’s Band a Hit in Beirut,” NYT, April 29, 1956; “Dizzy Gillespie Wows Mid-East Swing, Jazz Fans,” Chicago Defender, May 5, 1956, 16; “100,000 in Africa Cheer ‘Satchmo’: Gillespie Tour Loses $92,000,” NYT, May 24, 1956; Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy, 421. 54. Dizard, Strategy of Truth, 179. 55. See “Secret Weapon” December 30, 1957, 63, and “The Bigger Audience,” January 20, 1958, 46, both in Newsweek. 56. Dizard, Strategy of Truth, 178. For the summary, see FRUS, 1955–1957, 9, Foreign Economic Policy; Foreign Information Program, 508, 533. 57. See “Art and Entertainment: Latest ‘Cold War’ Weapon for U.S.,” USN&WR, July 1, 1955, 57; “Porgy in Leningrad,” Time, January 9, 1956, 51; and “Odyssey with Gershwin,” Newsweek, January 9, 1956, 43. 58. See “That Gibson Girl,” Newsweek, May 28, 1956, 62; “That Gibson Girl,”

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Time, August 26, 1957, 46; and “The Dream,” Time, March 22, 1963, 79. 59. See “With Pat and Dick in Africa,” 23. Time developed a related theme in “Hope of the World,” July 13, 1959, 76. 60. David Reed, “Out of the Jungles—New Nations and Problems,” USN&WR, July 27, 1959, 77. On Nkrumah and Touré, see “Left Turn,” Time, May 4, 1959, 23; on the Ivory Coast, see NYT, January 18, 1961; on Balewa of Nigeria, see NYT, October 3, 1960, and “Friendly Nigeria,” America, October 15, 1960, 62–63. The statesman Averell Harriman maintained that Africans revered America’s principles and sacred documents (“Invest in Africa? A Businessman’s Size-Up,” USN&WR, October 31, 1960, 80). The influence of the Virginia Bill of Rights was cited by the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, Dr. Charles Malik, in “Is It Too Late to Win against Communism?” USN&WR, July 4, 1960, 60. Time discussed Kenyan leader Tom Mboya’s encounter, at a mission school, with American principles and the thought and activities of Lincoln and Booker T. Washington, in “Ready or Not,” March 7, 1960, 22. 61. “Now South Africa Has Sit-Ins,” USN&WR, December 5, 1960, 16. “The Visitors,” Time, April 25, 1960, 32; “An Army of Principles,” Time, January 19, 1959, 29. The three-paragraph U.S. News item was preceded, however, by an extensive report that implied there was a conspiracy behind student demonstrations and riots around the world, including the sit-ins; see “Why Students Riot around the World,” USN&WR, June 6, 1960, 58–60. The inspiration ran both ways. The African independence struggle was a source of pride for black Americans. When Nkrumah of Ghana made a state visit to the United States in 1958, Time recorded his expression of hope “that he had given American Negroes a cause for pride by personifying the new Africa’s promise of dignity in world affairs” (“Pride of Africa,” Time, August 4, 1958, 14). 62. Kofi Buenor Hadjor, Nkrumah and Ghana: The Dilemma of Post-Colonial Power, 37. 63. “Pride of Africa,” 14; Hadjor, Nkrumah and Ghana, 31–32. 64. “‘Saturday’s Child’—Via Harlem to African Power,” Newsweek, August 4, 1958, 33. 65. “Fraternity over Charity,” Time, November 9, 1959, 17; “African ‘Emancipator’: Touré of Guinea Sees U.S.,” USN&WR, November 9, 1959, 23; “Touré on Tour,” Time, November 30, 1959, 30. Curiously, Time did not mention his well-known attitudes about U.S. racial problems in a cover story on Touré and the independence of Guinea (“Vive l’Indépendance!” Time, February 16, 1959, 24–30). 66. Meriwether, “Worth a Lot of Negro Votes,” 749. 67. “Taunting Tourist,” Newsweek, April 4, 1960, 49; “Fidel and the U.S. Negro,” Time, June 6, 1960, 36. The Time article told of Cuba’s employment of former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis as a press agent to drum up tourist business among black Americans. Time tried to discredit Castro as a deadbeat, claiming the money Cuba owed Louis was two months late. USN&WR was more evenhanded; see “Ex-Champion Louis Tourist Agent for

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Castro,” June 6, 1960, 26; and “Louis Bows Out of Castro Camp,” June 13, 1960, 16. 68. “Friendly Table-Hopper,” Newsweek, October 24, 1960, 62. 69. “Manhattan Follies,” Newsweek, October 3, 1960, 24. 70. “How Khrushchev Made Out in His Game at the U.N.,” USN&WR, October 3, 1960, 40, 42; “Worldgram,” USN&WR, October 3, 1960, 79. 71. “The Dizzy Island,” Newsweek, October 10, 1960, 47; “Flight to Harlem,” Time, October 3, 1960, 16. Time also tried to discredit others who visited Castro in Harlem, including Malcolm X of the Black Muslims and the black poet Langston Hughes, who had been so badgered by the congressional Red hunters that he “could not afford the slightest association with Fidel Castro” (Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, 317–19).

Chapter 9: Riots and Insurrection

1. For Kennedy’s attacks on the Eisenhower administration, see Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Great Powers and Africa, 276. Kennedy criticized the State Department’s refusal to pay the airfares of 250 Africans scheduled to enroll in universities. After Kennedy offered to pay the cost, Nixon’s campaign pressured the State Department until it released the $100,000 (“The African Question,” Time, August 29, 1960, 13; “Who Is Mr. Shepley?” Newsweek, August 29, 1960, 19). 2. On Kennedy and race, see “‘Big Debate’: Round 2,” USN&WR, October 17, 1960, 111. Others in his campaign added to the discourse. See, for example, former Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, “War and Peace—the New Approach,” USN&WR, November 21, 1960, 106; Dean Rusk, “Views of Dean Rusk—Next Secretary of State,” USN&WR, December 26, 1960, 70; and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, “It Is the Law,” Newsweek, May 15, 1961, 37. See also Meriwether, “Worth a Lot of Negro Votes,” 737–63. 3. Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 128. CORE had sent buses of volunteers through the South more than a decade earlier. Relying upon a Supreme Court ruling declaring segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional, the volunteers challenged Jim Crow. They were assaulted by segregationists, jailed by local authorities, and ignored by the press and the federal government. See Cantor, Age of Protest, 250; and Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 157–62. 4. Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 142–43, 145. 5. “More ‘Riders’ Go to Birmingham; Drivers Balk,” Atlanta Daily World, May 18, 1961; “‘Freedom Ride’ Renewal Foiled; Integration Leader Is Jailed,” Washington Times, Post Herald, May 20, 1961. 6. Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 153–55; Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, 124, 128–33; “Judge Issues Writ,” NYT, May 20, 1961. 7. Interview with Wyatt Tee Walker, former executive director of the SCLC (John Britton), October 11, 1967, New York City, Ralph Bunche/Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard

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University, transcript of tape 56, 19. See also Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 145. 8. Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 127, 153. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 158–59. 9. Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, 107–8. 10. Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Jakarta, July 29, 1961, 811.411/7–2961, and 811.411/7–3161, both in Department of State, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. The latter noted that the AP’s brief account described Tjokroadisumarto as an observer, but otherwise his participation in the demonstration seemed to have escaped the attention of the U.S. press. 11. Wangalwa added that racism “blinded many Americans,” not just southerners. His article was in the East African Standard, June 1, 1961, n.p. See also Richard B. Freund, U.S. Consul General, Nairobi, to State Department, June 1, 1961, 811.411/6–161, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 12. USIA, “Worldwide Reactions to Racial Incidents in Alabama,” May 29, 1961, S–17–61, Box 20, RG 306, NA. In its report, the USIA specifically mentioned AFP and Reuters dispatches that were printed in Manila, Tokyo, Saigon, and Africa, and wire photos published in Bangkok. 13. See, for example, “‘Peace Corps’ Bias Testers Beaten by White Hoods,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 11, 1961; “Biracial Unit Tells of Beating in South,” NYT, May 11, 1961; “Bi-Racial Buses Attacked, Riders Beaten in Alabama,” NYT, May 15, 1961; “FBI Probes Bus Riots in Alabama,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 16, 1961; “More ‘Riders’ Go to Birmingham; Drivers Balk,” Atlanta Daily World, May 18, 1961; “Decision Anniversary Finds South Undecided,” Washington Post, Times Herald, May 18, 1961; “Crowd at Bus Station,” NYT, May 20, 1961; and “Judge Issues Writ; Alabama Judge Bars Attempts at ‘Freedom Riders’ in the State,” NYT, May 20, 1961. 14. Asahi, June 2, 1961, n.p., DSJP, June 3–5, 1961, 7; Al Fair comments quoted in Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 159; USIA, “Worldwide Reactions to Racial Incidents in Alabama,” May 29, 1961, S–17–61, Box 20, RG 306, NA. The VOA itself reported on the violence against the Freedom Riders, but it did so within the established USIA policy of “stick[ing] to hard news, playing down the violence and emphasizing federal action to protect the civil rights of Negro citizens” (Murrow to President, May 23, 1961, Salinger Papers, box 132, 1961 file, quoted in Cull, Cold War, 211). 15. George H. Dunne, “God Bless America!” America, June 17, 1961, 442– 43. America also scourged the KKK and similar groups for “a battle lost to America’s enemies.” See “Freedom Riders,” May 27, 1961, 358; and “Violence in Alabama,” June 3, 1961, 388. 16. USIA, “Worldwide Reactions to Racial Incidents in Alabama”; Pravda, May 24, 1961, 24, Izvestia, May 24, 1961, 2, and Pravda, May 25, 1961, 3, all in CDSP, 13, no. 21 (1961), 31; Izvestia, August 9, 1961, 4, CDSP, 13, no. 32 (1961), 21; E. S. Sacks, “Stronghold of Colonialism,” IA (M), August 1961, 80–81. 17. On Mr. Nepo, see Izvestia, November 16, 1961, 4, CDSP, 13, no. 46 (1961), 44. Pravda also accused the Peace Corps of indoctrinating its recruits with

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“ideas of segregation and the caste system” (Pravda, November 28, 1961, 3, CDSP, 13, no. 48 [1961], 25; the article did not refer to the Freedom Ride, but addressed the general theme of U.S. racism). 18. Tucker, Patterns in the Dust, 41; Mao Tse-tung, “Report at the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Party Committee,” 1410–11, quoted in Lingque, “Historical Perspectives,” 41. 19. In 1958 and 1959, a number of events—Moscow’s abortive proposals to establish a joint submarine fleet with China and to set up a long-wave radio transmitter on Chinese territory, the decision by Chinese leaders to shell the Jinmen Islands without informing Moscow in advance, and the Soviet government’s decision to stop providing China with nuclear bomb prototypes and the technical data for producing a bomb—heightened the growing rift between the two countries. See Chen Jian, “The Tibetan Rebellion of 1959 and China’s Changing Relations with India and the Soviet Union,” 100. 20. Yinghong Cheng, “Sino-Cuban Relations during the Early Years of the Castro Regime, 1959–1966,” 81. 21. Ho Chung, “Freedom for Whom?” P. Rev., June 9, 1961, 20; Ho alleged that Kennedy’s associates included the Ku Klux Klan. The Freedom Ride as a manifestation of American racism is also treated in Ch’en Yüan, “‘Good Record’ of Race Relations in the U.S.,” Hung Ch’i, no. 14 (1961), n.p., Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 272 (1961), 10–13; Chi Chiu, “‘Democracy’ and ‘Freedom’ of the Kennedy Administration,” Shih-chieh Chih-shih, no. 14 (1961), n.p., Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 277 (1961), 1–4; Ch’en Yüan, “American-Styled ‘Freedom,’” Hung Ch’i, no. 3, February 10, 1961, n.p., Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 303 (1962), 4–6; Fang Chieh, “Kennedy’s Real Image,” Ta-chung T’ien-ying, no. 2 February 26, 1962, n.p., Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 307 (1962), 10–11. “Sequel to a Roadside Incident,” P. Rev., August 18, 1961, 18, and “Selling Uncle Sam’s Image,” P. Rev., January 19, 1962, 14. See also USIA, “Worldwide Reactions to Racial Incidents in Alabama.” The weekly Peking Review was established in 1958 by the PRC. Its purpose was to “provide timely, accurate, first-hand information on economic, political, and cultural developments in China, and her relations with the rest of the world” (P. Rev., 1 [March 1, 1958]). 22. “The Road to Alabama,” New Statesman, May 16, 1961, 819–20; Reischauer, Tokyo, to State Department, May 25, 1961, 811.411/5–2561; Leo G. Cyr, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Yaounde, June 13, 1961, 811.411/6–1361; James H. Boughton, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Tripoli, to State Department, June 16, 1961, 811.411/6–1661; Ambassador MacArthur, Brussels, to State Department, June 1, 1961, 811.411/6–161; U.S. Consulate, Madras, India, to Secretary of State, 811.411/5–2561. The censorious response in the English Midlands to the violence in Alabama, as measured by editorials and private conversations, is mentioned by U.S. Consul Kenneth B. Atkinson, Birmingham, England, to State Department, May 25, 1961, 811.411/5–2561. Somewhat more sympathetic reactions were reported from Morocco and Sweden; see Ambassador Bonsal, Rabat, to Secretary of State, May 23, 1961,

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811.411/5–2361; and G. Alonzo Stanford, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Stockholm, to State Department, May 26, 1961, 811.411/5–2661. Radio Accra broadcast “a surprisingly fair and understanding report on the American race problem to other parts of Africa”—”in sharp contrast with the anti-Western diatribes which have recently characterized the performance of the Ghanaian radio and press” (L. D. Battle, Executive Secretary, State Department, to McGeorge Bundy, White House, October 18, 1961, 811.411/10–1862, enclosing Radio Accra in English to Africa, October 8, 1961, FBIS, October 9, 1961, H 1). These documents are in Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 23. Cabell Phillips, “Voice of America Is Sending Full Reports Overseas of the Rioting in Alabama,” NYT, May 23, 1961. 24. Ibid. The element of provocation in the Freedom Ride was acknowledged in two editorials, but the paper stressed the demonstration was “completely legal.” Furthermore, the Times continued, the “deplorable chain of events in Alabama . . . can only deal a new blow to American prestige and especially to our foreign policy dedicated to the promotion of human rights and human equality irrespective of class, color or creed” (NYT, May 22, 1961). 25. CSM, May 22, 1961. A brief item advised that the outrages in Montgomery “were the main headline news in the British press. The reports are stark and ugly. But there is also sympathetic and constructive thinking in some of the editorials.” The conservative Daily Telegraph blamed the mobs in Alabama for helping the Russians and the Chinese “foster hatred of America” (Peter Lyne, “British Press Puts Alabama in Focus, CSM, May 23, 1961). See also “How the World Press Viewed the Days of Tension,” Newsweek, June 6, 1961, 22. The same story reported that USIA director Edward R. Murrow testified that “events in this country “are ‘absorbed, debated, and pondered on all shores of every ocean.’” The next week, Newsweek prominently displayed Secretary of State Rusk’s declaration that “racial segregation ‘creates embarrassment and difficulty in foreign relations,’” and that the nation needed to practice what it preached, lest it sound hypocritical (“Tension and Justice,” Newsweek, June 12, 1961, 37). The international theme also surfaced briefly in “‘Freedom Riders’ Force a Test . . . Laws or U.S. Law in Segregated South?” Newsweek, June 6, 1961, 18. 26. “The ‘Deep South’—Land with a Future,” USN&WR, November 6, 1961, 68; “How the World Press Viewed the Days of Tension,” 22. 27. Chicago Daily News, n.d. (ca. June 1961), n.p., Cong. Rec. Appendix, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., June 22, 1961, A4724, and June 15, 1962, A4560. 28. “How the World Press Viewed the Days of Tension,” 22; “Innocents Abroad,” Time, June 2, 1961, 52. The Czech Svobodne Slova republished a Polish interview with Martin Luther King Jr., who said the bus incident would work against the United States in Africa and Asia (John M. Richmond, Press Attaché, U.S. Embassy, Prague, to State Department, June 7, 1961, 811.411/6–761, Box 2311, RG 59, NA). 29. “Riders in Africa,” Time, June 16, 1961, 25; Albany (Ga.) Herald, May 23, 1961, n.p., Cong. Rec. Appendix, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., A3749. U.S. News mentioned

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that black Rhodesians borrowed “the sit-in tactics of American Negroes” (“Worldgram,” USN&WR, June 19, 1961, 72). See also CSM, March 6, 1961. 30. “Though the Heavens Fall,” Time, October 12, 1962, 21. See also Brauer, John F. Kennedy, 180–200; Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 260–62; and Reeves, President Kennedy, 355–64. On forces deployed for the Ole Miss operation, see C. V. Clifton to President Kennedy, October 3, 1962, Civil Rights, General, 1962, Box 96, President’s Office Files, JFK. 31. Dean Rusk with Richard Rusk, As I Saw It, 586. See messages to Rusk from these ambassadors: Breithut (Karachi), October 4, 1962, 811.411/10–462; Stevenson (United Nations), October 1, 1962, 811.411/10–162; MacArthur (Brussels), October 3, 1962, 811.411/10–362; Jones (Tripoli), October 3, 1962, 811.411/10–362; see also Keita to Kennedy, October 1, 1962, 811.411/10–562. Keita even predicted that success at Ole Miss would hasten the end of South African apartheid. These messages are in Department of State, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 32. Acting USIA Director Donald M. Wilson to President Kennedy, October 19, 1962, quoted in Brauer, John F. Kennedy, 203; Donald W. Lamm, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Canberra, to State Department, October 9, 1962, 811.411/10–962. Despite the sharply critical thrusts of some Dutch papers, they exhibited “understanding of and even some sympathy for [the] administration position” (Ambassador Van Delden, The Hague, to Secretary of State, October 3, 1962, 811.411/10–365). See also Harvey F. Nelson Jr., Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Helsinki, to State Department, October 2, 1962. These documents are in Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 33. USIA, “New Delhi Reactions to the Mississippi Desegregation Crisis,” research report R–169–62 (R), Box 12; USIA, “Student Reaction in Bogota to the Mississippi Desegregation Crisis,” October 1962, research report R–136–62 (R), Box 11. The findings in Bogota were “consistent with the conclusion” of an “overview of world-wide press reaction”; see USIA, “Media Comment on the Mississippi Crisis, October 5, 1962, research report R–109–62 (A), Box 10. These reports are in RG 306, NA. 34. USIA, “Editorial vs. News Coverage of Meredith Case: A Study of Contrasts,” November 6, 1962, research report R–144–62 (AF), Box 11, RG 306, NA. Because of “dramatic headlines, photos, and the accent on such points as Mississippi’s defiance of Federal authority, the riots and bloodshed, and the strong anti-negro attitude of ‘Ole Miss’ students, . . . tended to produce a negative effect” in news stories, in contrast to the “generally positive and sympathetic” editorials. The study concluded that the news accounts would have more influence on readers in the short run, but editorials might encourage a more positive view of the United States over the longer term. 35. “A Disgrace,” NT (M), no. 41 (1962), 23; the praises for Meredith were reiterated by N. Sergeyeva, “New York Symphony,” NT (M), no. 46 (1962), 28. On Chinese propaganda, see USIA, “Media Comment on the Mississippi Crisis,” n.d., R–109–62 (a), Box 10, RG 306, NA. 36. Pravda, September 29, 1962, 4, CDSP, 14, no. 39 (1962), 27; Izvestia, October

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3, 1962, 1, CDSP, 14, no. 40 (1962), 26. Buchwald’s article was reprinted by Izvestia, October 10, 1962, 2, CDSP, 14, no. 40 (1962), 26. For the cartoon, see NT (M), no. 42 (1962), 14; other cartoons from U.S. papers also were picked up. On the harassment of Meredith, see Izvestia: October 27, 1962, 2, CDSP, 14, no. 43 (1962), 34; and November 1, 1962, 1, and November 3, 1962, 2, both in CDSP, 14, no. 44 (1962), 26. See also Izvestia, October 6, 1962, 2, CDSP, 14, no. 40 (1962), 27. Ole Miss resurfaced in Soviet propaganda two years later as the precursor to “the massacre of Negroes in Birmingham . . . , the murder of black leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the 1963 March on Washington” (“Life on the Mississippi—20th Century,” NT (M), no. 44 [1964], 29). 37. Kohler suggested that a “reputable and well-known American journalist” such as Stewart Alsop be “encouraged” to write an article along those lines for a large-circulation publication such as the Saturday Evening Post. He even suggested a title: “Tale of Two Cities.” See Kohler, Moscow, to Secretary of State, October 3, 1962, 811.411/10–362. Rusk foresaw difficulties with Kohler’s proposal: the State Department had refused to permit Soviet correspondents to travel to Oxford during the rioting, and there was scant information about the events in Novocherkassk; see Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Moscow, October 11, 1962, 811.411/10–362. Both messages are in Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 38. CSM, October 2, 1962. Other articles asserted that Meredith and Ole Miss students were “under world public scrutiny” (CSM, October 2, 1962), and that a “sense of shock and dismay runs through much of the British coverage” (CSM, October 2, 1962). The Monitor featured the views of a Ghanaian student at Columbia University, who was “pleased” with the government’s actions in Mississippi, and who contrasted them to South African apartheid (Mary Kelly, “Ghanaian ‘Reassured’ in U.S.,” CSM, October 3, 1962). The following year, G. Mennen Williams, assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, suggested that Kennedy’s “vigorous action” in the Ole Miss affair made the difference between foreigners praising and criticizing America (CSM, February 12, 1963). 39. NYT, October 2, 1962. West Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, on a visit to New York City, predicted many Europeans would be “impressed by the great energy the government has exerted to support a principle for one citizen” (NYT, October 2, 1962). Before the rioting, the Times speculated on “what effect the racial problems in Mississippi might have on the [competition] of the Soviet Union and the United States to make friends in Africa” (NYT, October 1, 1962). 40. NYT, October 3, 1962. For a discussion of al-Ahram, see Merrill and Fisher, World’s Great Dailies, 51–59. 41. NYT, October 2, 1962. Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger dismissed the rioters as “misguided persons who . . . . aid our enemies” by arousing “resentment among those who would be our friends” (NYT, October 3, 1962). See also NYT, October 1, 1962. 42. NYT, October 2, 1962. A secondary theme dealt with the federal system, which baffled many foreigners. 43. NYT, October 12, 1962.

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44. “Kill the Reporters,” Newsweek, October 15, 1962, 99–100. 45. “Though the Heavens Fall,” 19; NYT, October 12, 1962. 46. Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity,” 551. 47. Rusk, As I Saw It, 582. On the Vienna convention, see Hope Ridings Miller, Embassy Row: The Life and Times of Diplomatic Washington, 129. On the consequences of prejudices, see Pedro Sanjuan, Deputy U.S. Chief of Protocol, to Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes, May 8, 1962, Department of State, 811.411/5–862, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. The incidents might trigger a retaliation by other nations, as the Nigerian foreign ministry once warned the U.S. embassy (Ambassador Palmer, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, to State Department, June 6, 1962, 811.411/6–662, Box 2311, RG 59, NA). 48. “The Color Line in Diplomacy,” USN&WR, March 27, 1961, 79; Minneapolis Tribune, n.d., quoted by CSM, January 24, 1961. 49. Rusk, As I Saw It, 585. Newsweek quoted the remark of a British delegate who was denied an apartment in New York City because “I might have colored diplomats at a party, which gave me a chance to tell them I certainly would, and to storm out in fine style” (“The U.N.—Drawing the Battlelines,” Newsweek, July 3, 1961, 29). 50. The hate letter was addressed to El Mehdi Ben Aboud, Morocco’s U.N. representative; see Rusk to U.S. Mission to U.N., December 19, 1961, 811.411/11–2861. See also Adali Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to Secretary of State, September 28, 1961, 811.411/9–2761; and Rusk, Circular Message no. 5219, to U.S. Embassies and Missions in Abidjan et al., 811.411/12–2961. Hate mail was also circulated during the Eisenhower administration. See Acting Secretary of State Dillion, Circular Message no. 803, December 1, 1960, 811.411/12–160, and U.S. Embassy (MacKnight), Lomé, to Secretary of State, December 6, 1960, 811.411/12–660. These documents are in Department of State, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 51. “Kluck of the Klan,” P. Rev., December 20, 1960, 25. 52. Pedro Sanjuan, Deputy U.S. Chief of Protocol, to Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes, May 8, 1962, 811.411/5-862, Box 2311, RG 59, NA; Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity”; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 168–69. 53. CSM, July 7, 1961; Rusk, As I Saw It, 582; “Briefing for the Undersecretary on African Diplomats in Washington, June 2, 1961”; Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity.” 54. “Do Capital Landlords Snub Negro Diplomats?” USN&WR, July 17, 1961, 6. 55. “Southern Hospitality,” Time, July 21, 1961, 13–14. For the demise of the Diplomatic Housing Committee, see “When African Envoys HouseHunt in Capital,” USN&WR, July 1, 1963, 11. On diplomats’ difficulties in finding housing, see “The Periscope,” Newsweek, January 7, 1963, 8; “The Chevy Chasers,” Newsweek, June 10, 1963, 32; and “Where to Put Diplomats— New Washington Problem,” USN&WR, July 1, 1963, 52. See also “Color in Diplomacy,” America, February 18, 1961, 654. 56. Cabell Phillips, “When African Diplomats Come to Washington,”

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USN&WR, June 12, 1961, 86. Apparently intended as a reply to this article was Betty Beale, “Washington Is Improving Socially for the Negro,” USN&WR, June 12, 1961, 87–88. John J. O’Connor surveyed housing problems for diplomats in Washington in “Apartments for Africans?” America, September 23, 1961, 795–96. Discrimination against Africans was news outside as well as inside Africa; see, for example, Jerome T. Gaspard, U.S. Consul General, Montreal, to State Department, July 12, 1961, 811.411/7–1261, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 57. See “The Periscope,” Newsweek, April 24, 1961, 18; and “Private Clubs, Private Homes—Next to Be ‘Integrated’?” USN&WR, May 22, 1961, 71; see also “Private Clubs and the Race Issue,” USN&WR, January 29, 1962, 46. For other news reports on the Kennedy administration and clubs that barred blacks from membership, see “Attorney General May Quit Segregated Club,” USN&WR, May 29, 1961, 8; “Battle of the Clubs in Washington,” USN&WR, August 21, 1961, 16; “Why Robert Kennedy Quit Exclusive Club,” USN&WR, October 2, 1961, 10; “People,” Time, October 13, 1961, 44; “Color Line,” Newsweek, January 22, 1962, 17; and “First Negro Member for Washington Club,” USN&WR, December 24, 1962, 10. The problem continued in 1963; at least two African ambassadors were denied service at or were ejected from restaurants. See CSM, July 12, 1963, May 2, 1963, and November 7, 1963. 58. U.S. Delegation to U.N. (Plimpton), to Secretary of State, April 19, 1962, 811.411; State Department (Ball) to U.S. Embassy, Lagos, May 8, 1962, 8112.411/5–862, and Ambassador Greene, Lagos, to Secretary of State, May 10, 1962, 811.411/5–1062 (the above documents are in Box 2311, RG 59, NA); State Department to U.S. Embassy, Lagos, November 5, 1963, Soc 14–1, Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Not all racial snubs were reported in their home countries. The refusal to serve a Malagasy embassy attaché and visiting agricultural official “miraculously received no publicity whatsoever in Madagascar,” apparently because the foreign minister so decreed (Philip M. Allen, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Tananarive, October 12, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4220, RG 59, NA). 59. Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity,” 552; State Department, Press Release no. 644, September 1961, MS 78–21, Pedro Sanjuan Papers, JFK. See also U.S. Consul General H. Reiner Jr., Sierre Leone, to State Department, January 11, 1961, 811.411/1–1161, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. Some incidents evidently escaped the notice of the press. Chukwuma Azikiwe, the son of Nigeria’s governor-general Nnamdi Azikiwe and a student at Harvard, was entangled in a situation that the governments of both countries wanted kept quiet. Police in Cambridge, who were searching for a black rapist, arrested him; the younger Azikiwe claimed he was abused and subjected to racial discrimination. Ambassador Joseph Palmer II expressed regret for the incident on behalf of the State Department to the governor-general, who in turn admonished his son “not [to] do anything that would mar good relationships” between the United States and Nigeria. The elder Azikiwe regarded the handling of the case by American authorities as “quite satisfactory” (Palmer, Lagos, to Secretary of State, June 21, 1962, and June 30, 1962; the latter enclosed

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the text of a letter from Governor-General Azikiwe to Palmer, Azikiwe case, country files: Nigeria, National Security Files, Box 144, JFK). 60. State Department, Press Release no. 644. CSM, June 23, 1961; “Racist Hospitality,” NT (M), no. 1 (1962), 24–25. The Soviet press published a number of stories about the problems of African diplomats in the United States, especially in the Washington area. See, for example, Pravda, July 24, 1961, 3; October 6, 1961, 6; Izvestia, July 12, 1961, 5; July 13, 1961, 2; August 11, 1961, 2; October 6, 1961, 5; January 14, 1962, 1, CDSP, 13, no. 28, 38; no. 30, 36; no. 32, 38; no. 40, 35; and CDSP, 14, no. 2, 39. 61. Roger Hipskind, U.S. Vice Consul, Luanda, to State Department, July 21, 1961, 811.411/7–2161. A Reuters dispatch about the refusal of a Virginia restaurant to serve the mayor of Dar es Salaam made the front pages of newspapers of his city. See Ambassador Duggan, Dar es Salaam, August 8, 1961, 811.411/8–761. See also James H. Boughton, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Tripoli, to State Department, June 16, 1961. 811.411/6–1661; and U.S. Consul General H. Reiner Jr., to State Department, January 11, 1961, 811.411/1–1161. These documents are in Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 62. “Most Embarrassing,” Time, April 21, 1961, 17. 63. Ibid. Time rebuked Hagerstown, in its “People” column, June 30, 1961, 32. See also “Troubled Route,” Time, October 13, 1961, 26. 64. NYHT, January 21, 1961, Cong. Rec.—Senate, January 26, 1961, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. (1961), 1296. 65. J. Anthony Lukas, “Trouble on Route 40,” Reporter, October 26, 1961, 42. Secretary Rusk, a Georgian, caught the essence of the dilemma with a dry observation: “We cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the normal rights of an American citizen” (ibid.). Not until the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights bill would the federal government exercise legal authority to protect diplomats. Even then, there continued to be difficulties, as when fifty-five Asian and African delegates to the United Nations complained to the secretary-general of being victimized by racism. And yet change had occurred. In a 1948 National Opinion Research Center survey of Americans, only 36 of those polled believed that American racism hurt the nation’s image abroad. But by 1963, 78 percent of white Americans surveyed said that domestic racial issues damaged the country’s position abroad (Communication from fifty-five representatives of African and Asian States to Secretary General U Thant, September 24, 1964, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA). See also Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity,” 578. 66. “‘Mo’ Is Sa’aid’s Nickname at Cornell,” Newsweek, April 22, 1963, 59. 67. Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972, 168. 68. “Foot-in-Mouth Disease,” Newsweek, December 17, 1962, 40. 69. Y. Bochkaryov, “The Onslaught on Racialism,” NT (M), no. 50 (1963), 5; “Blabberwock in Africa,” P. Rev., December 14, 1962, 18; see also Chen Kung-Chi, “Tanganyika Impressions,” P. Rev., April 26, 1963, 20; “Inside U.S.A.: Racism to the Fore,” P. Rev., June 28, 1963, 19. For other Communist

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attacks on Ellender, see “Unwanted Senator,” NT (M), no. 52 (1962); Izvestia, December 4, 1962, 2; December 5, 6, and 9, 1962, 4; Pravda, December 5, 6, and 7, 1962, 5. 70. “Unwelcome Visitor—Senator Ellender in Africa,” USN&WR, December 17, 1962, 18. 71. “Foot-in-Mouth Disease,” 40; “Traveling Is So Narrowing,” Time, December 14, 1962, 22. See also CSM for Reuters dispatches on December 3, 1962, and December 4, 1962, and an AP dispatch on December 6, 1962. The Portland Oregonian briskly disposed of Ellender’s “racist views” about lack of leadership capacity among Africans. The Oregonian pointed out that the new president of Tanganyika, Dr. Julius Nyerere, a former schoolteacher, was educated at Edinburgh University, and it attributed the paucity of educated Tanganyikans not “to lack of educational desire” but to years of stifling under British colonialism (Portland Oregonian, n.d., quoted in CSM, December 24, 1962). 72. “Welcome, Stranger,” Time, September 8, 1961, 53; “An Authority on Africa Looks at the Road Ahead,” USN&WR, March 6, 1961, 54–55. The opportunities awaiting a couple from Sierre Leone were outlined in “Do You Have Snakes?” Time, December 15, 1961, 20. 73. “‘Mo’ Is Sa’aid’s Nickname,” 59. 74. “African Moderate,” USN&WR, August 7, 1961, 14. For photographs of Houphouet-Boigny, see, for example, “Pro-Western Visitor from Africa,” USN&WR, June 4, 1962, 15. For pictures of African students, see “‘Mo’ Is Sa’aid’s Nickname,” 59. 75. CSM, January 30, 1961. 76. CSM, January 30, 1961, and August 25, 1962. On Operation Uganda, see Newark Star-Ledger, October 7, 1962, n.p., Cong. Rec. Appendix, 87th Cong., 2nd Sess., A 7935–36. 77. The Soviet press occasionally acknowledged grudgingly that the lot of African Americans was improving, as in the statement that “five Negroes have been elected to the House of Representatives” in the elections of 1962, “the highest number since the Civil War.” But such progress as there was dwindled to almost nothing when included in such statements as these: “all kinds of obstacles” were erected against black advancement; “out-and-out terror” was used against them; and since 10 percent of the population was black, having five representatives was “very, very little.” Still, the article conceded: “It does represent a degree of progress” (I. Lapitsky, “Defeat of the American UltraRights,” NT [M], no. 47 [1962], 6). 78. “Truth about the Negro’s Progress in America,” USN&WR, May 22, 1961, 66, 68. The story was illustrated with photographs of federal officeholders, but none of cabinet rank. (No blacks then held an appointment at that level.) See also “Ten Negroes in High Places,” USN&WR, May 22, 1961, 68–69. An article mentioned in passing but did not dwell on blacks’ bitterness about “lack of job opportunities, and need for better housing and educational opportunities” for their impoverished brethren (“A Look at the Rise of the Negro Middle Class,”

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USN&WR, July 15, 1962, 60). 79. Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940–1968, 103, 107–8. 80. “Unlawful Strategy,” Newsweek, September 4, 1961, 22; “A Proud City,” Newsweek, September 11, 1961, 31, 32. See also “Southern Milestones,” Time, September 8, 1961, 52. Peaceful desegregation of Memphis schools was welcomed in “No Bang or Whimper” (Newsweek, October 16, 1961, 29), as was “the peaceful opening of the Little Rock public schools” (CSM, September 21, 1961). 81. “The Education of the South,” Time, April 7, 1961, 45; “New Mood in the South on Mixed Schools,” USN&WR, September 11, 1961, 73; “A Medal for the Dragon,” Reporter, January 19, 1961, 20.

Chapter 10: Snarls Echoing ’Round the World

1. SCLC Newsletter, September 1962, 2. On Kennedy’s telegram, see Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 215; see also Howard Zinn, Albany: A Study in National Responsibility, 26. For King’s defeat in Albany, see David Halberstam, The Children, 432. 2. Lewis, King, 173–74. 3. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 274; see also Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham, 292; and Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 169–78. 4. William M. Kunstler, Deep in My Heart, 174; Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 217– 18; Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 403. 5. On the volunteers at rallies, see police detectives’ reports, Files 24, 25, Box 9; Files 17, 18, Box 12; Files 2, 3, 4, 5, Box 13, Eugene Connor Papers, Civil Rights Collection, Birmingham Public Library. See also Kunstler, Deep in My Heart, 189. Estimates of crowd sizes by the police detectives support Kunstler’s observation about the few volunteers, but somewhat more came forward to register to vote and to integrate white churches. See, for example, B. A. Allison to Chief of Police Jamie Moore, April 18, 1963, and R. S. Whitehouse to Moore, April 26. 1963, File 4, Box 13, Connor Papers, Birmingham Public Library. Like Gandhi’s arrests, King’s incarcerations became particularly newsworthy; see William Robert Miller, “The Broadening Horizons: Montgomery, America, the World,” 53–55. On the factions of black Birmingham, see Andrew J. Young, “And Birmingham,” 23. 6. NYT, May 3, 1963, and May 4, 1963. The quotation is from Kunstler, Deep in My Heart, 190. 7. For local issues in the campaign, see Lewis, King, 199–200. On the spread of the demonstrations, see Viorst, Fire in the Streets, 221–22. David J. Garrow argues that King and Wyatt Tee Walker were “more attuned” to the possibility of getting executive action than securing strong federal legislation (Bearing the Cross, 274). Without the crisis in Birmingham, however, it is unlikely that

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either Kennedy or Congress would have acted. 8. Donald Dumont to State Department, August 3, 1963. U.S. diplomats in Khartoum found “a surprising awareness” of the U.S. civil rights struggle even in “remote western provinces” of Sudan; see Karl F. Mautner, First Secretary, to State Department, July 14, 1963. These dispatches are in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 9. On the number of journalists in Birmingham, see “Race Relations—A Candid Report,” n.d. [June–September 1965], for various drafts, Files 1 and 2, Box 3, and File 29, Box 2, Albert Boutwell Papers, Birmingham Public Library. For wire service stories printed in the Far East and Latin America, see Wilson to Kennedy, May 17, 1963, 2, 3, Civil Rights, Alabama, Box 96, President’s Office Files, JFK. Even Xinhua News Agency in Beijing used a few paragraphs from a UPI dispatch; see Xinhua, May 15, 1963, FBIS, May 15, 1963, BBB 3, JFK. Most papers in Beirut “relied heavily on wire services, of which Agence France Presse, carried by the French-language press, was the most sensational”; see Armin H. Meyer, U.S. Embassy, Beirut, to State Department, June 14, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Reuters dispatches dominated the coverage used in Kenya; see Vass, U.S. Consulate/USIS, Nairobi, to Rusk, May 10, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA. 10. USIA estimated that Africa, because of poverty, technological lag, and governmental policy, had only 32 transmitting stations and 250,100 sets in 1963, of which 18 stations and 80,000 receivers were in sub-Saharan Africa; the other 14 stations and 170,000 receivers were in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Near East and South Asia had 35 stations and 724,800 sets; servicing hundreds of millions of Indians were 1 experimental station and 600 receivers. In the Far East—outside Japan, which had 434 stations and 16,243,000 sets— there were 77 stations and 2,651,700 sets; even those figures are somewhat misleading since Australia had 33 stations and 2,032,000 sets of the regional total. Latin America and the Caribbean had 185 stations and 6,142,8000 receivers; most were concentrated in Argentina (11 stations, 1,305,000 sets), Brazil (39 stations, 2,040,000 receivers), and Mexico (26 stations, 1,000,000 sets). By comparison, Western Europe had 1,803 stations and 39,033,200 television receivers. See USIA, “Overseas Television Developments in 1963,” research report R–45–64, April 14, 1964, Box 2, RG 306, NA. Indicative of the evolving Cold War competition between the Americans and the Soviets, the USIA opened eighteen posts in Africa, eleven in Latin America, and five in the Near East between the spring of 1961 and fall of 1963 while four posts were closed and one was opened in Western Europe. See USIA Office of Public Information to USIA Employees, October 28, 1963, 2, USIA Records, Memoranda, 1961– 1964, Box 2, Government Agencies, JFK. 11. More delays might be required because of dubbing, editing, transfer of material from one medium to another, and other technical or legal processes. Indicative of the time required was the distribution of a film of President Kennedy’s speech on March 13, 1961, in which he proposed the Alliance for Progress. The USIA sent the film “to all Latin American USIA posts within

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eighteen hours after he spoke. It was followed within ten days by a one-reel theatrical film in French, Spanish, and English.” USIA also shipped videotape or kinescope with Portuguese and Spanish translations of the speech to Latin America, probably with an equivalent delay (“USIA Support for the ‘Alliance for Progress,’” November 22, 1961, USIA memoranda, 1961–1964, Box 1, Government Agencies, USIA, JFK). 12. Transmission of film via shortwave and cable proved technically unworkable or too costly; see Fielding, American Newsreel, 306–7. Thus, film generally had to be shipped by air from the United States to most overseas destinations. Satellite communication of news started to come into its own during the funeral of President Kennedy in November 1963. Portions of it were broadcast live to the television systems of twenty-three countries with a combined population of more than six hundred million people. However, “ABC, CBS, NBC, and UPI News film sent countless hours of film covering all aspects of the presidential assassination via jet transports” to 104 nations (“Television’s Largest Audience,” Broadcasting, December 1, 1963, 56–58). A Telstar transmission of two and a half minutes from the western United States to Europe in 1962 cost more than $50,000 and required complex technical arrangements that did not lend themselves to breaking news events (“Mormon Choir–Mt. Rushmore Telstar Segment Costly, Complex,” Broadcasting, July 30, 1962, 54). On technical glitches, see, for example, “Back in Business,” Broadcasting, January 14, 1963, 58. Not until 1965 did Intelsat I, the first geosynchronous satellite used for commercial operations, inaugurate true international service (Andrew F. Inglis, Behind the Tube: A History of Broadcasting Technology and Business, 396, 399–400). 13. USIA, “Reaction to Racial Tension in Birmingham, Alabama,” May 13, 1963, research report R–8563 (A), 9, Box 15, RG 306; Vass, U.S. Consulate/USIS, Nairobi, to Rusk, May 10, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222; Norbert L. Anschuetz, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Paris, to State Department, May 8, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4220. Improved Nigerian attitudes toward racial problems in the United States were “rapidly eroded by reports, photographs, and TV coverage from Alabama” (Palmer, U.S. Embassy/USIS, to Rusk, May 8, 1963, Soc 14–1, Box 4222). The above documents are in RG 59, NA. French National Television even produced (in 1963) a “film documentary on the history of the American Negro”; see USIA Office of Public Information to USIA Employees, October 28, 1963, 17, USIA Records, Memoranda, 1961–1964, Box 2, Government Agencies, JFK. On Kenyan and Nigerian television, see USIA, “Overseas Television Developments in 1963,” 23, 40. 14. Dizard, Strategy of Truth, 69–70. 15. For Africa, see FBIS at JFK for the following: Lagos, Nigeria, May 8, 1963, no. 92, May 10, 1963, I 5–6; and Accra, Ghana, in English to Europe, May 9, 1963, May 10, 1963, 1, 18–19. For Communist China, see Xinhua, May 15, 1963, May 16, 1963, 1, 17–18; Xinhua, May 7, 1963, May 8, 1963, BBB 14–15; Xinhua, May 8, 1963, May 9, 1963, RRR 1; Xinhua, May 8, 1963, May 8, 1963, BBB 5–6; Xinhua, May 10, 1963, May 10, 1963, BBB 9; Xinhua, May 15, 1963,

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May 15, 1963, BBB 1–2; and Beijing Radio, May 14, 1963, May 15, 1963, BBB 2–4. For Latin America, see FBIS at JFK for the following: Havana Reloj Nacional Network, May 7, 1963, May 8, 1963, HHHH 17; Panama City Radio Tribuna in Spanish, May 9, 1963, May 10, 1963, RRRR 1–2; San Jose [Costa Rican] Radio Reloj Radio Network in Spanish, May 13, 1963, no. 94, May 14, 1963, GGGG 1; Havana Radio, May 14, 1963, May 15, 1963, HHHH 6; and Havana CMQ Television Network, June 3, 1963, June 4, 1963, HHHH 6–7. 16. NYHT, May 13, 1963, quoted in Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 8294. The columnist Max Lerner maintained that “the news picture has become more decisive for the American image in the world than any other communication item” (PC, June 15, 1963, 11). Diane McWhorter has argued that the Birmingham photographs “shifted international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution” (Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, caption for photograph 32, 386–87). But press photographs had a similar impact during earlier racial crises. 17. On the use of photographs, see Acting USIA Director Donald M. Wilson to Kennedy, May 17, 1963, 3, JFK. On Pravda’s pictures, see Thomas L. Hughes, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to Secretary of State Rusk, Research Memorandum RSB–92, June 14, 1963, Civil Rights, Box 295A, National Security Files, JFK. On the AP photo in Norway, see Ethel A. Kuhn, Acting Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Oslo, to USIA, May 10, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA. Communist and non-Communist papers differed in the latter’s restraint and the former’s exploitation of “the . . . use of dogs against people and . . . the jailing of children” (USIA, “Reaction to Racial Tension in Birmingham, Alabama,” May 13, 1963, research report R–8563, [A] 9, Box 15, RG 306, NA). 18. Dumont, U.S. Embassy, Burundi, to State, August 3, 1963; Cassilly, U.S. Embassy, Conakry, Guinea, to Rusk, June 27, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S. Bombay Consulate to Rusk, retransmitted by U.S. Embassy, New Delhi, to Rusk, June 27, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S.; Franklin, Madras, to Secretary of State, May 21, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222; Charles K. Moffly, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Yaoundé, Cameroons, to State Department, September 6, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220. The messages are in RG 59, NA. For a discussion of the Hindu, see Merrill and Fisher, World’s Great Dailies, 162–70. 19. Anthony B. Akers, U.S. Embassy, Wellington, to State, August 1, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 20. McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 372. L’Osservatore Romano was quoted in “The Sharpeville Massacre,” Time, April 4, 1960, 19. On the skirmish in Mississippi, see “The Education of the South,” Time, April 7, 1961, 45. (An article in a legal publication claimed that the bite of “a giant police dog” on a minister’s leg during an incident in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963 “left an enduring impression . . . on the minds of millions of people throughout the world.” If true, any impression on world public opinion was transitory. See Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, April 26, 1963, n.p., Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 7778–79.) The AP reported that dogs were deployed to

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prevent several hundred young people from entering downtown Providence, Rhode Island, and “against ban-the-bomb demonstrators” in London. Police dog units were maintained in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Houston, Miami, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Salt Lake City, and by the Virginia and Delaware state police, among others (Cong. Rec. Appendix, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. [1963], A3122). Fire hoses were turned on black students demonstrating in Orangeburn, South Carolina, in 1960 (“Race Relations and International Affairs”). Hoses were also employed against a mob of segregationists in New Orleans (“Louisiana Nightmare,” Newsweek, November 28, 1960, 20). On weapons that “got hated” out of the hands of police, see Garry Wills, The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon, 93. 21. The Swedish newspaper is quoted by Stockholm Radio, May 7, 1963, FBIS, May 8, 1963, Y 1, JFK; Havana Radio, in Spanish to the Americas, May 14, 1963, FBIS, May 15, 1963, hhhh 6, JFK; Radio Nigeria quoted the Morning Post on its domestic service in English, May 8, 1963, FBIS, no. 92, May 10, 1963, I 5, JFK (see also Panama City Radio Tribuna, May 9, 1963, FBIS, May 10, 1963, rrrr 1, JFK); Margaret Joy Tibbetts, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Antwerp, to State Department, May 27, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220, RG 59, NA. 22. “Dogs, Kids, and Clubs,” Time, May 10, 1963, 19; “Birmingham, U.S.A.: ‘Look at Them Run,’” Newsweek, May 13, 1963, 27–28; Malcolm X quoted by New York Amsterdam News, May 25, 1963, 20; see also Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given, 85. 23. See broadcast from Beijing, May 14, 1963, FBIS, May 15, 1963, BBB 3, 4; Havana CMQ Television Network in Spanish, June 3, 1963, FBIS, June 4, 1963, HHHH 7, all in JFK. For a scathing attack on Kennedy as a hypocrite, see Lo Shan, “Kennedy Holds the Colour Bar,” P. Rev., May 24, 1963, 18–19. 24. See Xinhua, May 8, 1963, FBIS, May 9, 1963, BBB 6; and Xinhua, FBIS, May 10, 1963, BBB 10; King was also mentioned in a broadcast from Beijing, May 14, 1963, FBIS, May 15, 1963, BBB 3, all in JFK. 25. Xinhua, May 13, 1963, FBIS, May 14, 1963, BBB 10, JFK; Panama City Radio Tribuna in Spanish, May 9, 1963, FBIS, May 10, 1963, rrrr 1–2, JFK; Xinhua in English to Asia and Europe, May 8, 1963, FBIS, May 8, 1963, BBB 6; and in English to Asia and Europe, May 13, 1963, FBIS, May 14, 1963, BBB 3. A Havana commentator mentioned that in Jackson, Mississippi, “policemen with billy clubs, carbines, and hunting dogs” effected the arrests of some black students (Havana CMQ Television Network in Spanish, June 3, 1963, FBIS, June 4, 1963, HHHH 6, JFK). 26. See, respectively, these dispatches to the State Department: Jones, U.S. Embassy, Jakarta, June 24, 1963; Stutesman, U.S. Embassy, La Paz, June 24, 1963; Reischauer, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, June 28, 1963; Macomber, U.S. Embassy, Amman, June 29, 1963; Stebbins, U.S. Embassy, Katmandu, June 22, 1963; Jean M. Dery, Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy, Tripoli, August 28, 1963; Philip Axelrod, Political Affairs Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Bangkok, July 5, 1963; and Daniel M. Braddock, Consul General, São Paulo, June 29, 1963; all in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, U.S., RG 59, NA. A USIS-sponsored public opinion

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poll found only one in three of respondents in Rio de Janeiro had heard of the events in Birmingham. A summary noted that “the racial situation in the U.S. is seen as bad, but improving. While it is widely believed that the federal government is doing what it should, it is also felt that the majority of whites in the U.S. are opposed to equal rights for Negroes.” See USIA, “Rio de Janeiro Looks at Birmingham,” June 1963, research report R–126–63 (R), i, Box 16, RG 306, NA. 27. See Armin H. Meyer, U.S. Embassy, Beirut, to State Department, June 14, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S. Box 4221; Avery F. Peterson, U.S. Consul General, Vancouver, to State Department, July 17, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S. Box 4221; and Baldwin, U.S. Embassy, Kuala Lumpur, to Rusk, June 25, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220. These messages are RG 59, NA. 28. NYHT, May 13, 1963, Cong. Rec., 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 8294. A similar point was made by the American Legation, Budapest, June 29, 1963, Box 4221, and Consul General Manning in Capetown, July 2, 1963, Box 4220, both in Soc 14, U.S., RG 59, NA. 29. Halvor O. Ekern, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Freetown, to State, August 2, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4221; Roy M. Melbourne, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, to State Department, June 25, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221; Ambassador Olcott J. Deming, U.S. Embassy, Kampala, to State Department, June 19, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220. Reaction to the murder of Evers also is also mentioned, for example, by James P. Willis Jr., Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Montevideo, to State Department, June 19, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221; Marshall Green, U.S. Consul General, Hong Kong, to State Department, July 5, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221; and Ambassador Carl Rowan, Helsinki, to Secretary of State, June 21, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221. These dispatches are in RG 59, NA. Byron De La Beckwith was charged with the murder of Evers; two of his trials ended in hung juries, but Beckwith was convicted in a third trial three decades after the killing (NYT, February 6, 1994). 30. Vass, U.S. Consulate/USIS, Nairobi, to Rusk, May 10, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA. The State Department interpreted Kenyatta’s message as “obviously [an] election ploy” (Rusk to U.S. Consul, Nairobi, May 11, 1963, Soc 14–1, Box 4222, RG 59, NA). Criticism of Kennedy and the United States also came from outside Africa. Neville Ashenheim, Jamaican ambassador to the United States, transmitted a message to President Kennedy from the prime minister and minister of external affairs of Jamaica. It said, essentially, that unquestionably Kennedy himself believed in racial equality, but that “stronger and more decisive action [was needed] to blast away the injustice against the black and dark-skinned” (Ashenheim to Angier Biddle Duke, Chief of Protocol, State Department, May 31, 1963, Soc 14–1, Box 4222, RG 59, NA). 31. Oboté to Kennedy, May 23, 1963, transmitted by Edward W. Holmes, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Addis Ababa, to State Department, May 25, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220, RG 59, NA. The embassy in Ethiopia sent the

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letter because Oboté was attending the conference of African states in Addis Ababa. 32. “Cheers for a Charter,” Newsweek, June 3, 1963, 1963, 40; “Sky Above— The Mud Below,” Newsweek, May 27, 1963, 25. U.S. News pandered to readers’ expectations with an illustrated article on “Nomadic life—primitive rituals— witchcraft . . . [and] customs among black Africans who are taking over from whites” (“Tribal Life in a Country Soon to Govern Itself,” USN&WR, May 20, 1963, 95). Time provided ample coverage of the OAU conference; see, for example, “Together at the ‘Summit,’” Time, May 24, 1963, 38; and “A Small Taste of Unity,” Time, May 31, 1963, 22–23. 33. USIA, “Reaction to Racial Tension in Birmingham, Alabama,” May 13, 1963. Baghdad Radio aired this gratuitous insult: Kennedy violently suppressed “Negroes’ demands for equality with whites in Birmingham,” while cloaking his true identity as a savage “who does not distinguish man’s flesh from that of animals.” The State Department directed its embassy to raise objections to the insult. See Roy M. Melbourne, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, to State Department, June 25, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221; and Ball, State Department, to U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, May 23, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4222, both in RG 59, NA. 34. On Nigerian criticism before the Birmingham campaign, see Palmer, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, to Rusk, March 5, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA. See also Radio Ghana, May 10, 1963, FBIS, Africa, May 13, 1963, I 6; and John P. Meagher, U.S. Consul, Ibadan, Nigeria, to State Department, July 31, 1963, Box 4220, Soc 14–1, U.S., RG 59, NA. 35. Vass, Nairobi, to Rusk, May 10, 1963; Mahoney, U.S. Embassy, Accra, Ghana, to Rusk, May 17, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222; Press du Cameroun echoed the line August 28: “Will the Peoples of Africa still believe the promises made by the United States, if they do not give American Negroes the same rights as white citizens?” (see Charles K. Moffly, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Yaoundé, to State Department, September 6, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220). Birmingham’s racial troubles received “prominent space in most papers” in Madagascar; see Ferguson, U.S. Embassy, Tananarive (later the capital of the Malagasy Republic), to Rusk, May 17, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221. These documents are in Department of State, RG 59, NA. 36. On Essor du Katanga, see Jonathan Dean, U.S. Consul, Elisabethville, to State Department, June 10, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221. On the separation of Rhodesia from Britain, see Martin Meredith, The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Postwar Era, 161–72. See also Paul F. Geren, U.S. Consul General, Salisbury, Rhodesia, to State Department, July 2, 1963; Manning, U.S. Consul General, Capetown, to State Department, July 2, 1963; and William H. Witt, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Capetown, to State Department, May 14, 1963, all in Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220, RG 59, NA. 37. Nielsen, Great Powers, 227–28; “In Mouth Only,” Newsweek, February 18, 1963, 48. See also “The Color Bar,” Newsweek, June 17, 1963, 52; and Time for “Self-Bound Gulliver,” 30, and “Of Bathers and Borders,” October 4, 1963, 47.

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The exploitation theme also appears in USN&WR: “Set a Communist to Catch a Communist,” July 29, 1963, 30; “Red ‘Yellow Peril,’” July 29, 1963, 29; “Has Race Trouble Tarnished U.S. Image Abroad?” August 19, 1963, 66. CSM treated the ideological rivalry February 5, 1963; August 29, 1963; September 18, 1963; and September 27, 1963. 38. See CDSP’s compilations of articles, photographs, and cartoons about U.S. racial problems that Pravda and Izvestia printed: May 1–7, four; May 8–14, seventeen; May 15–21, thirty-three; and May 22–28, twenty-one. Since the Soviet press took its cues from Pravda and Izvestia, many more such items no doubt found space in Soviet publications. 39. See CDSP, 15 (1963) for compilations that include these references: no. 18, 41; no. 22, 24; no. 26, 23; no. 20, 33. New Times lifted cartoons from France’s Le Canard Enchaîné and two New York papers, Newsday and the Long Island Daily Press; the last showed black children being herded into Birmingham’s jail. The caption was “Women and Children First.” The cartoons illustrated an article by Valentin Zorin, “The American Negro Fights for Freedom,” NT (M), no. 21 (1963), 5. 40. Brauer, John F. Kennedy, 240; Hughes to Rusk, June 14, 1963. Hughes also provided these data: Items of three or more minutes devoted to American racism between April 29 and June 9 totaled 2,609, but only 169 came from China. Pravda’s coverage was described as “relatively moderate in volume and content” measured against the “voluminous and frequently virulent” Soviet broadcasts to the world. The “veritable barrage” in 1963 was seven times greater than the outpouring at the height of the Ole Miss confrontation in 1962, nine times the peak of the Freedom Rides, and eleven times the twoweek high during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. New Times, which was published in six languages, printed a number of articles critical of the United States before and after the Birmingham crisis. See, for example, “Operation Freedom,” NT (M), no. 12 (1963), 19–20; and “To Cane or Not to Cane,” NT (M), no. 21 (1963), 24. Still, New Times paid tribute to “Honest Americans” who fought racism; see N. Sergeyeva’s review of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, “Honest Americans,” no. 20 (1963), 29–31; and Eslanda Robeson, “The Negro in American Life,” no. 25 (1963), 14–18. 41. Marshall Green, U.S. Consul General, Hong Kong, to State Department, July 5, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA; Xinhua, June 18, 1963, SCMP, no. 3004, 32. 42. U.S. Consulate, Hong Kong, to Rusk, August 9, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Xinhua carried the text of Mao’s statement (which he delivered at a reception for African visitors) in a dispatch on August 8, 1963, SCMP, no. 3038 (1963), 26–28. It was reprinted in P. Rev., 33 (August 16, 1963). Most of the dozens of announcements and articles took the line that Chinese leaders and non-Chinese dignitaries welcomed, supported, or extended Mao’s statement. See, for example, Xinhua, August 12, 1963, SCMP no. 3040 (1963), 30, 32, 40, 42. See also Ch’en Yuan, “In the Country of the So-Called ‘Born Free,’” Red Flag, November 19, 1963, in Selections from China Mainland

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Magazines, no. 395, 18–23. The Chinese continued to print commemorations of Mao’s “historical statement.” See, for example, “Commemorating Chairman Mao’s Historic Statement,” 29–30; and “American Negroes’ Just Struggle Will Triumph,” 30–31, both in P. Rev., no. 33 (1964). 43. CSM, August 13, 1963. 44. Tibbetts, Antwerp, to State, May 27, 1963; USIA, “Reaction to Racial Tension in Birmingham, Alabama,” May 13, 1963, research report R–8563 (A), 9, Box 15, RG 306, NA. The cartoon in Warsaw Szpilki, n.d., n.p., was reprinted as “Beginning of Term in Alabama,” NT (M), no. 40 (1963), 17. See also U.S. Legation, Budapest, to State Department, June 29, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220, RG 59, NA. 45. Several stories appeared on the front page of Le Monde; at this point the Times still followed its tradition of reserving page one for advertising. See these issues in 1963 of Le Monde: May 4, 4; May 5–6, 3; May 7, 2; May 9, 8; May 10, 1, 3; May 11, 1, 3; May 12, 3; May 14, 1, 3; May 15, 3; May 16, 6; May 17, 5. See also NYT, May 4; May 6; May 8; May 9; May 11; May 13; May 14; May 15; May 16. 46. Clark, U.S. Embassy/USIS, London, to USIA, Washington, May 5, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA; Anschuetz, Paris, to State Department, May 8, 1963; Times (London), May 4, 1963, 9; May 6, 1963, 12; May 13, 1963, 13. 47. Rowan, U.S. Embassy, Helsinki, to State Department, June 21, 1963, Box 4221; Tibbetts, Antwerp, to State Department, May 27, 1963; Ethel A. Kuhn, Acting Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Oslo, to USIA, May 10, 1963; Marshall W. S. Swan, Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Oslo, to USIA, May 16, 1963, Box 4222. These messages are in Soc 14–1, U.S., RG 59, NA. 48. Sankei, June 11, 1963, n.p., DSJP, June 11, 1963, 2; Tokyo Shimbun, June 16, 1963, n.p., DSJP, June 15–17, 1963, 3; Nihon Keizai, May 21, 1963, n.p., DSJP, May 22, 1963, 3. 49. “Freedom—Now,” Time, May 17, 1963, 25. 50. “The Sky Above—The Mud Below,” Newsweek, May 27, 1963, 25–26. See also Walter Lippmann, “The Racial Crisis,” Newsweek, May 27, 1963, 23. 51. CSM, May 8, 1963. More favorable were later reports about Kennedy’s civil rights message to Congress (CSM, June 21, 1963); and on Arab perceptions of Kennedy’s actions on behalf of civil rights (CSM, July 15, 1963). 52. NYT, May 29, 1963. For the editorial, see NYT, May 5, 1963. The Times summarized coverage from Communist sources, including Pravda, the Daily Worker of London, L’Unita of Rome, L’Humanité of Paris, and Xinhua, as well as non-Communist outlets in Britain, West Germany, and Asia (NYT, May 10, 1963). On Ghanaian and Nigerian press reactions, see, respectively, NYT, May 5, 1963, and May 9, 1963. 53. Significantly, the statements of Myrdal and Haile Selassie distinguishing the United States from South Africa were quoted; see CSM, October 7, 1963; NYT, May 5, 1963. Dr. Hastings Banda, the prime minister of the new African nation of Nyasaland, struck a similar tone during a goodwill tour of several U.S. cities (CSM, October 24, 1963). An earlier roundup balanced negative

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and positive elements among international press reactions to Birmingham; it included excerpts from the Manchester Guardian, Les Echos of Paris, the Press of Delhi, and Svenska Dagbladet of Stockholm (NYT, May 12, 1963, n.p., Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 8295). 54. “Has Race Trouble Tarnished U.S. Image Abroad?” USN&WR, August 19, 1963, 66. 55. PC, May 18, 1963. 56. On Little Rock, see Lake Charles (La.) American Press, n.d., n.p., quoted in CSM, September 20, 1963; on quiet integration, see NYHT, n.d., quoted in CSM, September 28, 1963. The military was also experiencing racial progress; see CSM, July 13, 1963. 57. NYT, May 29, 1963. 58. NYT, May 26, 1963. A similar message came from Sierra Leone, which endorsed the OAU resolution (Halvor O. Ekern, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Freetown, July 5, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA). For the interpretation of the State Department and USIA that “foreign leaders and newspapers have tempered their criticism [of the United States] with the realization that the problem is complex and that the federal government is genuinely trying to solve it,” see NYT, May 29, 1963. For the State Department’s confidential appraisal of the OAU resolution, see William H. Brubeck, Executive Secretary, to McGeorge Bundy, White House, May 31, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA. 59. PPP: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington: GPO, 1964), 468–69. 60. USIA, “Recent Worldwide Comment,” i, 8; On Oboté’s message, see State Department to U.S. Embassy, Kampala, July 15, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Without mentioning Kennedy, the mercurial Oboté later reversed course again: “How could the Americans expect Africa not to doubt them if . . . the rule of law was not for the colored, and the dignity of man was not for the colored” (W. Kennedy Cromwell, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Kampala, to State Department, July 31, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., RG 59, NA). More favorably, David Dacko, the president of the Central African Republic, wrote that Kennedy’s efforts “to abolish racial segregation” compel “the admiration of whole world” (Dacko to Kennedy, n.d. [ca. May–June 1963], Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4222, RG 59, NA). The emperor of Ethiopia characterized Kennedy’s statements as “masterpieces [that] should prove a potent factor in helping to alleviate the situation.” See also Francisco J. Orlich, President of Costa Rica, to Kennedy, July 4, 1963; and a similar response that emanated from Acción of Uruguay, which was frequently critical of the United States (Willis, Montevideo, to State, June 19, 1963). Several Lebanese papers likened Kennedy to Lincoln (Meyer, Beirut, June 14, 1963), all in Department of State, Soc 14-1, Box 4220, RG 59, NA. 61. Edward M. Korry, U.S. Embassy, Addis Ababa, to State, June 29, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. See also Xinhua, May 13, 1963, FBIS, May 14, 1963, BBB 3; Radio Accra, May 8, 1963, FBIS, May 9, 1963, I 5, both in JFK. USIA, “Recent Worldwide Comment on the U.S. Racial Problem,” July

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19, 1963, research report R–135–63 (A), 8, Box 16, RG 306, NA. Sawt al Uruba of Lebanon gave Kennedy some credit for taking the initiative, but discounted it overall because “mounting Negro pressure for equal rights” had forced him to take action. See Meyer, Beirut, to State, June 14, 1963. 62. Boonstra, U.S. Embassy, Mexico City, to Secretary of State, June 20, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221; Margaret Joy Tibbetts, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Antwerp, to State Department, June 21, 1963, Soc 14, U.S., Box 4220; and Russell L. Riley, U.S. Consul General, Johannesburg, to State Department, June 25, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221. The messages are in Department of State, RG 59, NA. 63. Kennedy, Circular Message 2176. Secretary Rusk reiterated Kennedy’s points in Rusk’s Circular Message 2177 to all American Diplomatic and Consular Posts, June 19, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1, Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Most diplomats evidently carried out Kennedy’s instructions dutifully. But Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith disputed the wisdom of “such [a] crash effort” so long “as it is genuinely evident that the Administration is doing its best” to advance the black cause; the Indians knew some civil disturbance was the “price of progress” (Galbraith to Rusk, June 20, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA). 64. On the early direction of the march, see interviews with Norman Hill, associate executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, by James Mosby, March 12, 1970, tape 532, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, 15–16, 27–29. On the respectability achieved by the march, see “On the March,” Newsweek, September 2, 1963, 21. 65. See these secret messages: Thomas C. Mann, Ambassador to Mexico, to Rusk, August 26, 1963; Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Mexico City, August 26, 1963, Countries, Mexico, 7–63/11–63, Box 141, National Security Files, JFK. On The March, see Rusk, Circular Message 1431, February 5, 1964. Some posts, such as Accra and Tokyo, regarded the film as potentially effective, while others, such as Karachi, The Hague, and Kabul, thought The March might revive quiescent attitudes about U.S. racial problems. Even those who favored exhibiting the film usually recommended reserving it for sophisticated or elite audiences. See messages from posts in Accra, February 11, 1964; Tokyo, February 14, 1964; Karachi, February 10, 1964; The Hague, February 14, 1964; and Kabul, February 15, 1964, all in Department of State, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA. 66. James B. Engle, First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Accra, September 1, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. There were 2,600 participants in Kingston, Jamaica, 1,200–1,400 in Amsterdam, and 400 in London. See Doherty, U.S. Embassy, Kingston, to Secretary of State, August 29, 1963, Rice, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to State Department, September 5, 1963, and Jones, London, to Secretary of State, August 31, 1963, all in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Eight petitions were deposited with the embassy at The Hague, and five with the Consulate General at Amsterdam. See Rice, U.S. Embassy, The Hague, to State Department, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG

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59, NA. Other posts receiving petitions included London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. 67. Reinhardt, U.S. Embassy, Rome, to State Department, August 29, 1963; similar message was sent by the U.S. Consulate, Hong Kong, September 5, 1963; both dispatches are in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. See also Pravda, August 30, 1963, 4, and Izvestia, August 31, 1963, 1, both in CDSP, 15, no. 35 (1963), 31–32; Xinhua, August 29, 1963, BBB 29; Xinhua, August 29, 1963, BBB 7–10; and Ta-Kung Pao, (Xinhua), August 31, 1963. For the North Korean reaction, see Pyongyang Radio, August 29, 1963, ggg 1. North Vietnam transmitted similar messages; see Hanoi VNA, August 29, 1963; and Hanoi Radio in Lao to Laos, August 29, 1963, JJJ 2–4. For these broadcasts and articles, see FBIS, no. 170, August 30, 1963, JFK. For the article in Ta-Kung Pao, see SCMP, no. 3053 (1963), 31. Some Red treatments were evenhanded. The press of Warsaw made the march the lead story; the Poles’ “reporting appears objective so far with no attempt at propaganda” (Cabot, U.S. Embassy, Warsaw, to Rusk, August 29, 1963, Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA). 68. Radio Accra, August 28, 1963, FBIS, August 29, 1963, I 6 and I 7, JFK. 69. On the coverage of the march, see USIA, “Worldwide Comment on the Washington Civil Rights March,” September 6, 1963, research report R–172–63 (A), i and passim, Box 17, RG 306, NA, and messages to the State Department from Nairobi (Vass, August 29, 1963); New Delhi (Bowles, August 30, 1963); and Dublin (McCloskey, August 29, 1963). See also Bonn (August 30, 1963) and Berlin (Calhoun, August 29, 1963). On the demonstrations and petitions, see messages to the State Department from U.S. diplomats in Kingston (Doherty, August 29, 1963); The Hague (Rice, September 5, 1963); Paris (Fales, August 28, 1963); London (Bruce, August 21, 1963) and Jakarta (Jones, August 31, 1963); Oslo (Wharton, August 29, 1963); Berlin (Calhoun, August 29, 1963); Accra (Engle, September 1, 1963); and Hong Kong (Lacey, September 5, 1963). These messages are in Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. On the Swedish press, see Radio Stockholm in English to Europe, August 29, 1963, FBIS, August 30, 1963, Y 1, JFK. The march also was covered in broadcasts. See, for example, Panama City Televisora Nacional, FBIS, August 30, 1963, RRRR 1, JFK. Messages of praise and support came from abroad. President Sékou Touré of Guinea cabled “sincere congratulations on attitude of federal government in race struggle and position adopted regarding March on Washington” (Touré to Kennedy, September 3, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA). 70. See CSM (Reuters) August 29, 1963; August 30, 1963; August 27, 1963. Accounts of foreign reactions were bundled in NYT, August 29, 1963, and August 30, 1963. 71. NYT, May 23, 2002. While other black children were killed in Birmingham, the deaths of the four girls in the bombing were by far the most affecting. 72. On the demonstration in Uganda, see U.S. Embassy (Deming), Kampala, to Secretary of State, September 17, 1963, and U.S. Embassy (Leonhart), Dar es Salaam, to Secretary of State, Nos. 342 and 344, September 28, 1963. For the donation, see W. K. Scott, Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, to

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State Department, December 28, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. The donation to the families of the dead children received some publicity in Africa. See, for example, Radio Accra Radio, September 19, 1963, FBIS, September 23, 1963, JFK. 73. Pravda, September 20, 1963 6, CDSP, 15, no. 38, 23; TASS, September 17, 1963, FBIS, September 18, 1963, BB 3, JFK (emphasis added). 74. “Tragedy in Birmingham,” NT (M), no. 38 (1963), 14–15. Similar (except it paid greater attention to the international impact of the girls’ deaths) was “Gangrene of Racism,” NT (M), no. 39 (1963), 3. See also U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to Secretary of State, October 1, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. On Radio Moscow, see “Significant Radio Reportage,” FBIS, no. 182 (1963), n.p. 75. CDSP listed and described briefly the articles of Pravda and Izvestia, which totaled approximately forty-five hundred words, and editorial cartoons, which continued to appear for several weeks. Pravda devoted a full page to the Birmingham atrocity, and there were other articles as well. See CDSP, 15, no. 39 (1963), 35. See also CDSP, 15, no. 40, October 30 (1963), 36, and no. 42 (1963), 34. On the escalation of Soviet rhetoric, see U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to Secretary of State, October 1, 1963, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 76. U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to Secretary of State, October 1, 1963; Xinhua, September 27, 1963, and September 21, 1963, in FBIS, respectively, October 2, 1963, BBB 20–21, and September 3, 1963, BBB 4, all in JFK. On Williams, see Lacey, U.S. Consul, Hong Kong, to Rusk, October 11, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 77. See messages dated September 17, 1963, to the Secretary of State from Rice (The Hague); and Rome (Reinhardt), all in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. Material from the Swedish papers was summarized by Radio Stockholm, September 17, 1963, FBIS, September 20, 1963, Y 2–3, JFK. 78. PC, September 28, 1963, 10. See also New York Amsterdam News, September 28, 1963, 38. 79. “Where the Stars Fall,” Time, September 27, 1963. The article and the cartoon appeared in CSM, September 18, 1963; see also CSM, September 19, 1963; September 27, 1963; September 28, 1963; and November 13, 1963. For the UPI collage and the story about Senator Kennedy, see NYT, September 17, 1963. The condemnations from L’Osservatore Romano and Izvestia were briefly recorded by NYT, September 17, 1963.

Chapter 11: Summer of Shocks

1. Rusk to All American Diplomatic and Consular Posts, July 1, 1964, Department of State, Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 2. Kunstler, Deep in My Heart, 299. 3. USIA Director Carl T. Rowan to President Johnson, June 29, 1964, Soc 14– 1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. On the arrest of King, see Pravda, June 12, 1964, 4, and June 13, 1964, 6, CDSP, 16, no. 24, 36; and Izvestia, June 13, 1964, 6, CDSP,

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16, no. 24, 36; a linkage between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the violence in St. Augustine appears in Izvestia, June 21, 1964, 3, CDSP, 16, no. 25, 34. On the attack in St. Augustine, see Pravda, June 24, 1964, 4, CDSP, 16, no. 25, 32. On the response in Mali, see Bayard King, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, U.S. Embassy, Bamako, Mali, to State Department, June 29, 1964, Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 4. Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia, 93, 106. The casualties are compiled in Pat Watters, Encounter with the Future, 3. A thousand arrests were also made during the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Hoover’s comments are in his eight-page report on the trip that he prepared for President Johnson and transmitted to Walter W. Jenkins, Special Assistant to the President, July 13, 1964, Box 26, Ex HU2/STA24, White House Central Files, LBJ. Earlier, former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles undertook a “fact-finding mission” to Mississippi at the behest of President Johnson, whom he briefed after returning to Washington. See “[Press] Briefing by Mr. Allen W. Dulles re His Trip to Mississippi for the President,” June 26, 1964, Box 26, EX HU 2/ STA24, WHCF, LBJ. 5. Alternatives such as restricting the students’ activities, deporting them, or making direct attempts to dissuade them from joining the campaign probably would have opened up the government to criticism from abroad. See L. D. Battle to Rusk, June 26, 1964, Department of State, Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 6. King, Bamako, to State Department, June 29, 1964. Six Danish youth groups sponsored the petition; see William J. Dyess, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Copenhagen, to State Department, December 30, 1964. An unidentified civil rights organization asked foreign diplomats to bring “the Mississippi situation before the Security Council and request that a U.N. peacekeeping force be sent [to] Mississippi.” See Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to Secretary of State, June 30, 1964. These documents are in Soc 14 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. The murders, along with “racial clashes in the various parts of the United States,” contributed to the “Tarnished American Image” in West Germany (CSM, August 26, 1964). 7. Harry Freeman, “The Democratic National Convention,” NT (M), no. 36, 17. 8. Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Violence, 255–59. 9. See Izvestia, September 2, 1964, 2, and Pravda, August 30, 1964, 5, and August 31, 1964, 6, all in CDSP 16, no. 35, 43. 10. Darrell D. Carter, Acting Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy, Mexico City, to State Department, July 30, 1964, Department of State, Soc 14–1, U.S. Four newspapers in Bermuda carried “extensive coverage of the riots in Harlem and elsewhere,” which their readers followed with “watchful and horrified interest.” See Consul General Renchard to State Department, July 27, 1964, Soc 14. These reports are in Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 11. Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Lagos, June 27, 1964, Soc 14–1 U.S. Apologies

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were extended to the Uganda Foreign Ministry and to the two Ugandans. U.S. Embassy (Deming), Kampala, March 25, 1964, Department of State, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3249. Similar problems cropped up during 1965 and 1966. See Embassy of Ghana to State Department, May 10, 1965, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, Embassy of Cameroon to State Department, July 16, 1965, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250 (expressing gratitude for State’s “effective intervention” after two Cameroonian diplomats were victimized in an incident in Maryland), and U.S. Embassy (Burns) Dar es Salaam, to State Department, November 4, 1966, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3249. The diplomatic notes are in RG 59, NA. 12. G. Ushakov, “African Diplomats in the American Jungle,” NT (M), no. 42 (1964), 22–23. The article was fairly accurate but had gratuitous references to like instances four years back. 13. “Why Africa Is in Chaos,” USN&WR, February 17, 1964, 49. 14. For example, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which abolished poll taxes for the elections of federal officeholders, was certified as ratified by thirty-eight states in February 1964. 15. “Debate in the Senate; a Meeting in Birmingham,” Time, April 10, 1964, 22. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Birmingham—Keeping Our Fingers Crossed,” NR, August 8, 1964, n.p., Cong. Rec.—House, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 18245–46. 16. Raymond Moley, “In Defense of Two Cities,” Newsweek, April 27, 1964, 110. (He ignored the confrontations between police and demonstrators during the campaign and Birmingham’s long history of violence when he ascribed to outsiders the responsibility for “some of the crimes for which Birmingham is blamed.”) See also “Birmingham: ‘We Can Say Things in the Open,’” Newsweek, December 14, 1964, 23. 17. Columbia (S.C.) State, June 25, 1964, n.p., Cong. Record—Appendix, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., A3751–3752. The article listed in advance the points Young was scheduled to make about black income, employment, and ownership of homes and automobiles (A3752). 18. Rowan to President Johnson, June 29, 1964. 19. Benjamin H. Read to McGeorge Bundy, July 18, 1964, Box 3250; Deming to Secretary of State, July 7, 1964, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250. See also U.S. Embassy (Mathews), Lagos, to Secretary of State, June 26, 1964, Box 3249. The above messages are in RG 59, NA. For Paz’s comment, see Rowan to President Johnson, June 29, 1964. 20. “Protests against Racialism,” P. Rev., May 15, 1964, 27; see also Observer, “U.S. Presidential Election: A Farce,” P. Rev., September 11, 1964, 15. For the ­Soviet response, see Kohler, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to Secretary of State, June 22, 1964, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA. On Prensa Latina, see USIA, “Foreign Reaction to Senate Passage of the Civil Rights Bill,” June 25, 1964, R–89– 65, Box 3, RG 306, NA. Tanzania’s Zanews described the new law as “win­dow dressing [that] changes nothing” (Frank C. Carlucci, U.S. Consul, Zanzibar, to State Department, August 12, 1964, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA). 21. Izvestia, August 23, 1964, 2, CDSP 16, no. 34, 25. Early the next year,

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Izvestia observed that the statute “has not produced any noticeable effect” (Izvestia, February 18, 1965, 5, CDSP 17, no. 7, 22). 22. Kohler, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to Secretary of State, June 22, 1964, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA. The embassy, somewhat quixotically, mailed 239 copies of a news release about the Civil Rights bill to Soviet media (although recipients also included foreign correspondents in the Soviet Union). See Ernest G. Wiener, Cultural Affairs Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, to State Department, July 17, 1964, Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 23. The USIS campaign in Ethiopia, for example, included radio broadcasts, distributions of text releases and photos to the press, exhibits and wall posters, and the printing of ten thousand copies of a pamphlet for general distribution (U.S. Embassy/USIS [Korry], Addis Ababa, to Secretary of State, July 8, 1964). See also Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, 157. 24. George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, 75–76. 25. U.S. Embassy (Graham) Conakry, to Secretary of State, May 13, 1964, Box 3249, RG 59, NA. By now, Malcolm had accepted the tenet of Islam, which welcomed people of different races. For Malcolm’s activities in Kenya, see Ambassador Attwood to Secretary of State, October 22, 1964. See also Frank C. Carlucci, U.S. Consul, Zanzibar, to State Department, August 26, 1964. Malcolm had “almost daily coverage” in the Egyptian press (Donald C. Bergus, Political Affairs Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Cairo, to State Department, August 28, 1964). While contending that Malcolm X’s campaign was unsuccessful, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Robert E. Lee conceded “his extreme statements may have caused some damage to the United States image” (Lee to Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr., September 9, 1964). Ambassador Attwood asserted that Malcolm X “had considerable success in Kenya in publicizing his views and in getting [the] ear of Kenyan leaders” (Attwood to Secretary of State, November 2, 1964). These messages are in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. The remark about diluting the venom of Malcolm X was made by John P. Meagher, U.S. Consul, Ibadan, to State Department, May 12, 1964, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA. On those tactics, see Richard Lentz, “Dark Prince in Africa: American Diplomacy and the Racial Jeremiad of Malcolm X.” 26. “The Talk Is Race,” Time, August 7, 1964, 17–18. What Time did not report was telling. Malcolm X said: “We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves by retaliating . . . could create the type of racial violence in America that could easily escalate into a violent, world-wide, bloody race war. In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights” (Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, 72, 75–76). 27. “Calculated Risk,” Newsweek, August 10, 1964, 27. 28. “Now It’s Negroes vs. Negroes in America’s Racial Violence,” USN&WR, March 8, 1965, 6. 29. Rusk’s cable also specified coverage by USIS and called for “reports to

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Washington on Mr. Farmer’s visit” and suggestions to “succeeding posts on Mr. Farmer’s itinerary”; see Rusk to U.S. Embassies in Accra et al., December 24, 1964, and Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Nairobi, December 30, 1964, both in Department of State, Soc 14–1, Box 3250. Malcolm X complained that the officers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya opposed his appearance on television in Nairobi and attempted to prevent Americans in that country from meeting with him and were “trying to keep me from making any public speeches” (Gordon Winkler, Acting Country Public Affairs Officer, to State Department, November 6, 1964, Soc 14–1, Box 3250). Farmer himself described Malcolm X as “an effective leader with much personal appeal” (U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv, to U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Lusaka, Leopoldville, Lagos, Accra, and Dakar, January 7, 1965, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3249). The above dispatches are in RG 59, NA. For James Farmer’s recollections, see his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, 228–29. 30. See NYT, January 2, 1965; December 13, 1964; and December 18, 1964. Adlai Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, characterized the bitter attacks on America as “irrational, irresponsible, insulting, and repugnant” (NYT, December 15, 1964). A rare Christmas Eve session was called because the charges leveled by Foreign Minister Ganao of the Congo Republic were so controversial that “the countries affected were unwilling to put off their replies” (NYT, December 25, 1964). 31. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, 217. The Christian Science Monitor expressed surprise at the attention paid to the assassination by British television and radio “as though [Malcolm X] somehow symbolized the civil rights movement.” There was little surprise about Beijing’s view: “the ‘United States ruling circles and racists’ murdered Malcolm X.” Beijing used his death to reiterate its line that “violence must be met with violence, as Malcolm X himself taught” (CSM, February 25, 1965; March 16, 1965). 32. Malcolm had several meetings with Muhammad Surur Sabban, secretary-general of the Islamic World League. Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, first secretary-general of the Arab League, received Malcolm X in Jidda and insisted on lending him his own room at Jidda’s leading hotel. Crown Prince Faisal’s son, Prince Muhammad bin Faisal, contacted Malcolm X to inform him he was considered an honored guest of the government; the crown prince later granted him an interview (U.S. Embassy, Jidda, to State Department, September 29, 1964, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA). 33. Eisenhower’s message was classified “Top Secret, Presidential Handling,” and warned of the “serious danger that Syria will become a Soviet Communist satellite.” He alluded to the king’s position as “Keeper of the Holy Places of Islam” and characterized the Soviets as godless Communists (Eisenhower to King Saud, August 21, 1957; Secretary Dulles directed the U.S. Embassy in Jidda to transmit it to King Saud, State Department [1957] file, Staff Secretary series, Box 2, DDE). It was during the Eisenhower administration that the interest of the U.S. government in the Muslim world seemed to have intensified. See, for

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example, “Inventory of U.S. Government and Private Organization Activity Regarding Islamic Organizations as an Aspect of Overseas Operations,” conducted by the Operations Coordinating Board, May 3, 1957, OCB 000.3 Religion, File 2 (4), Box 2, White House Office Files/NSC Staff, DDE. On the Eisenhowers at the Islamic center, see “Ike Visits Mosque,” USN&WR, July 5, 1957, 12. 34. The article added: “Malcolm X describes the white race as . . . ‘inhuman devils whose very nature is to lie, cheat, steal, deceive, hate, and murder black mankind.’ But he promises that an avenging Allah will soon wipe out the ‘white devils.’” See NYT, January 25, 1960. Secretary Herter described the Times account as accurate; see State Department Instruction 1311, February 15, 1960, 811.413/2–1560, Box 2311, RG 59, NA. 35. State Department Instruction 1311. Herter cautioned recipients to “be careful to avoid the impression that the U.S. Government has any prejudice against either Islam or negroes.” The African and Asian posts to which the directive was sent were Accra, Addis Ababa, Aden, Alexandria, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Benghazi, Cairo, Capetown, Conakry, Dacca, Dakar, Damascus, Dar es Salaam, Dhajran, Jakarta, Istanbul, Kabul, Kampala, Karachi, Khartoum, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait, Leopoldville, Luada, Manila, Monrovia, Nairobi, New Delhi, Penang, Port au Prince, Port Said, Port of Spain, Pretoria, Rabat, Salisbury, Singapore, Tahran, Tripoli, and Tunis. 36. McConaughy, U.S. Embassy, Karachi, to Secretary of State, July 1, 1963, Soc 14, Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 37. “What’s Right with America: As Observers Abroad See It,” USN&WR, September 14, 1964, 48–49. The magazine assured its readers earlier that “the United States is not the only country where racial tensions have been erupting into violence” (“Race Riots: A World Problem,” USN&WR, August 10, 1964, 24). 38. Washington Evening Star (AP), June 23, 1963, n.p., Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 18710–11. Despite their worldwide operations, the AP and UPI exhibited a fundamentally American national character (BoydBarrett, International News Agencies, 29). 39. Kenneth L. Baer, “African Students in the East and West, 1959–1966: An Analysis of Experiences and Attitudes,” 14, 16. Baer also relates that the State Department established a scholarship program for disaffected African students. The departures of 550 foreign students by 1963 and an estimated fifteen per month in the autumn of 1964 are mentioned by Josef Mestenhauser, “Foreign Students in the Soviet Union and East European Countries,” 156. 40. Mestenhauser, “Foreign Students,” 167; CSM, May 12, 1965. Some press references about the Soviets’ race problems were balanced. Newsweek conceded, for example, that the students’ complaints about racism could have been “real or fancied” (“Good-by, Lumumba U.,” February 10, 1964, 80, 82). While Reporter magazine concluded “there is a race problem in Moscow,” it gave space for the Russians to complain about African students’ lack of “civilized habits and behavior,” adding any Muscovite could see that the “Africans behave badly” (George Feifer, “The Red and the Black: Racism in

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Moscow,” Reporter, January 2, 1964, 27–28). 41. “Segregation in Sofia,” Newsweek, February 25, 1963, 42. 42. “Way Down South in Wenceslas Square,” Time, May 24, 1963, 33; “Race Trouble—Is It the Same the World Over?” USN&WR, July 1, 1963, 38. See also “Racial Troubles in a Red Nation,” USN&WR, May 27, 1963, 16; “How the Communists Are Treating Negroes,” USN&WR, February 25, 1963, 8; CSM, February 18, 1963, and February 20, 1963, 5; Charles Foltz Jr., “Big Changes Inside Russia,” USN&WR, January 20, 1964, 63; and “How Russia Mistreats Students from Africa,” USN&WR, April 19, 1965, 14. 43. “The Color Bar,” Newsweek, June 17, 1963, 51, 52. 44. CSM, December 20, 1963; see also CSM, December 19, 1963. For the remark about contributing to the U.S. defense budget, see Feifer, “The Red and the Black,” 27. Another article mentioned the belief of African students that “they were victims of racial bias at Moscow University” but focused on anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union (NYHT, April 26, 1964, Cong. Rec. Appendix, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., A2206). 45. Pravda, December 21, 1963, 3; Izvestia, December 21, 1963, 2; David K. Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, 338–39. See also Pravda, December 22, 1963, 5, and December 24, 1963, 4; and Izvestia, December 24, 1963, 2 (these reports are in CDSP 15, no. 51 (1964), 17–18); and Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots, 27. 46. Nicholas Nyangira, “Africans Don’t Go to Russia to be Brainwashed,” NYT Magazine, May 16, 1965. For Nixon’s remarks, see NYT, April 16, 1965. 47. Washington Post, n.d., reprinted in CSM, February 17, 1965. See also CSM, February 3, 1965. 48. Theodore H. E. Chen, “Government Encouragement and Control of International Education in Communist China,” 115, 118–19. Contributing to the exodus of foreign students were unwelcome political indoctrination, language difficulties, poor educational standards, the lack of a social life, hostility to foreigners based on their special privileges, racial discrimination, and spying on foreign students. See Emmanuel John Hevi, An African Student in China, 119–36; see also René Goldman, “The Experience of Foreign Students in China,” 135–40. 49. “Self-Bound Gulliver,” Time, September 13, 1963, 30; “How the Communists Are Treating Negroes,” USN&WR, February 25, 1963, 8. See also “The Periscope,” Newsweek, August 19, 1963, 12. The Soviets were as scathing as the capitalist press about the travails of foreign students in Communist China, no doubt due to the Sino-Soviet rift. A Soviet student returning from China reproduced some of the complaints of African students, to which were added details of the “horrifying licentiousness and unfriendliness toward the Soviet Union” by the Chinese authorities (A. Papoyan, “Peking ‘Hospitality,’” Komsomolskaya Pravda, September 11, 1963, 3, CDSP 15, no. 36 (1963), 22). 50. For example, African students were barred from movie theaters in Tennessee and Delaware. See U.S. Embassy (Palmer), Lagos, to Secretary Rusk, April 24, 1963; State Department (Ball) to U.S. Embassies in Lagos, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam, May 2, 1963, all in Soc 14–1, Box 4222, RG 59, NA.

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There were also assaults on Ghanaian students in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. See Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Accra, September 11, 1963, Soc 14–1, Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 51. U.S. Consul, Sydney, to State Department, May 14, 1964, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA. 52. “Riot against U.S. in a ‘Color Bar’ Country,” USN&WR, May 18, 1964, 13. (U.S. News did permit a rebuttal of sorts: “The [Australian] government insists the laws do not reflect racial prejudice, but are needed to preserve the racial homogeneity of the nation.”) A Reuters dispatch about the cross-burning ignored White Australia policy (CSM, May 7, 1964). 53. “Snatch at Sydney,” Time, August 13, 1965, 28. The journalist’s observation was originally published by the Sun of Sydney, February 22, 1966, quoted by London, Non-White Immigration, 295. See also “Civil Rights Now,” Newsweek, May 18, 1964, 43. 54. Solomos, Race and Racism, 53–54. On King’s visit to Britain, see Hiro, Black British, 44; and “Up From Montgomery,” Newsweek, December 21, 1964, 41. For a less confrontational statement by King, see CSM, September 23, 1964. Interestingly, U.S. News, which seldom approved of King or his activities, implied he deserved credit for nudging a British civil rights body toward a posture of moderation (“Klan Comes to Britain: What It’s All About,” USN&WR, July 5, 1965, 31). 55. “Race Trouble in Birmingham, England, Too,” USN&WR, March 23, 1964, 103. See also “How ‘White Backlash’ Struck in Britain,” USN&WR, October 26, 1964, 67; and “Backlash in Britain: Key Issue in a Key Election,” USN&WR, January 18, 1965, 20. 56. “The Other Birmingham,” Newsweek, March 30, 1964, 25–26. 57. Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1963, n.p., Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 18709. The Journal’s research persuaded it that the persistence of racialism in Europe held “a melancholy lesson for the United States: Overcoming race prejudice may be much harder than some integration leaders now anticipate.” 58. Jane Kramer, Unsettling Europe, xv–xvii; “Slow Melting,” Newsweek, August 3, 1964, 37. 59. “Black and White,” Time, September 7, 1964, 46. 60. “How Martin Luther King Won the Nobel Peace Prize,” USN&WR, February 8, 1965, 76. 61. See USN&WR for “Other Areas Where Race Riots Flared,” August 3, 1964, 6; “Crisis in Race Relations,” August 10, 1964, 23–24; and “Race Riots: A World Problem,” 24. 62. “Where Negroes and Arabs Are Clashing,” USN&WR, December 21, 1964, 6. On the Sudan, see Alasdair Drysdale and Gerald H. Blake, The Middle East and North Africa: A Political Geography, 215. 63. Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune, July 11, 1963, Cong. Rec.—Senate, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 18711. 64. “Birmingham: ‘We Can Say Things in the Open.’”

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Chapter 12: Selma and Watts

1. See Lewis, King, 283–90; and Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 186. 2. Wallace to Johnson, March 18, 1965; Johnson to Wallace, March 20, 1965, both in ex HU 2/ST1, Box 24, WHCF, LBJ. By contrast, Wallace had challenged President Kennedy’s authority to send federal troops into Alabama during the Birmingham crisis on the ground that state authorities had not requested them. Wallace claimed to “have sufficient state and local forces to handle the situation” and promised that “law and order will be maintained” (Wallace to Kennedy, May 13, 1963, Theodore C. Sorensen Papers, Civil Rights files, Box 30, JFK). 3. Jim Bishop, The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr., 384. 4. USIA, Overseas Television Growth in 1965, research report 111–66, June 1966, Table 1, I, Box 13, RG 306, NA. Ghana, the first black African nation to achieve independence in the modern era, inaugurated its TV system in August 1965 with three hundred sets (CSM, August 4, 1965). 5. Mark B. Lewis, Chairman, Television Task Force, USIA and Television in the 1970s: Report and Recommendations, September 26, 1969, USIA Special Reports, 1969–1970, S–54–69, Appendix 2, Earth Stations, Box 8, RG 306, NA. Earth stations cost $1.5 million each, too costly for impoverished African states. President Johnson announced an initiative to help African states build them, but political and technical problems delayed its launch (NYT, October 23, 1966). 6. CSM, March 22, 1965. On television and Johnson’s trip to Asia, see Robert E. Kintner to President Johnson, FG 296 (USIA, 1964–1966), Confidential Files, Box 33, WHCF, LBJ. 7. On the effects of time differences, see NYT, February 27, 1965. For Telstar relays of the March on Washington, see CSM, August 30, 1963; on satellite coverage in 1968 and 1969, see Lewis, USIA and Television, 1–2, 1–6, 1–7, 5–5. VisNews, the British-based global TV news agency, used satellite relays more than a hundred times in 1968 and 1969. More common were its shipments by air freight, which were sent to 140 organizations in eighty countries. 8. USIA, Nigeria: A Communications Fact Book, research report R–159–65, November 1965, 1, 18–19, Box 10, RG 306, NA; see also USIA, Nigerian Student Reaction to American Outlook and Other Media, research report R–133–64, 9, Box 4, RG 306, NA. Surveys of educated respondents in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in 1966 found the national radio station was the single most important source of information, followed by newspapers; half claimed they read magazines regularly. Only 5 percent of the Kenyans and Ugandans had TV sets in their homes and watched daily; another 15 percent saw television occasionally at community centers. Tanzania had no TV system (USIA, East African Media Survey, research report R–122–66, November 1966, I, Box 13, and USIA, United Republic of Tanzania: A Communications Fact Book, research report R–49–66, Box 10, RG 306, NA). 9. USIA, Asahi’s Survey of Japanese Mass Media Use, April 5, 1967, research

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report R–16–67, 3, Box 14, RG 306, NA. Conducted by the Japanese newspaper with the largest circulation, the survey found that most respondents believed that “television or radio news is more readily obtainable than newspaper news,” but that the latter provides “more reliability and profundity, attributes which particularly appeal to sophisticated readers.” On Japanese papers as media conglomerates and on their circulation, see USIA, Japan: A Communications Fact Book, research report R–89–66, May 1966, 14, 18, Box 13, RG 306, NA. In Argentina, newspaper articles outranked all other media in credibility and reached people of high status and influence inside and outside greater Buenos Aires; radio was in second place (USIA, Comparative Media Use in Provincial Cities of Argentina, research report R–12–67, summary page and I, Box 14, RG 306, NA). 10. For Johnson’s statement, see CSM, March 17, 1965; see also USIA, World Press Reaction to Selma, March 29, 1965, research report R–35–65, 2, 6, 7, 9, Box 7, RG 306, NA; and William N. Fraleigh, Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Rome, to State Department, March 16, 1965, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 11. See messages to the State Department from embassies in Jakarta (Jones), March 31, 1965; and Stockholm (Parsons), March 10, 1965, both in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 12. USIA, World Press Reaction to Selma, March 29, 1965; Fraleigh, Rome, to State Department, March 16, 1965; Leonhart, Dar es Salaam, to State Department, March 30, 1965; and Reed, Luanda, February 10, 1965. King was also mentioned approvingly by a government-controlled newspaper in Kabul; see Howard J. Ashford Jr., Counsel for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Kabul, March 30, 1965. The messages are in Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 13. “Formidable! Formidable!” Time, April 9, 1965, 23. 14. CSM, March 31, 1965. 15. “Formidable! Formidable!” Ghana also commemorated Lincoln a century after his death (CSM [AP], May 26, 1965). 16. USIA, “World Press Reaction to Selma,” 1–2. 17. On the demonstrations and petitions, see, for example, John H. Morris, U.S. Consul General, Winnipeg, to State Department, March 12, 1965; Richard H. Hawkins Jr., U.S. Consul General, Montreal, to State Department, March 24, 1965; U.S. Embassy, Ottawa, to Secretary of State, March 15, 1965; John L. Barnard, U.S. Consul General, Nassau, to State Department, March 26, 1965; Warde M. Cameron, U.S. Consul General, Amsterdam, to State Department, April 2, 1965; and U.S. Consulate, Toronto, to State Department, March 29, 1965. These documents are in Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. The SCLC also held a fund-raising meeting in Paris on March 28, 1965 (State Department to U.S. Embassy in Paris, Soc 14, U.S., Box 3249, RG 59, NA). The next year the SCLC received $100,000, representing revenues from an appearance by King and singer Harry Belafonte in Stockholm, television and record sales, and general donations (Swedish Information Service press release, June 30, 1966, File 4, Box 122, and copy of a memorandum from William Gordon, USIS public affairs officer, Stockholm, to USIA, Washington, April 6, 1966, File 6, Box 2, both in the King Center Archives, Atlanta).

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18. On copies of Johnson’s speech that were sent to “all heads of state and government in Africa,” see Secretary Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Capetown, May 20, 1965, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. USIA Director Carl T. Rowan urged Johnson earlier to send signed reprints of the address “to selected African chiefs of state” (Rowan to Johnson, April 9, 1965, Box 24, ex FG296, Confidential Files, WHCF, LBJ). Positive responses to Johnson’s speeches or actions in non-Communist newspapers were reported, for example, in messages in 1965 to the Secretary of State or State Department from Rome (Fraleigh), March 16; The Hague (Howe), March 17; Brussels (McSweeney), March 17; Ottawa, March 18; Bonn (Hemsing), March 19; Kabul (Ashford), March 30; Brazzaville (Koren), April 10; and Dakar (Cook), April 12, all in Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 19. For Azikiwe’s statement, see Alfred E. Wellons, Counselor for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, to State Department, March 25, 1965; see also President Johnson to President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, May 5, 1965. These messages are in Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. In contrast, Azikiwe issued an apology in 1963 for extolling the virtues of the United States. State Department to U.S. Embassy, Lagos, November 24, 1963, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 4221, RG 59, NA. 20. Alfred E. Wellons, Counselor for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, to State Department, April 1, 1965, Soc 14–1, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. On Mainichi, see DSJP, August 7–9, 1965, 7. 21. USIA, A Note on Worldwide Opinion about U.S. Race Relations, December 1965, research report R–204–65, i, Box 11, RG 306, NA. The dominant view was that most white Americans opposed equal rights for blacks. With one exception, the surveys were conducted before the Watts riots. On Le Nation, see Edmond Taylor, “The French Press Warms Up to LBJ,” Reporter, April 22, 1965, 29. See also Rivkin, U.S. Embassy, Luxembourg, to Secretary of State, March 29, 1965, transmitting the congratulations of Prime Minister Pierre Werner of Luxembourg to President Johnson for his speech to Congress. After Johnson signed the bill, the king of Burundi “render[ed] sincere homage” to Johnson for “his determination to put an end to injustice and to assure [the] same rights to all American citizens.” The king’s message and Johnson’s reply are in Rusk to U.S. Embassy, Bujumbura, August 27, 1965. These messages are in Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 22. Jack F. Matlock, Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy, Accra, to State Department, March 25, 1965, Soc 14–1 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. The U.S. embassy accused Tettegah of dishonesty, because he reversed his previous approval of federal enforcement of “civil rights in Alabama,” and of President Johnson’s speech (ibid.). Two months later, the African-Asian Peoples Soli­ darity Organization urged that U.S. racial problems be brought before the United Nations, since “African Americans are suffering from the same racial discrimination and exploitation [as] people under colonial rule” (CSM, May 18, 1965). 23. Izvestia, February 18, 1965, 5, CDSP 17, no. 7, 22 (see also NT [M] for

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“Selma, Alabama,” no. 7, 18); I. Lapitsky, “The Selma Tragedy,” no. 12, 12; “The Sheriff as Educator,” no. 8, 26. 24. The quotation is from “Protest,” NT (M), no. 35 (1965), 1. Strelnikov’s dispatch appeared in Pravda, August 12, 1965, 4, CDSP 17, no. 32, 19–20. NT (M) also developed the martyrdom of Reeb and Liuzzo in “The Unhooded Klan,” no. 15 (1965), 25, and I. Lapitsky, “The Selma Tragedy,” no. 12 (1965), 12–13, as did Pravda, May 22, 1965, 4, CDSP 17, no. 21, 23. Her death is mentioned in V. Kozyakov, “Ku Klux Klan Bares Its Teeth,” IA (M), no. 5 (1965), 90–91. The first trial of Wilkins ended in a mistrial, with ten jurors voting to convict him of manslaughter and two for acquittal. A second trial ended in acquittal. Wilkins and two other Klansmen were convicted in U.S. District Court in Montgomery of conspiring to violate the civil rights of participants in the Selma to Montgomery march. They were sentenced to ten years in prison. See Race Relations in the U.S.A., 1954–68, Keesing’s research report no. 4 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 177–78. 25. Adam Clymer, “How the Government Won the Third Liuzzo Trial,” Reporter, December 30, 1965, 25–26. 26. Izvestia, March 16, 1965, 2, CDSP 17, no. 11 (1965), 25–26. 27. Izvestia, May 22, 1965, 4, CDSP 17, no. 21 (1965), 23. On the Klan, see Pravda, August 12, 1965, 4, CDSP 17, no. 32 (1965), 19–20, and S. S., “The Unhooded Klan,” NT (M), no. 15 (1965), 25. A form of slavery remained alive in the United States, New Times asserted; see “The Slaveowner,” NT (M), no. 31 (1965), 23. A review of a German production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin described “chained Negro slaves on the deck” of a riverboat as “still very characteristic of modern America” (Pravda, July 10, 1965, 4, CDSP 17, no. 28, 28). 28. CSM, March 22, 1965. At the end of 1965, Hughes amended his assessment slightly: “Asians do not seem as militant on the [race] question as Africans.” Nevertheless, he cautioned, Americans are whites in a continent “with unhappy memories of white exploitation” (CSM, December 7, 1965). Two days later, an editorialist noted that stories about Watts were on “the front pages of every national (and international) newspaper” (CSM, December 9, 1965). 29. NYT, March 21, 1965. 30. CSM, March 22, 1965. Other references to foreign reactions appear in CSM, March 15, 1965; March 29, 1965; June 8, 1965; January 11, 1965. 31. “Opiate of the Masses,” Newsweek, March 8, 1965, 83. 32. NYT, March 14, 1965. The Times also provided examples of foreign reactions to Selma, including L’Osservatore Romano’s condemnation of “the ‘bestial violence’ of white racists in the United States” and a sit-in at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to “protest against treatment of civil rights demonstrators,” both in NYT, March 14, 1965; Communist statements were reported in NYT, March 16, 1965. 33. Erskine Caldwell, “The Deep South’s Other Venerable Tradition,” NT (M), no. 35 (1965), 21, 23. 34. Ibid., 18. See also Erskine Caldwell, “The Deep South’s Other Venerable Tradition,” NYT Magazine, July 11, 1965, 10–11, 14, 16, 18.

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35. “Coast-to-Coast Civil Rights Demonstrations,” P. Rev., March 19, 1965, 19–20. The “implacable enemy of the American Negroes,” it reiterated, was no friend of Africans (People’s Daily, August 19, 1965, n.p., republished as “American Negroes’ New Revolutionary Storm,” P. Rev., August 27, 1965, 26–27). 36. “American Negroes’ New Revolutionary Storm,” 26–27. The theme was present, in muted form, in People’s Daily, August 16, 1965, n.p., republished as “The Spreading Flames of Wrath,” by P. Rev., August 20, 1965, 15; see also “Premier Chou Condemns U.S. Ruling Circles’ Suppression of U.S. Negroes,” P. Rev., August 20, 1965, 4. Another article on Watts denounced “cannibal U.S. imperialism” (Israel Epstein, “The American People Are Speaking Out,” China Pictorial, no. 1 [1966], 35). 37. Peter Bart, “New Negro Riots Erupt on Coast; 3 Reported Shot,” NYT, August 13, 1965. On the symbolic shock of Watts, see Richard Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King, 182–85. 38. Kohler to Secretary of State, August 17, 1965, Soc 14 U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 39. “Regular Troops against the Demonstrators,” Pravda, August 1965, 5; “Street Fighting in Los Angeles,” Pravda, August 1965, 5; Johnson, Urban Ghetto Riots, 120; B. Strel’nikov, “Cruel Revenge,” Pravda, August 18, 1965, 5. 40. “Faults of Racialism,” NT (M), no. 34 (1965), 1; Natalia Sergeyeva, “Background to Los Angeles,” NT (M), no. 36 (1965), 14; Pravda, August 15, 1965, 5, in CDSP, 17, no. 33, 15; Harry Freeman, “Glowing Promises and Bitter Reality,” NT (M), no. 40 (1965), 12–13. Izvestia found racism both in the American hinterland and in Los Angeles; see Izvestia, September 18, 1965, 4, CDSP, 17, no. 38, 26, 27. Some weeks later, Pravda argued that consanguinity existed among segregation in the United States, “the rebirth of racist concepts” in West Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and the “racist regime” of Southern Rhodesia; see Pravda, December 10, 1965, 8, CDSP, 17, no. 49, 21. 41. U.S. Embassy, Brussels, to Secretary of State, August 18, 1965; Hillenbrand, U.S. Embassy, Bonn, to Secretary of State, August 16, 1965. Compare to Hillenbrand to Secretary of State, August 17, 1965, which said the consensus of articles was “the Negro struggle for social equality was the underlying cause of the riots.” These messages are in Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 42. Attwood, U.S. Embassy, Nairobi, to Secretary of State, August 17, 1965; and Cook, U.S. Embassy, Dakar, to State Department, August 29, 1965, both in Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 43. See U.S. Consuls, Port Elizabeth, August 20, 1965, and Cape Town, August 24, 1965, to State Department, both in Soc 14, U.S., Box 3250, RG 59, NA. 44. “As Others See Us,” Newsweek, August 23, 1965, 35. Race was one of the factors that explained “Why Swedes Dislike the U.S.A.,” the headline written for a series of articles published in late 1965 by Stockholms Tidningen; see CSM, November 10, 1965. There were also reminders of the dizzying pace with

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which new African states were winning independence—thirty-three since World War II (CSM, January 14, 1965). 45. Caldwell, “Deep South’s Other Venerable Tradition,” NYT Magazine, July 11, 1965, 10, 11. 46. CSM, November 18, 1965. 47. J. F. F. [James F. Fixx], “When Seeing Isn’t Believing,” Saturday Review, June 5, 1965, 35. The anecdote was taken from Bryant M. Wedge, Visitors to the United States and How They See Us, 6. The USIA and the State Department supported the research financially, but Wedge said the interpretations were his own. 48. CSM, November 5, 1965. See also a story about a Russian delegation’s tour of a Chicago public housing, which had “excellent interracial relations” (CSM, March 31, 1965). 49. “Good Will Odyssey,” Time, April 30, 1965, 118. The item was a review of a book by Kayira. 50. CSM, August 6, 1965. 51. “Good Will Odyssey,” 118. 52. Kenneth Crawford, “LBJ under Pressure,” Newsweek, March 29, 1965, 26; see also Kenneth Crawford, “Second Appomattox,” Newsweek, May 3, 1965, 35. CSM contributed to the progress theme February 6, 1965, and March 16, 1965. 53. “The Other South,” Time, May 7, 1965, 48–49; “The Truth about Negro Progress in U.S.,” USN&WR, December 13, 1965, 68. See also “Skilled Jobs: Too Few Negro Applicants,” USN&WR, April 19, 1965, 15. The advancement of black Americans in government was part of this theme. See, for example, stories about Patricia R. Harris, ambassador to Luxembourg, the ninth African American to receive an ambassadorship and the first black woman named to an ambassadorial post abroad (“New Envoy: Negro Woman; LBJ Picks Her for Luxembourg,” USN&WR, May 31, 1965, 16; CSM, August 16, 1965). See also “Washington Whispers,” USN&WR, May 10, 1965, 26. Newsweek recorded the promotion of Benjamin Davis Jr. to lieutenant general, “the highest rank yet attained by a Negro in the U.S. armed forces.” Davis was the son of the army’s “first Negro general,” who was appointed a brigadier general in 1940 (“Transition,” Newsweek, April 26, 1965, 70). Broader racial change also was portended by legislation changing U.S. immigration laws that would produce, in the words of U.S. News, “A New Mix for America’s Melting Pot” (October 11, 1965, 55). 54. By threatening to declare off-limits to all personnel any housing that discriminated against black servicemen, “more desegregation of housing was achieved in a few months than Maryland had seen in years” (Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara, 388). The same no doubt was also true in other states. 55. “Only One Color,” Newsweek, December 6, 1965, 42–43. The article also challenged Communist propaganda on race and the Vietnam War, claiming that many black soldiers “realize that their very presence in Vietnam gives

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317

the lie to Communist propaganda that the conflict is simply a white man’s war against the colored man.” Still the military reflected the frictions existing in society, and these began to create racial turmoil in the ranks. By 1969, there would be more than twenty serious incidents between black and white soldiers serving in U.S. outfits in Vietnam. Ironically, it was in the line combat units that racial amity and unity were most often maintained. See Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam, 259; Ronald H. Spector, At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century, 369–72; and Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, esp. xvi–xvii. 56. CSM, August 10, 1965; for the first-day total of black voters registered, see CSM, August 12, 1965. More presciently, the editor, Erwin D. Canham, believed blacks “may not vote as monolithically as assumed . . . , not as extensively as expected . . . [and] may respond to political factors . . . as their kinfolk already do in the North” (CSM, August 10, 1965). 57. CSM, December 9, 1965; August 10, 1965; and October 13, 1965. 58. “Discrimination and Discord in Asia,” Time, April 9, 1965, 32. 59. CSM, January 5, 1965. 60. NYT, August 18, 1965. Sulzberger did advise Americans of their country’s stake in racial justice, given the rivalry with Communist powers “for the favor of foreign countries in a world whose population is predominantly dark.” See also CSM, March 26, 1965. 61. On the Untouchables, see “One with Their Country?” Newsweek, February 15, 1965, 96, 98. Friction was also produced when South Africa banned black American scientists from serving at U.S. missile tracking stations. On diplomatic problems with South Africa, see CSM, September 30, 1965. The America-is-better theme started earlier and continued later. See, for example, “What’s Right with America: As Observers Abroad See It,” USN&WR, September 14, 1964, 48–49; and David Danzig, “Prejudice and Progress,” Saturday Review, March 12, 1966, 26, 151. Interestingly, the Dutch were credited with making a remarkable adjustment to “three color invasions” by nonwhites (CSM, May 17, 1965). 62. Russell Warren Howe, “James Crow, Esq., Comes to Britain,” Reporter, May 6, 1965, 28–29. At about this time, documentaries broadcast by U.S. commercial and noncommercial networks “extensively covered” racial discrimination in the United Kingdom, according to the television writer of the Times Jack Gould. He did not provide details of the tone of the programs; see NYT, June 18, 1965. British racism also was exposed after the Watts rioting (CSM, August 18, 1965). 63. On British immigration restrictions, see two “Worldgram” columns in USN&WR, March 22, 1965, 82, and April 19, 1965, 66. For changes in U.S. immigration laws, see “Admitting Foreigners: Britain Closes Down, U.S. Acts to Open Up,” USN&WR, August 16, 1965, 10. U.S. News did mention some reform measures; see, for example, “How British Schools Handle Racial Problems,” June 28, 1965, 11; and “Britain’s Program to Deal with Civil Rights,” April 19, 1965, 14. Time was equally critical of British immigration policy (and

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hypocrisy), zeroing in on the Labor Party initially, but later belaboring both Laborites and Conservatives for intending to restrict the “colored residents of Britain to less than 1 percent of the population (“A Question of Original Sin,” Time, August 13, 1965, 27–28). 64. CSM, June 30, 1965; “The Coming of the Klan,” NT (M), no. 27 (1965), 19; “Klan Comes to Britain: What It’s All About,” USN&WR, July 5, 1965, 30–31. See also “Now, Klan Crosses Are Burning in Britain,” USN&WR, June 21, 1965, 10.

Summary and Conclusions

1. Harry D. Marsh and David R. Davies, “The Media in Transition, 1945– 1974,” 450.

Selected Bibliography

A r c hi va l S o u r c e s

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P r in t e d D oc u m e n ta ry Sources

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index

Abernathy, Ralph David, 88, 157 Acheson, Dean, 5, 55, 56, 61, 210 AFP. See Agence France-Presse Africa, 22, 61, 78, 89, 106, 128, 136; reaction to racism in U.S., 34, 81, 97, 98, 100, 102, 120, 129, 138, 142; African students in U.S., 91; nations gain independence in, 130–31, 136; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 143, 145, 146; African diplomats in U.S., 149–50; press of, 158, 163; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 163, 167; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; strategic importance of to U.S., 177; and Civil Rights Act, 178; and Malcolm X, 179–81; African students in Soviet Union, 183; racism in, 183; and communication technology, 191–92. See also individual countries African American press, 62, 84, 151; on Native Americans, 37; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 167; on Sixteenth Street Church bombing, 172 African Americans, 2, 3, 25, 27, 30, 31, 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 72, 76, 80, 99, 119, 120, 124, 136, 151; in the military, 1, 17, 59, 69; journalists, 29, 78, 161, 167, 172, 177; in U.S. government, 74, 75; experiencing racism abroad, 77; and Brown v. Board of Education, 82; and Montgomery bus boycott, 88, 89; and racial progress of, 90, 106, 154; and school desegregation, 94, 102, 119, 143; and Freedom Ride, 138, 139; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159–60, 162–63; and March on Washington, 170; and Islam, 181; and Selma, 190, 195; and Watts riot, 202

Aftenpost (Norway), 122 Agence France-Presse, 10, 11, 100, 144, 209; and Selma, 196, 199 Alabama, 23, 93–94, 127, 137–38, 141, 142, 189, 199 al Ahram (Cairo), 146 al-Akhbar (Cairo), 178 Alaska, 22, 35, 36, 113, 114 Albany (Ga.) Herald, 143 al Fair (Morocco), 138 Algemeen Dagblad, 143, 172 Algemeen Handelsblad, 73 Alger, Horatio, myth of, 73, 74, 115, 134 Ali, Muhammad, 133 Allen, George, 118 al-Tahrir (Cairo), 111 America, 123, 149 American Indians. See Native Americans American Jewish Committee, 83 American Magazine, 37, 179 American Mercury, 117 American National Theater and Academy, 132 American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, 180 American South, 82–83, 90, 91, 200; Southerners defending racist policies, 87, 88; resisting desegregation, 92, 93, 94, 95–96, 119, 136–37, 174, 179; and racial progress of, 154, 204 Amrita Bazar Patrika (India), 66 Anderson, Marian, 76, 132 Anniston, Ala., and Freedom Ride, 136 Apartheid, 78, 80, 106, 139, 140, 146, 163, 168, 202 Arbeiter Zeitung (Austria), 120 Argentina, 56 Arizona, 31, 32, 37, 38, 50 Arkansas, and National Guard, 97, 99. See also Little Rock, Ark.,

335

336

I NDEX

desegregation incident Armed forces. See Military Asahi (Japan), 80, 93, 101, 105, 109, 188, 193; on Freedom Ride, 138 Asia, 17, 58, 60, 61, 87, 102, 114, 117; reaction to racism, 17, 34, 64, 81, 97, 98, 109, 120, 128, 129, 138–39, 145; treatment of Asian emigrants abroad, 77; and extraterritoriality, 108–11; press of, 158; and communication technology, 191–92; racism in, 206. See also individual countries Associated Press, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, 22, 37, 51, 62, 79, 85, 94–95, 209, 210; and photos of, 95, 159; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 96, 98, 100; and Freedom Ride, 138, and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159; reporting on racism in other countries, 182–83; and Selma, 199 Atlanta, and desegregation, 154–55 Atlantic Monthly, 81 Australia, racist policies of, 77, 159, 186, 188, 191 Azbell, Joe, 85 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 90, 124, 195 Baker, Josephine, 70–71 Baldwin, James, 207 Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa, 154 Baltimore Afro-American, 151 Banda, Hastings, 90 Basumati (India), 66 Belgium, 22, 100, 123, 127, 141, 143; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 163, 165; attitudes toward U.S., 168 Bell, Roger, 113 Berding, Andrew H., 7, 8 Berstelmann, Thomas, 44 Biberman, Herbert, 57 Bilbo, Theodore G., 24, 25 Birmingham, Ala., 136-37, 177, 196–97. See also Birmingham Civil Rights march; Freedom Ride; Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing Birmingham Civil Rights march, 156–57 Birth of a Nation, 25 Black, Hugo, 42–43 Black Muslims, 181, 182. See also Malcolm X Blanshard, Paul, 45 Bloody Sunday, 191, 193, 197, 199, 206. See also Selma

Bolivia, 33, 41, 178 Bombay, 160 Bowles, Chester, 8, 12, 131, 150 Brazil, 56, 63, 80, 162, 187, 191, 199 Bridges, Harry, 116 Britain, 4, 18, 22, 103; on U.S. racism, 50, 67, 86, 100, 121, 123, 125, 167; African American soldiers in, 77; and racism in, 77, 105–6, 183, 186–87, 207. See also British press British press, 43, 86, 103, 141, 145, 159, 165, 166, 173 Bronson, Ruth Muskrat, 35 Brooks, Early, 63 Brower, William, 29, 65, 78 Brown, Edgar G., 27 Brownell, Herbert, 57, 97 Brown v. Board of Education, 78, 79, 94, 213; broadcast of decision in, 79, 80; USIA exploitation of, 79, 80; foreign reaction to, 80; domestic reaction to, 80–81; and Soviet propaganda, 81; implementation of, 82; Southern resistance to, 82, 92, 93, 94, 95–96; Eisenhower and, 96–97 Bruce, Louis R., Jr., 38–39 Bryant, Roy, 83, 84 Buchwald, Art, 11, 144 Budapest, 11 Bulletin (Middletown, Conn.), 94 Bunche, Ralph, 26, 63, 73–74, 127, 131 Burger, Die, (Capetown), 163 Burma, 12, 18 Burundi, 158, 159, 160 Business Week, 53 Butler, Hugh, 116 Byrnes, James F., 74, 81 Cairo, Ill., 60 Calcutta, 95, 105 Caldwell, Erskine, 200 Canada, 39, 67, 127, 195, 199 Canadian media, 43, 100, 158, 159, 191 Canal Zone, 43–49 Cartoons, 106, 220n4; use of in propaganda, 139, 142, 144, 148, 164, 165, 171, 186, 193, 199, 201 Castro, Fidel, 134–35, 140 Celler, Emanuel, 120 Central America, 33 Central Committee of the Communist Party, USSR, 1, 12, 18, 139 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 70 Central Propaganda Department of the

I NDEX

Communist Party, 13 Ceylon, 12, 18, 94, 100, 103, 104, 183 Chafe, William H., 82 Chancellor, John, 97 Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier, 87 Charlton, Cornelius, 70 Chiang Kai-shek, 68, 111 Chiari, Roberto, 49 Chicago, 59, 61, 74 Chicago Defender, 2 Chicago Tribune, 2, 69 Chile, 56, 140, 159 China, 6, 58, 68, 140; Chinese media, 6, 12, 13, 99; reaction to U.S. racism, 22, 66, 67, 89, 99, 138; relations with U.S., 68, 165; Chinese emigrants and racism, 77; criticizing U.S., 99, 111, 121; on Reynolds case, 111; relations with Soviets, 140, 164; racism in, 185, 206. See also Chinese propaganda Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 6, 68. See also Chinese propaganda Chinese propaganda, 67, 111, 122, 125, 210, 212; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 99; on Freedom Rides, 139, 140; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 162, 164; and March on Washington, 169; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 172; on Selma, 200; on Watts riot, 200 Christian Century, 81, 84, 88, 117 Christian Science Monitor, 12, 32, 47, 72–73, 93, 95–96, 102, 114, 120, 126, 128, 131, 208; on Freedom Ride, 141–42; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 145; on treatment of foreign diplomats, 150; on U.S. as inspiration to world, 153– 54, 194; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 165, 166, 167; and March on Washington, 170; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 173; criticizing racism in other countries, 184; on communication technology, 192; informing of U.S. racist image abroad, 198, 202; educating Americans on effects of behavior, 203; on racial progress, 205; on racism in other countries, 206, 207 Cicero (Ill.) riots, 59–60, 61, 62, 63 Civil Rights Act, 174, 177, 178–79, 195 Civil Rights Congress, 72–73 Civil Rights legislation, 59, 85, 168 Civil Rights movement, 22, 85, 119; John

337

F. Kennedy’s response to, 138, 158, 167, 168 Clark, Clifford, 21 Clark, Harvey, Jr., 59–60 Clark, James G., 196, 197 Clement, Frank, 94 Clinton, Tenn., 86, 94–95, 96, 104 Cobb, Preston, Jr., 128 Cohen, Warren, 101 Cold War, 3, 5, 7, 19, 31, 36, 39, 49, 64, 65, 66, 100, 113, 117, 118, 128, 130, 142, 148, 149, 153, 154; and propaganda, 1, 2, 56, 68, 93, 102, 134, 209; and national security, 88, 114 Collier’s magazine, 26, 74, 117 Collins, Addie Mae. See Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing Colombia, 41, 144 Colonial Beach, Va., 60 Colonialism, 4, 35, 88, 113 Columbia, Tenn., 1, 86 Commonweal, 42, 84 Communication technology, 158–59, 191–93, 199, 209, 211 Communist propaganda, 25, 53, 55, 79, 130. See also Chinese propaganda; Soviet propaganda Concentration camps, 36, 41, 52 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 57 Connally, Tom, 115–16 Conniff, Michael L., 48 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 137, 157, 161, 167, 177, 189, 196, 197 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), 136–38, 143, 180 Corriere della Sera (Italy), and Selma, 193 Crisis, The, 84 Cuba, 49, 56, 71, 140, 165, 178 Cull, Nicholas, 79 Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 13 Cushman, Robert E., 23–24 Daily Graphic (Ghana), 163 Daily Worker, 2, 3, 26, 66, 68, 145 Daley, Richard, 156 Dallas Morning News, 116 Dardanelles, 48 Dar es Salaam, 102, 171, 193 Dawson, William L., 74–75 Denmark, 18, 22, 67, 71, 175 Desegregation: of the military, 59, 75, 104; Southern resistance to, 82, 96, 119, 124, 179; of schools, 80, 82, 92, 93, 94, 96, 104, 119, 124, 155, 179; of interstate

338

I NDEX

commerce, 136–37 Deutsche Presse-Agenteur, 11 Dewey, Thomas, 61–62 Dixiecrat Party, 23 Dizard, Wilson P., 132 Dorsey, George, 17. See Monroe, Ga., murders Dover, Cedric, 20–21 Drapeau Rouge, Le (Belgium), 165 Duberman, Martin Bauml, 27, 71 Du Bois, W. E. B., 22, 131, 179 Duke, Angier Biddle, 149 Dulles, John Foster, 41, 43, 48, 50, 97, 98, 100, 103, 108, 109, 112, 127, 130, 145, 207 Dunne, George H., 123, 139 Duplan, Luis L., 50 East African Standard (Kenya), 178, 202 East German Radio, 48 Eastland, James, 88 Ebony, 1, 62–63, 67–68, 72–73 Eckford, Elizabeth, 96. See also Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident Ecuador, 39, 41, 56, 101 Edmund Pettus Bridge, 191, 196. See also Selma Egypt, 22, 60, 94, 97, 143, 159, 181 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 23, 24, 26 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 40–41, 43, 48, 84, 107, 112, 117, 118, 119, 121, 125, 127, 130, 131, 182; and Brown v. Board of Education, 81, 82, 96; criticized for lack of desegregation commitment, 81, 99, 136, 137; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 92, 96–97, 100, 101, 102; and Girard case, 108–9 Eisenhower, Mamie, 128 Eisenhower, Milton, 50 Eisenhower administration, 39, 57, 107, 110, 112, 129, 207 Ellender, Allen J., 152–53 el-Raid (Tripoli), 102 Embry, Carlos B., 34–35 Essor du Katanga (Belgium), 163 Ethiopia, 20, 22, 99, 128, 167, 168 European reaction to racism, 64, 87, 100, 138. See also individual countries Evans, Rowland, 177 Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 88 Evers, Medgar, 162, 163 Excelsior (Mexico City), 176 Extraterritoriality, 12, 108–9, 111

Fair Employment Practice Commission, 22 Farmer, James, 136, 137, 180 Farouk, King, 60 Fast, Howard, 66–67 Faubus, Orval, 96–97, 100, 103–4, 106 FBI, 117, 148, 175, 198 Fisk University, Nashville, 74 Fitzjohn, William, 151 Fleck, Benjamin A., 88 Fleet, Charles Van, 99 Fleming, Harold C., 120 Folsom, James, 127 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 13 Foreign criticism. See International criticism Foreign diplomats and discrimination against, 12, 147, 148, 150–51; on Route 40, Maryland, 8, 148, 151; in Washington, D.C., 20, 107, 148, 150; and United Nations, 148; and John F. Kennedy, 149 Foreign journalists. See International journalists Foreign media. See International press reactions; individual countries Foreign policy. See U.S. foreign policy Forman, James, 195 Fox International Movietone, 98 France, 22, 63, 67, 86, 103, 123, 126; criticism of U.S. government, 40, 127; media of, 43, 159; on Till murder, 83, 84–85; on Freedom Ride, 139; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 145; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 165; on racism in, 183; on Selma, 195, 199 Frank, Reuven, 96 Freedom Ride (1961), 136–38, 140, 142–43 Free Press Journal (Bombay), 178 French West Africa, 98 Gaddis, John Lewis, 109 Gandhi, Mahatma, 9, 85, 88-89, 120, 156, 190 Gazet van Antwerpen (Belgium), 161 Genocide, allegations of, 37, 72, 114, 118 Georges, Francois, 20 Georgia, 17, 20, 128, 156. See also Monroe, Ga., murders Germany, 43, 103, 127, 139 Ghana, 61, 90, 107, 131, 133, 145, 152, 153, 200; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 163, 166; on March

I NDEX

on Washington, 169–70; students studying abroad, 184 Gibson, Althea, 133 Gilbert, Leon, 69–70 Gillespie, Dizzy, 131–32 Girard, William S., 108–9, 110 Global news flow, 3, 7, 10, 52, 87, 100, 150, 192, 209, 211; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 158–59; and Selma, 199 Goldman, Peter, 179, 181 Goldwater, Barry, 49 Good Neighbor policy, 44, 51, 52, 54 Gosset, Pierre and Renée, 91 Greece, 22 Greensboro, N.C., 63, 119 Griffin, Howard, 129 Gruson, Sydney, 56 Guardia, Ernest de la, 48–49 Guatemala, 41 Guihard, Paul, 145 Guinea, 159, 160 Hague, The, 73, 172 Haile Selassie, 128, 167 Haiti, 20, 22, 43 Haley, Sir William John, 90 Hall, Grover C., Jr., 86, 87 Hampton, William, 63 Harlem, 176, 182 Harris, Roy V., 155 Harsch, Joseph C., 114 Hart, Justin, 2, 4 Hartford Courant, 81 Havana Broadcasting, 160–61, 165 Hawaii, 22, 113–16, 117, 118 Hendrix, Bill, 155 Herter, Christian, 182 Hindu (India), 88, 160 Hiroshima, 212 Hispanic Americans, discrimination against, 44, 51 Hispanoamericano, 58 Hitler, Adolf, 29, 36, 51, 66, 68, 200. See also Nazis Hokkaido Shimbun (Japan), 112 Holmes, Hamilton E., 126 Hoover, J. Edgar, 175 Hopis, 31. See also Native Americans Horne, Gerald, 67, 73, 131 Houphouet-Boigny, Félix, 153 Howard, Anthony, 125 Hoy, 2 Hughes, John, 128, 198–99

339

Huie, William Bradford, 84 Hungary, 67; revolt in, 11, 43, 84, 97, 99, 100, 103; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 165; racism in, 183 Hunter, Charlayne A., 126 Huntley-Brinkley Report, 96 Huxley, Elspeth, 153, 177 Ickes, Harold L., 36 Imprensa Popular, 56 Imru, Ras (Prince) H. S., 20 India, 12, 18, 58, 104; reaction to American racism, 9, 22, 66, 86, 89, 105; press of, 10, 43, 80; relations with Soviet Union, 66; press’s reaction to American racism, 66, 88, 89, 94; Indian emigrants and racism, 77; on Brown v. Board of Education, 80; on Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 102, 103; on Freedom Ride, 141; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 166; and March on Washington, 170; and racism in, 183, 188, 206, 207; and communication technology, 191; and Selma, 199 Indian Claims Commission, 32 Indian Express, 142, 166 Indigo, Gabriel, 150 Indonesia, 12, 18, 67, 93, 94, 98, 102, 104, 129; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 162; racism in, 183 Ingram, Mack, 67–68 Inter-American Peace Commission (IPC), 49 International Affairs, 35, 36, 113, 125, 139 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 49 International journalists, 41; in U.S., 8, 9, 41, 86, 87, 97, 158 International News Service, 2, 9. See also United Press International International press reactions: to treatment of Native Americans, 40, 41, 42; to treatment of Hispanic Americans, 44; to Brown v. Board of Education, 80; to Till murder, 83, 84; to Montgomery bus boycott, 86, 89; to U.S. racism, 88, 93, 94, 95, 120, 123, 127, 129; to Sputnik, 93; to sit-ins, 121; to Ole Miss desegregation incident, 126, 144; to Freedom Ride, 138–39, 141; to Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159–61, 163; to March on Washington, 170; and Sixteenth Street

340

I NDEX

Baptist Church bombing, 172; to Civil Rights Act, 178; to Selma, 193, 195, 196; to Watts riot, 201–2 International public opinion: of U.S. racism, 3, 4, 11, 19, 23, 30, 64, 67, 81, 88, 93, 120, 127; of Truman administration, 21 (see also Truman, Harry S.); reaction to NAACP petition to United Nations, 22; of U.S. treatment of Native Americans, 40; of U.S. treatment of Hispanic Americans, 44, 50, 54; anti-American/ pro-Communist propaganda, 45, 57, 79, 99; of U.S. actions in Panama, 48, 49; of Brown v. Board of Education, 80; of Till murder, 83; of Sputnik, 93; of Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 100–101, 102; of Ole Miss desegregation incident, 172; of Freedom Ride, 139, 141, 143; of Birmingham Civil Rights march, 160; to Sixteenth Street Church bombing, 171–72; to Selma, 194–96. See also individual countries Interstate Commerce Commission, 63, 138 Iran, 48 Iraq, 80, 159 Ireland, 67, 170 Irvin, Monte, 76 Irvin, Walter, 61, 62 Israel, 18, 63 Italy, 22, 60, 103, 123, 126 Ivory Coast, 126, 133 Izvestia, 81–82, 98–99, 121, 122, 129, 130, 174, 185; on Freedom Ride, 139, 142; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144, 145; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 164; on March on Washington, 169; on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; on New York riots, 176; on Civil Rights Act, 178, 179; reacting to U.S. media criticism, 184; on Selma, 196, 198; on Watts riot, 201. See also Soviet propaganda Jackson, Donald L., 58 Jackson, Miss., and Freedom Ride, 137, 138 Japan, 17, 18, 101, 108–9, 112, 117; press of, 80, 158, 191; racism in, 105, 167, 188; reaction to Freedom Ride, 138, 141; communication technology, 192, 193. See also Japanese press

Japanese Americans, 21, 22, 116 Japanese press: on Brown v. Board of Education, 80; on Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 93, 101, 103; on Girard case, 109; on Reynolds case, 112; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 146; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 162, 166; and Selma, 199 Jazz tours, 131–32 Jet magazine, 84 Jim Crow, 2, 12, 15, 18, 20, 23, 26, 37, 38, 52, 59, 65, 74, 76, 82, 83, 85, 87, 105, 106–7, 120, 129, 142, 167, 174, 203; and military, 28, 29, 69, 204; in Panama, 45, 47, 48; and schools, 119; in Washington, D.C., 149; in Birmingham, Ala., 156; and Selma, 190, 200 Johnson, Lyndon B.: and Panama, 49; and Mississippi Civil Rights workers’ murders, 175; and Civil Rights Act of 1964, 178; and Selma, 189, 191, 193, 197; on voting rights, 195, 199 Johnson, Samuel, 2 Kasindi, Mary Josephine, 151 Kasper, John, 94, 95 Kennedy, Edward, 173 Kennedy, John F., 119, 125–26, 128, 131, 136; and Martin Luther King, Jr., 122, 156, 158; and Freedom Ride, 137–38, 141; criticized from abroad, 140, 141, 144, 146, 152, 162, 170, 172; and Ole Miss desegregation, 143, 144, 145; on discrimination toward foreign diplomats, 147, 148, 149; election of, 157; Civil Rights commitment of, 157, 168; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 158, 159, 161, 165; international support for, 167, 170, 173, 196; and Organization for African Unity, 168; on March on Washington, 169 Kennedy, Robert, 122, 126, 137–38, 149, 156 Kennedy, Stetson, 57, 62 Kenya, 81, 90, 101, 130–31, 138, 152; and Mau Mau rebellion, 60; Americans aiding, 154; and communication technology, 159; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 162, 163; on March on Washington, 170; on Malcolm X, 179; and racism in, 188; on Watts riot, 202

I NDEX

Khrushchev, Nikita, 43, 93, 134–35, 137, 140, 148, 212 Kilpatrick, Jack, 63, 64 King, Coretta Scott, 122 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 59, 85, 87, 88, 131, 174, 186; and sit-ins, 122; and Freedom Ride, 137; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 156, 157–58, 161, 163; and John F. Kennedy, 158; and Selma, 189, 190–91, 193, 197 Klibanoff, Hank, 85, 97 Komsomolskaya Pravda, 98, 178 Korea, 18; and civil war, 37, 38, 55, 56, 68, 69; Korean emigrants and racism, 105; and racism in, 206 Korean Republic, 111 Krug, Julius, 31, 33 Ku Klux Klan, 2, 41–42, 63, 67, 148, 155, 175, 186, 195, 197; used in antiAmerican propaganda, 99, 120, 121, 125, 129, 140, 198, 201; portrayed in cartoon, 201; in Britain, 208 La Farge, Oliver, 38 Lagos, 61, 80, 150 Landstem, Die (Capetown), 163 Latham, Michael, 49 Latin America, 40, 47, 49, 50, 53, 57, 93, 95, 138–39; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 158, 159, 167; and Civil Rights Act, 178; and communication technology, 191; and Selma, 193 Latinos, 44. See also Hispanics Lavoratore, Il, 25 Lawrence, David, 23, 24 League of Nations, 39 Lebanon, 94, 159 L’Ethiopie d’Aujourd’hui (Ethiopia), 128 Libya, 60, 98, 162 Life magazine, 1, 91, 110 Limon, Gilberto, 55 Lincoln, Abraham, 21, 26, 70, 143, 146, 153; used as symbol, 170, 194, 196, 203 Lincoln Memorial, 21, 153, 194 Lindley, Ernest K., 120 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 36, 99 Lithuania, 38 Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 9, 11, 92–93, 96, 104, 128, 167; and Brown v. Board of Education, 124–25; and USIA, 93, 100; Eisenhower and, 96, 100, 101, 102; Faubus and, 96, 103– 4, 106; foreign reaction to, 98, 100–101, 102, 103; and National Guard, 96, 98;

341

and Soviet propaganda, 97, 98, 99; editorial cartoons about, 99, 106; and State Department, 150 Liuzzo, Viola, 197, 198 London Daily Mirror, 142 Longoria, Felix, 51 Look magazine, 35 Los Angeles Examiner, 32 L’Osservatore Romano, 91, 102, 120, 139, 160, 172 Louw, Eric H., 40 Luce, Henry, 23, 65 Lucy, Autherine, 93–94, 126 Lumbee Indians, 41–42 L’Unità, 123 Lynchings, 21, 50, 63, 64, 66, 67, 83, 84, 90 MacIver, Robert M., 44 Macleans (Canada), 100 Mainichi (Japan), 80, 101, 109, 146, 188, 193, 195 Malcolm, Dorothy, 17. See also Monroe, Ga., murders Malcolm, Roger, 17. See also Monroe, Ga., murders Malcolm X, 161, 179–82 Mali, 143, 174, 175 Manchester Guardian, 104, 123 Manila, 109 Manila Chronicle, 132 Mao Tse-tung, 68, 140, 164, 185–86, 140 Marcantonio, Vito, 23 March on Washington, 168, 168, 170, 192, 213 Markel, Lester, 7 Marshall, George C., 19, 46 Marshall, Thurgood, 69, 83, 130–31 Marshall Plan, 32 Martinsville Seven, 66 Massey, Raymond, 20 Maynard, David M., 93 McCarthyism, 103 McGee, Willie, 67 McNair, Denise. See Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing McNeal, Elijah, 153 McPherson, Kans., 65 McSherry, Frank J., 45, 48 McWhorter, Diane, 160 McWilliams, Carey, 29, 87 Mercure, 35 Meredith, James, 143, 144, 145, 146, 198. See also Ole Miss desegregation incident

342

I NDEX

Messaggero, Il, 139 Mestenhauser, Josef, 183 Mexicans, 2, 3; and U.S. discrimination against, 51, 52 Mexico, 22, 41, 43, 44, 54, 58, 212; attitudes toward U.S., 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 168; relations with U.S., 51, 55, 56–57; press of, 52, 57; reactions to U.S. racism, 67, 169; and New York riots, 176; communication technology, 191 Michener, James A., 115, 116, 117 Milam, J. W., 83, 84 Military: segregation in, 27, 28, 29, 69, 75; bases, 44, 46, 108, 109; desegregation of, 59, 104, 204; racism in, 69; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144 Minneapolis Tribune, 81, 147, 186 Mississippi, 20, 23, 24, 83, 88, 143; Civil Rights workers’ murders, 175 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, 175 Mitchell, James P., 104 Mohan, Raja, 66 Mohawks, 39 Moley, Raymond, 177 Monde, Le (Paris), 165 Monroe, Ga., murders, 17, 22 Monroe, N.C., 127 Monterrey, Mexico, 51 Montevideo, 71 Montgomery, Ala., 137 Montgomery Advertiser, 85, 86, 87 Montgomery bus boycott, 85–86, 87, 88, 89 Montgomery Improvement Association, 85, 88 Moore, Harry T., 61, 62 Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), 80 Morning Post (Nigeria), 161 Morse, Wayne, 29 Moses, Robert, 42 Mozambique, 98, 101 Mundo, O, 54 Murray, Johnston, 40–41 Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma, 167 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 60, 61, 71, 84, 93, 119, 129, 180, 182, 204; petition to United Nations, 22; Civil Rights litigation of, 68; and the military, 69–70

Nagasaki, 212 Nairobi, 159 Nash, Frank C., 109 Nation (Kenya), 142 Nation, The, 48, 50, 62, 76, 81, 84, 87 Nation of Islam, 179, 182. See also Malcolm X National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), 40 National Guard, 60, 61, 94, 95, 96, 98, 143, 144, 201 Native Americans, 2, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41–42, 43, 212; reaction of Americans to treatment of, 33; appeals to United Nations by, 39. See also individual tribes Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Bill, 33 Navajo Indians, plight of, 32, 35, 41 Nazis, 36, 52; Americans compared to, 139, 140, 142, 144, 162, 165, 200, 208 NBC, 96 New Delhi, 140, 142, 144, 170 New Orleans, 4; and school desegregation, 119, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 127 New Mexico, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 52, 57, 58 New Republic, The, 19, 20, 36, 50, 52, 61, 62, 78, 110, 130 New Statesman, 43, 121, 125 New Times (Moscow), 13, 17, 21, 24, 25, 34, 37, 38, 53, 113, 208; criticism of U.S. media, 35, 128; criticism of U.S. government, 39, 42, 75, 114, 152, 197; combating U.S. propaganda, 41; on Panama/U.S. bases crisis, 47; on Mexico, 54, 56–57; on segregated housing in U.S., 65–66; using U.S. sources, 66, 176; on U.S. racism, 67, 150, 176, 200; celebrating Americans of color, 71; on Till’s murder, 84; criticism of Bunche, 130; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; and Mississippi Civil Rights workers’ murders, 175; and Selma, 196, 197; and Watts riot, 201. See also Soviet propaganda New York, 42; racism in, 148, 150, 176; racial violence in, 176 New York Daily News, 110 New York Herald Tribune, 2, 129, 130, 144, 151, 176; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 162, 167; and Watts riot, 201

I NDEX

New York Post, 74 New York State Power Authority, 42 New York Times, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 17, 20, 22, 23, 27, 38, 47, 54, 65, 72, 112, 128; on plight of Native Americans, 33, 37, 38, 39; on racial progress, 39, 58; on racism in South Africa, 39–40, 206; on Soviet propaganda, 43; on Panama crisis, 48, 50; on U.S.-Mexico relations, 56; on effect of racism on foreign opinion, 61, 62, 81, 86, 102, 119, 166, 173; on reactions to Brown v. Board of Education, 80, 81; on Montgomery bus boycott, 85, 86; educating readers on effect of U.S. racism on international public opinion, 88, 102, 124, 146; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 96, 98, 102; reliance on wire services, 98; on Hawaii’s statehood, 117–18; on sit-ins, 119–20; on Powell, 130; on Gillespie, 132; on Freedom Ride, 137–38, 141; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 146; on treatment of foreign diplomats, 149; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 157, 166, 167, 168; on March on Washington, 170; on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; on Malcolm X, 181; criticizing racism in Soviet Union, 185; on Selma, 199–200; on Watts riot, 201; criticizing other countries for racism, 206. See also U.S. Media New York Times Magazine, 54. See also U.S. Media New York Times News Service, 8 New Zealand, 88, 159, 160, 191 News (Mexico City), 41 News & Courier (Charleston, S.C.), 120 News agencies, 138, 144, 158, 176, 209. See also Wire services Newsreels, 8, 97–98, 158 Newsweek magazine, 2, 8, 19, 22, 25, 26, 29, 40, 52, 53, 54, 60, 68, 111–12, 135, 164; on military segregation, 28; defending Randolph, 29; on effects of Salt of the Earth, 58; on racial progress, 63–64, 76, 90, 155, 177, 204–5; criticizing those who criticized U.S., 70, 71–72, 105, 106, 142, 162–63, 180; celebrating Americans of color, 76, 129, 132; defending U.S., 77, 82, 84, 91, 162; on Montgomery bus boycott, 85, 86; on Sputnik, 93; on Little Rock,

343

Ark., desegregation incident, 98, 103; on international criticism of U.S. racism, 103, 120, 124, 127, 128, 141, 146, 152, 166, 202; on Hawaii’s statehood, 114, 115, 117, 118; on New Orleans school desegregation, 124; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 126, 146; defending Bunche, 127; on U.S. public diplomacy efforts, 132, 133; educating Americans on proper behavior, 133–34, 152–53; on Freedom Ride, 141–42; educating readers on effect of U.S. racism on international public opinion, 153, 199; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 166; criticizing other countries for racism, 183–84, 186, 187, 207; on Watts riot, 202. See also U.S. Media Niebuhr, Reinhold, 50 Nigeria, 20, 61, 65, 80, 90, 91, 133, 145, 150, 176, 198; inspired by U.S., 153, 154; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 163; communication technology of, 159, 192–93; and March on Washington, 170; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; and Civil Rights Act, 178; and U.S. voting rights, 195; and Watts riot, 202 Nigerian Outlook, 150 Nixon, E. D., 85 Nixon, Richard, 49, 98, 122, 136, 157, 185 Nkrumah, Kwame, 90, 107, 131, 133, 153 North Carolina, 41, 67, 134 North Korea, 169 Norway, 22, 159, 165 Noticias, 101 Novak, Robert, 177 Novedades, 52 Nyasaland African Congress, 90 Oboté, Milton, 162, 168, 178 O’Donovan, Patrick, 88 Office of War Information, 19 Ole Miss desegregation incident, 126, 136, 143, 145, 146; and National Guard, 143, 144 Onandagas, 39 101st Airborne Division, 97, 100, 102 Oneidas, 39. See also Native Americans O’Neill, Charles E., 123 Onuoha, Geoffrey Baba Ie, 91 Operation Crossroads Africa, 130 Operation Wetback, 57 Organization of African Unity, 167, 179

344

I NDEX

Organization of American States (OAS), 49 Oxford, Miss., 86, 144. See Ole Miss desegregation incident Paeso, Il (Rome), 99 Pakistan, 12, 18, 66, 80, 132, 143, 182; Pakistani emigrants and racism, 77, 104; and racism in, 183, 206; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159; and communication technology, 191 Panama, 41, 46-47, 49, 162. See also Canal Zone Paris-Match, 95, 129 Patterson, Floyd, 129 Patterson, John, 137, 140 Peace Corps, 141 Pechnatov, Vladimir, 19 Pedoman, 93 Peking Review, 13, 121, 140, 148, 152, 178 People’s Daily. See Renmin Ribao Peru, 41 Philadelphia, Miss., 9, 86, 175. See also Mississippi, Civil Rights workers’ murders Philippines, 18, 43, 51, 55, 63, 109 Photographs, effect of on international opinion of U.S., 98, 100, 159–60, 165, 167, 176, 191, 193, 199, 201 Pillion, John, 117 Pillsbury, Dorothy, 32 Pittsburgh Courier, 2, 20, 21, 37–38, 47, 50–51, 167, 172 Plessy v. Ferguson, 59, 63, 79 Poland, racism in, 183 Polyansky, Dmitri S., 120 Popular, El, 52 Porgy and Bess, 77, 132 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 129–30, 131 Pravda, 1, 12, 25, 34, 42, 53, 57, 58, 73, 74, 81, 103, 121, 123, 174, 185; on Till’s murder, 84; on Freedom Ride, 139; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 164, 165; on March on Washington, 169; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; and New York riots, 176; reacting to U.S. media criticism, 184; on Mississippi Civil Rights workers’ murders, 197; and Watts riot, 201. See also Soviet propaganda Prensa Latina (Cuba), 178 Press Trust of India, 170

Pribilof Indians, 36 Pritchett, Laurie, 156, 157, 197 Problems of Economics, 47 Progresso Italo-Americano, Il, 64 Propaganda, anti-American/proCommunist, 2, 19, 41, 45, 50, 56, 66, 79, 98, 99, 100, 111, 124, 150, 212; and Jim Crow, 87; using American sources, 120; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 165. See also Chinese propaganda; Soviet propaganda Public accommodations, access to, 52, 59–60, 61, 65 Quechua, 40 Racial violence/discrimination. See Violence Radio, 6–7, 8, 158–59, 191, 192, 193 Radio Baghdad, 162 Radio Moscow, 26, 47, 62, 118, 129, 141, 145; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 164, 166; and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171 Randolph, A. Philip, 27, 28, 29, 131 Rankin, John E., 24 Reader’s Digest, 8, 38–39, 41, 52, 104, 113, 115 Red Army, 11, 28, 43, 57 Red Star, 28, 57. See also Soviet propaganda Reeb, James, 197 Rehman, Indrani, 150 Reiner, H., Jr., 150 Remon, Cecilia, 48 Remon, José, 48 Renmin Ribao (China), 99, 111; and Selma, 199. See also Chinese propaganda Reporter magazine, 64, 74, 151, 155, 198, 207 Reservation system, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43. See also Native Americans Reston, James, 128 Reuters, 10, 95, 100, 144, 150, 195, 199, 209 Reynolds, Grant, 28 Reynolds, Robert G., 110–11, 112 Rhodesia, 106, 133, 163 Rice, John R., 37, 38 Richmond News Leader, 63 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 103 Riesel, Victor, 177–78 Rio de Janeiro, 102 Rivers, L. Mendel, 87

I NDEX

Roberts, Gene, 85, 97 Robertson, Carole. See Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 89 Robeson, Paul, 23, 27, 46, 70, 71, 72, 250n64 Robinson, Jackie, 71–72, 250n64 Robinson, James H., 130 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 25, 33, 38, 120 Rosier, Paul, 31, 40 Route 40 incidents (Maryland), 151 Rowan, Carl T., 67, 180 Rusk, Dean, 138, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149; and March on Washington, 169; and Civil Rights Act, 174, 178; and Mississippi Civil Rights workers’ murders, 175; countering Malcolm X, 180–81 Russell, Bertrand, 43 Russell, Francis H., 61 Russell, Richard, 49 Rutherford, William A., 72, 75–76 Sakai, Maka, 108 Salt of the Earth, potential effect of, 57–58 Sampson, Edith, 75–76 Sanjuan, Pedro, 148–49 Sankei-Jiji (Japan), 101, 146, 166 Satirapharp (Thailand), 111 Saturday Evening Post, 53, 110 Saturday Review, 203 Saudi Arabia, 56, 181, 182, 188 Saund, Dalip Singh, 112–13, 213 Scully, Eileen, 111 Segregation, 26, 63, 89, 90, 127; in Canal Zone, Panama, 45, 48; in Washington, D.C., 65, 74, 148, 149; in schools, 79, 80, 96, 119; in interstate commerce, 137; in housing, 149 Segura, Francisco, 39–40 Seigenthaler, John, 137 Selma, Ala., 86, 194–97, 199, 200, 204, 206; voting rights campaign, 7, 189, 190–91, 193, 195; and march to Montgomery, 198 Seminoles of Florida, 34. See also Native Americans Senate Armed Services Committee, 28 Senecas, 39. See also Native Americans Shepherd, Sammy, 61, 62 Shivers, Allan, 96 Silver City, N.M., 58 Simpson, R. Smith, 101 Singapore, 5, 61, 62, 188

345

Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 56 Sit-in movement, 119–21, 122, 133 Sitton, Claude, 119 Six Nations, 39. See also Native Americans Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 168, 171–73 Skanska Dagbladet (Sweden), 160 South Africa, 16, 63, 66, 78, 80, 89, 160; criticized by U.S. media, 39–40, 78, 106–7, 133, 206, 207; attitudes toward U.S. government, 40, 168; compared to U.S., 100, 121, 122, 163, 164, 167, 179; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 146; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159; and March on Washington, 170; and Watts riot, 202 South America, 33, 44, 53, 70 South Carolina, 24, 74, 87, 177 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 155, 156, 157, 180 Southern Regional Council, 120 Soviet propaganda, 15, 18, 23, 26, 210, 212; using U.S. sources, 11, 19, 21, 34, 37, 53, 66, 74, 129, 144, 150, 159, 171, 200, 201; on Monroe, Ga., murders, 17; on U.S. treatment of African Americans, 18, 21, 24, 25, 65, 66, 67, 76, 99, 122, 129, 174; and U.S. military segregation, 28; on American treatment of Native Americans, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43; U.S. as imperialist, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 53, 113; reach of, 40; and Latin America, 40, 46–47, 53; combating U.S. propaganda, 41; U.S. as hypocritical, 42, 99; on Panama, 46, 47, 48; and Mexicans, 53, 54; on Brown v. Board of Education, 81–82; on Till’s murder, 84; promoting Sputnik, 93, 259n2; on Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 97, 98, 102; on Hawaii’s statehood, 118; on the sit-in movement, 121; on New Orleans desegregation incident, 125; on Freedom Ride, 139; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 143–44; on U.S. treatment of foreign diplomats, 150; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 164, 165; on Sixteenth Street Church bombing, 171–72; and March on Washington, 169; and Selma, 196, 198; on Watts riot, 201 Soviet Union, 1, 2, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 38, 40, 43, 48, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60,

346

I NDEX

63, 67, 93, 103, 107, 129; press of, 12, 89; diplomacy efforts, 134; reaction to U.S. racism, 138; criticized by U.S. media, 142; relations with China, 164; and African students, 183; racism in, 183, 185 Sovinformbureau, 19 Spain, 123, 139 Spanish-American War, 43 Special Protocol Service Section (SPSS), 148, 149 Sputnik, 92–93. See also Soviet propaganda St. Augustine, Fla., 174, 176 Stalin, Josef, 18, 25, 164 State Department, 12, 13, 19, 20, 27, 41, 67, 70–71, 74, 134, 168; and Till murder, 84, 85; and public diplomacy efforts, 131, 132–33; and foreign diplomats, 149, 176; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 166; and Mississippi Civil Rights workers’ murders, 175; and Malcolm X, 181, 182 Statue of Liberty, depicted in cartoons, 99, 142 Steinberg, Ellen, 124 Straits Times (Singapore), 61 Strelnikov, B., 197–98 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 175, 195 Suez Canal, 48, 50 Suluh Indonesia, 102 Sulzberger, C. L., 206 Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 102 Svirsky, Leon, 66 Sweden, 95, 160, 172, 193 Switzer, Rozella, 65 Ta Kung Pao (Tientsin, China), 89 Tageblatt, 102 Taiwan, 110–11 Tanganyika, 98, 151, 154 TASS, 1, 10, 54, 65, 124–25, 150; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 146; and March on Washington, 170; Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 171; Watts riot, 201. See also Soviet propaganda Television news: and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 96, 97, 100; impact of internationally, 158–59, 191, 193; and Selma, 191 Tello, Manuel, 55, 56

Telstar satellites, 158, 170 Termination movement, 36. See also Native Americans Texas, 50, 51, 52, 52, 53, 54, 96 Texas Rangers, 97 Three Rivers, Texas, 51 Thurmond, Strom, 23, 87, 178, 205 Tijd, De, 123 Till, Emmett, 83–84, 94 Time magazine, 1, 2, 5, 8, 12, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 41–42, 112, 123, 128; reacting to Communist propaganda, 28, 66, 67, 68, 70, 135; defending Randolph, 29; on U.S. government treatment of Native Americans, 32, 33, 38; criticizing discrimination in Canal Zone, 45–46; on Mexico, 50, 56; on effects of Salt of the Earth, 58; defending the U.S., 62, 67, 69, 82–83, 91, 95, 147; on racial progress, 63, 64, 70, 75, 76, 90, 91, 104, 155, 177, 204; educating Americans on proper behavior, 64–65, 102, 118, 134, 152–53; criticizing those who criticized U.S., 71–72, 142, 180, 206; warning of Communist propaganda, 72, 74; criticizing other countries for racism, 77, 105–6, 184, 186; on segregation, 80– 81, 95; on Brown v. Board of Education, 82–83; on Montgomery bus boycott, 85, 86, 89; U.S. as inspiration to the world, 90, 142, 194, 203; educating readers on effect of U.S. racism on international public opinion, 101, 102, 103, 124, 152; on Hawaii’s bid for statehood, 114–16, 117, 118; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 126, 143, 146–47; on U.S. public diplomacy efforts, 132, 133; on foreign diplomats and discrimination against, 150–51; on Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 166; on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 172 Times (London), 42–43, 47, 90, 121, 123, 126, 129; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 165 Times of India, 80, 109–10 Times of Indonesia, 111 Tjokroadisumarto, Widjonarko, 138 Tobias, Channing, 62 Togliatti, Palmiro, 25 Tokyo Shimbun (Japan), 102, 166. See also Japanese press Toledano, Vincente Lombardo, 47

I NDEX

Toledo (Ohio) Blade, 65 Touré, Sékou, 133, 134 Tripoli, 102 Truman, Harry, 7, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 51, 54, 60, 62, 65, 69, 74, 75, 113 Truman administration, 5, 18, 19, 20, 38, 59 Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, 21–22, 23, 30, 31, 35, 51 Tucker, Nancy, 101 Tunisia, 111 Tuscaroras, 39, 42–43. See also Native Americans Tuskegee Airmen, 27 Tuskegee Institute, 21, 90 Uganda, 104, 154, 159, 162, 171, 176, 178, 203 Uhuru Riders, 138 United Arab Republic, 143 United Mine Workers Journal, 53 United Nations, 12, 22, 33, 36, 39, 48, 49, 62, 72, 75, 84, 129, 143, 147; and American racial problems, 148, 181 United Press International (UPI), 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 22, 79, 85, 94–95, 100, 176, 210; and photos, 95, 100, 144; and Freedom Ride, 138, 140, 141; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; and Selma, 199; and Watts riot, 201 Universal Grafico, El, 176 University of Alabama, and desegregation, 93–94, 126 University of Georgia, and desegregation, 119, 126, 127 University of Mississippi. See Ole Miss desegregation incident Untouchables, 105 U.S. Congress, 19, 33, 40, 41, 58, 108, 109, 112, 117, 130, 131; and civil rights, 157, 158, 163, 168; and Civil Rights Act, 174, 178; and Selma, 193, 195 U.S. domestic policy, effect of Native Americans on, 33, 35, 38, 39 U.S. foreign policy: effect of racism on, 3, 11, 12, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 73, 103, 107; effect of Navajos on, 32, 33; regarding Mexico, 56–57 U.S. government: response to foreign allegations of racism, 4, 75; and the American media, 4, 5, 7, 8; and propaganda, 54; efforts to suppress Salt of the Earth, 58. See also U.S.

347

foreign policy; USIA USIA, 41, 73, 87, 118, 122, 174, 192, 213; and Brown v. Board of Education, 79; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 93, 100; and Freedom Ride, 138–39, 141; and Ole Miss desegregation incident, 143, 144; surveying foreign opinion, 143, 144, 168, 195; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 159, 162, 166; and Civil Rights Act, 178; discrediting Malcolm X, 180–81; and Selma, 194, 195, 199 U.S. Information Service (USIS), 79, 80, 102, 126, 138, 198, 213; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 165; and New York riots, 176 U.S. Justice Department, 22; and Brown v. Board Of Education, 79 U.S. media: on American racial violence, 2, 3, 4, 20–21, 22, 62, 65; as social educator on proper behavior, 3, 5–6, 13, 14, 19, 20, 64, 67–68, 80, 81, 84, 91, 114, 118, 128, 152, 153; on international criticism of U.S. racism, 3, 7, 8, 13, 20, 22, 50, 52, 76, 86, 103, 141, 145, 166, 170, 205; use of symbols, 5; relations with federal government, 5, 8; changes in, 7; reach of, 8, 79; reporting racial progress, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 38–39, 58, 63, 76, 90, 104, 154, 167, 198, 204–5; celebrating Americans of color, 15, 71, 76, 129; criticizing those who criticized, 15, 23, 26, 27, 70, 71, 180; on racism in other countries, 16, 70, 77, 104, 105, 106, 182–83, 186–88; response to H. Wallace, 23; responding to international criticism, 23–24, 61, 62, 105; reacting to Communist propaganda, 26, 28, 134; praising Bunche, 26, 73–74; responding to Robeson, 27, 71; defense of Randolph, 29; on Native Americans, 38–39, 40; on racism in South Africa, 39–40, 206; blaming Communists, 47, 67, 120; on American treatment of Hispanic Americans, 52; educating Americans on effect of U.S. racism on international public opinion, 53, 54, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 72, 74, 87, 88, 94, 98, 103, 120, 124, 126, 127, 147, 151, 153, 206; on African Americans, 66, 80, 81; defending the U.S., 77, 95, 120; on Brown v. Board of Education, 80–81; on Montgomery bus boycott,

348

I NDEX

85–86, 87, 89; on U.S. as inspiration to the world, 89–90, 133, 154; on Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 97, 103; on Girard case, 110; on Reynolds case, 111–12; on Hawaii’s statehood, 114, 115, 117, 118; reactions to sit-ins, 119; praising Powell, 130; on U.S. diplomatic efforts, 130, 132; on Sixteenth Street Church bombing, 171–73; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 145; praising Americans’ work abroad, 154; and Birmingham Civil Rights march, 161, 166. See individual media outlets U.S. News & World Report, 23, 28, 46, 73, 110, 112, 135, 152; blaming Communists for unrest, 47; on racial progress, 59, 104, 154, 155, 204; on racism in other countries, 77–78, 105, 106, 182, 184, 186, 187–88, 207, 208; defending U.S., 77, 105, 106–7, 129; on school desegregation, 82, 104; on Montgomery bus boycott, 86, 88; on Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 103, 104; on Hawaii’s statehood, 115; praising Powell, 129, 130; defending Bunche, 130; on U.S. public diplomacy efforts, 132; educating readers on effect of U.S. racism on international public opinion, 134, 153, 177; on foreign diplomats and discrimination against, 147, 149; U.S. as inspiration to the world, 153; on international criticism of U.S. racism, 167; criticizing those who criticized U.S., 180 U.S. propaganda, 23, 44, 54, 61, 73, 100, 210; promoting racial progress, 60; use of African Americans, 76; U.S. as inspiration to the world, 89; using Saund, 112; on Hawaii, 118; on March on Washington, 169, 192; and Civil Rights Act, 179; to discredit Malcolm X, 179–81. See also USIA; Voice of America U.S. Supreme Court, 24, 42–43, 59, 61, 63, 67, 88, 109, 136, 153–54; and Brown v. Board of Education, 79, 82, 125 Vasilyev, N., 34 Vaughan, Harry H., 51 Veracruz, 50 Vietnam War, 7 Vigil, Juan, 31

Violence: white on black, 59–60, 83, 84, 95, 96, 123, 176, 212; and Watts riot, 201 Vishinsky, Andrei Y., 39, 62 Voice of America, 19, 23, 79, 81, 100, 117, 141; for U.S. propaganda, 145, 179; and Selma, 199. See also U.S. propaganda; USIA Voting Rights Act, 189, 190, 204 Voting rights campaign, 201, 205 Walker, Wyatt Tee, 137, 156 Wall Street Journal, 104, 105, 187 Wallace, George, 161, 162, 171, 172, 187, 205; and Selma, 191, 197, 199 Wallace, Henry, 23 Walls, James, 21 Wangalwa, Philip, 138 Waring, Waties, 24 Warren, Earl, 82, 196 Washington, D.C., 65, 74, 148, 149, 150, 176 Washington Evening Star, 87 Washington Post, 2, 21, 74, 85, 98, 115, 176, 185 Watts riot, 7, 190, 195, 200–201, 205, 206, 208 Wells, Ida B., 2, 3–4 Wesley, Cynthia. See Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing West, Rebecca, 90 West African Pilot, 80, 150 West Germany, 123, 167, 199, 202 West Indians, 45, 77 White, Walter, 60, 71 Wilkins, Collie Leroy, Jr., 197, 198 Wilkins, Roy, 204 Williams, Robert, 172 Wilson, Charles E., 108 Wilson, Edmund, 42, 43 Wilson, Jimmie, 127 Winston, Henry, 171 Wire services: relevance of 2, 8, 9, 10, 79– 80, 86, 94–95, 209; relationship among, 10; photos, 10, 95, 158, 170; and Little Rock, Ark., desegregation incident, 97, 98, 100; on Freedom Ride, 138; on Ole Miss desegregation incident, 144; foreign press reliance on, 144, 158, 170, 176; on Selma-Montgomery march, 191 Woburn Times, 128 Wofford, Harris, 137 World news system. See Global flow of

I NDEX

news World War I, 17, 27, 74 World War II, 4, 7, 12, 17, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 39, 50, 51, 55, 60, 77, 101, 102, 105, 113, 115, 127 Wright, Skelly J., 123 Xinhua News Agency, 12–13, 36, 68, 111, 124–25, 140, 161, 169

Yameogo, Maurice, 194 Yomiuri (Japan), 101, 109, 193 Young Communist League Truth. See Komsomolskaya Pravda Zaman (Ethiopia), 128 Zhukov, Yuri, 25 Zimbabwe, 106 Zoot-Suit Riot, 51

349