In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses the role of international affairs in reducing racial inequality in the United States from 1877 to 1981:
The year 1877 is significant in America history, as this was the year in which the Federal Government ceased to interfere in the affairs of its Southern States, and these States began to construct the system of white racial supremacy known as “Jim Crow.” It is also a useful starting point for charting the rise of America to world supremacy. In the years before 1914, the Americans regarded opposition to European colonial rule as a prime foreign policy objective. They resented British/Indian control of the far East and they were strongly opposed to any division of China between the European colonial powers. They preached an ’Open Door Policy’ for China in which none of the white powers would have political control.
Again, this concern for the independence and self-determination of others was inconsistent with their own internal policies. As put by Paul Gilroy in the introduction of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “the American civil war did not end in 1865.” Until the 1960s and even later blacks remained systematically at a legal and social and economic disadvantage in America. In most of the Southern States, blacks were not allowed to vote or to sit on juries, public and most private services were racially segregated, racial intermarriage was made illegal.
[…]
In the end America did not sign the treaty of Versailles and did not join the League of Nations. American domestic affairs remained insulated from foreign affairs. Wilson himself did much to keep them so. The early twentieth century saw a grown of racial consciousness among American blacks, and a number of charismatic leaders emerged to press the case for black equality. These included intellectual activist W. E. B. Du Bois, entrepreneur C. J. Walker, National Equal Rights League founder William Monroe Trotter, and activist Wells-Barnett, and Marcus Garvey, founder of The Universal Negro Improvement Association. These men wanted to attend and address the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Wilson ensured that they were kept out.
By the 1930s, we see a growing realisation of the conflict between foreign and domestic policy. Look, for example, at chapter 26 of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird. It is the 1930s and a teacher in the protagonists’ school denounces Nazi mistreatment of the Jews in Germany. She seems completely unaware that the Nuremburg decrees may have compared rather well with the ‘Jim Crow’ system in which she lived.
[…]
What matters about the Cold war for America is that its race relations became a serious embarrassment to its foreign policy. In order to oppose Communism the Americans had to preach their own versions of human rights which included all the usual liberal freedoms – i.e. freedom of speech, freedom of association, equality before the law, and so forth. It also needed the cooperation of an increasing number of non-white post-colonial governments. At every opportunity the Soviets tried to embarrass the Americans by drawing attention to their internal race relations.
Take, for example, the memorandum written in June 1963 by Thomas Hughes, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He summarises some of the main themes of Soviet broadcasts to the Third World: Capitalism provides a natural environment for racism, which will never end so long as the American system needs cheap labour; the federal government’s policy of limited intervention in Southern conflicts is tantamount to support of Southern racism; the United States cannot claim to be the leader of the free world while hypocritically refusing to support civil rights within its own borders.
Hughes adds that, most politically damaging, Soviet broadcasters were arguing that American domestic policy toward its black citizens was ‘indicative of its policy toward peoples of color throughout the world.’ Emerging African, Asian, and South American nations, in other words, should not count on Americans to support their independence.
The journalist Walter Lippmann had noted in 1957 that
the work of the American propagandist is not at present a happy one…. [Segregation] mocks us and haunts us whenever we become eloquent and indignant in the United Nations…The caste system in this country, particularly when as in Little Rock it is maintained by troops, is an enormous, indeed an almost insuperable, obstacle to our leadership in the cause of freedom and human equality.
We can write the history of the American civil rights movement purely in terms of domestic politics. We can for example write about the Brown decision and ’Massive Resistance’ and the crisis in Little Rock. Of course this is entirely legitimate. The struggle for racial equality has deep roots in American history and may well have triumphed even had there been no other countries in the world. However it does seem reasonable to see an international dimension in the rapid progress of racial equality after the 1940s.
