Cold War

Perhaps this makes me incompetent, but I have never thought of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of the Cold War. The connections all four articles make concerning the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War are very clear, however - even when that is not what the article intended, like Robert Self's article. Mary Dudziak presents a convincing case that Brown v. Board was a civil rights decision handed down because it was sanctioned by a federal government that was trying to improve its image abroad. For states choosing between the systems of the US and the USSR, race inequality in the US was a serious blemish on the record of the US. To provide the world with more evidence than a written court case, Penny Von Eschen argues that the US promoted the international travel of certain famous black people in order to further enhance the international image of the United States. The Cold War plays a different role in the other two articles. In his argument that aims to bring Robert Williams back from the fringes of the Civil Rights Movement and reconcile the two, Timothy Tyson paints the other power of the Cold War as a dangerous supporter of civil rights movements in the United States that were not receiving the necessary support in the United States. Williams was forced to flee to Cuba from the FBI, a serious Cold War enemy at the time. The role of the Cold War is not as apparent in Self's article, though it is surely present. In Cohen, the role of citizen consumer's had transformed by the 1950's and she argues that one could excercise their citizenship by engaging with the American values of capitalism and consumerism. During the 1950s in Oakland, the reader sees a similar story in Oakland that Sugrue presents for Detroit - white flight and a poor urban area. With citizen consumers suburbanizing and jobs headed elsewhere, the black power movement arises from uneven economic development, not as a response to the "failing" strategies of the Civil Rights Movement.