Title: Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Author: Carol Anderson
Year of Publication: 2003
Thesis:
The fight for civil rights often hides the fact that the fight was also for human rights. Anderson uses the story of the intent to get two key documents (An Appeal to the World and We Charge Genocide) to a world audience to underscore this reality. She shows how Du Bois championed the more direct appeal and Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White collaborated to remove their power of oversight and downplayed the condition of Black people at crucial moments.
Time: 1944-1955
Geography: U.S. / International stage (U.N.)
Organization:
Introduction: The Struggle for Black Equality
1 - Beyond Civil Rights: The NAACP, the United Nations, and Redefining the Struggle for Black Equality
2 - The Struggle for Human Rights: African Americans Petition the United Nations
3 - Things Fall Apart
4 - Bleached Souls and Red Negroes
5 - The Mirage of Victory
Type: Political history
Methods:
Sources:
NAACP archives, FBI files, personal papers, speeches, dissertations, gov't publications and presidential records.
Historiography: Dudziak
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes:
My draft reflection during coursework (spring, 2019)*
Carol Anderson documents how from the Roosevelt years through the Eisenhower administration (1944-1955), a series of internecine battles within the Democratic Party and African American activist groups within a milieu of Cold War politics, eroded the “prize” of human rights. As these groups, along with delegates from other countries, negotiated over a draft of a Declaration of Human Rights, it became quickly evident that the State Department would avoid at all costs confrontations with powerful Southern Democrats through the successive administrations. Complications abounded as the NAACP sought to distance itself from the Black Left to avoid the stigma of Communism, which contributed to a rift within the organization itself, with Walter White and Eleanor Roosevelt eager to promote the accomplishments of Black folk on one side, and W.E.B. Du Bois eager to expose the difficulties Black people faced. This, Du Bois believed, would pressure the U.S. to change its policies toward Black people overall. What remains is the eleven-year saga of the recession of human rights into a more modest request for civil rights.
Submitted for coursework in June, 2019
Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Although much has been published since Kevin Gaines’ state-of-the field essay on African American History, he provides a useful division of major chapters in the overall conceptualization of the field. Gaines describes three major themes that correspond roughly to historical developments: slavery, segregation, and the Long Civil Rights Movement. The three books I review in this essay fit into the latter category. Before considering them, however, it may be useful to briefly take up Gaines’ outline of the problems and possibilities in the extension of this period, as each of these works influence and are influenced by the question of the Long Civil Rights Movement.
According to Gaines, the Long Civil Rights Movement championed by Jacquelyn Hall rejects the Brown v. Board notion that the Movement is somehow a spontaneous battle over whether African Americans could sit at the front of a bus or go to school with white children.[1] Scholars generally accept this premise, but researchers such as Lang and Cha-Jua wonder how far back we can bring the Civil Rights Movement until it begins to lose its relevance and analytical value.[2] Gaines echoes Hall, noting that most scholarship within this vein looks at the period between the New Deal and the Cold War.[3] Scholars worry that extending the period would bury the ill effects of major historical shifts, such as the Cold War, on the Civil Rights Movement. Despite these concerns, I agree with Hall, Cha-Jua, and Lang that this problematic theorizing of the “Black Freedom Struggle” has widened the scope of inquiry on all fronts, including I would add, into the two other major periods Gaines mentions (slavery and segregation). Another development related to the conjoining of Black Power Studies and the Civil Rights Movement is a stronger emphasis on transnational studies, which add a greater degree of flexibility and insight for works that link the Cold War and African American History.[4]
Having established the distinction between the “short” and Long Civil Rights Movements, it is fitting to note that few scholars within this selection firmly embrace this dichotomy. Mary Dudziak’s Cold War and Civil Rights, for example, gently pushes on the Civil Rights struggle, situating itself within the Cold War and ending conservatively in the Vietnam War. Concluding that a long and hard-fought series of battles fought over the image of U.S. race relations eventually buried Civil Rights discourse from international scrutiny, Dudziak’s scholarship arguably falls precisely into the category of declension narratives that Long Civil Rights Movement proponents have so sharply criticized.[5] Creatively titled chapters such as “Telling Stories about Race and Democracy” and “Holding the Line in Little Rock” barely conceal periods that coincide with U.S. presidential terms from Truman through Johnson.
Despite Dudziak’s relatively conformist timeline, her rigorous transnational lens proves offers unparalleled insight into the Black Freedom Struggle. Using diplomatic communications and local and international newspapers, she shows how racist attacks often derailed the State Department’s attempts to control a narrative of redemption. As it attempted to silence prominent Black voices such as Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and W.E.B. DuBois, an international audience watched with disdain. Perhaps the most poignant illustration of a failure to influence public attitudes would be the August 28, 1963 March on Washington used by the State Department as an example of a functioning democracy. The September bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church took the wind of out of those sails. Less well known was the support pouring out for the March in sectors around the world; James Baldwin organized a letter-writing campaign among intellectuals in France as a sign of support.[6]
In conversation with proponents of the Long Civil Rights Movement, Dudziak demonstrates how Truman’s executive orders and actions to desegregate the military, along with successful attempts to cast the U.S. South as the progenitor of racism, were likely the most powerful reasons for the shift in international opinion. The U.S. Government, formerly seen as antagonistic to Civil Rights, was now seen, despite any issues, as an ally of Civil Rights. The Department of Justice’s amicus briefing in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) is another example of ways the U.S. Government was able to provoke a shift in international public opinion. Sadly, many of these actions were cosmetic. In a disappointing chapter on the Little Rock Nine, Dudziak showed how the nuances of desegregation policy, namely in the pupil reassignment laws, was lost on an international audience, even though these laws generated significant controversy in the U.S.[7]
While other scholars similarly locate the Civil Rights struggle within a Cold War context, not all retain an exclusive focus on Civil Rights. Carol Anderson broadly titles her work Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. However, it is in essence, an institutional history of internecine struggles within the NAACP and its overlapping conflict with the State Department. She also traces the power of Southern Democrats to water down legislation. Anderson does not restrict herself to a single argument. Instead she develops a number of points that converge into the argument that an NAACP compromised by its proximity to Black and white leadership with ulterior motives and a Congress and presidency comprised by Southern Dixiecrats led to a compromised United Nations Declaration of Human Rights—strong in rhetoric and absent of enforcement powers.
Anderson, however, does not simply craft a declension narrative ending with a watered-down version of the UN Declaration of Human Rights—in lionizing W.E.B. Dubois and villainizing Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White, she illustrates the complicated ways in which African Americans attempted to reform U.S. domestic policy against not-so-subtle opposition from within, whether white or Black. Roosevelt not only occupied a position on the Board of the NAACP, but she also served as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and “worked to ensure that neither individuals nor nongovernmental organizations would have any authority to petition the UN for redress of human rights violation.”[8] Walter White, who saw Roosevelt as an ally, gained fame as an undercover, passing white person, which led to information on multiple lynching cases. Anderson excoriated him in his later career, however, for writing flowery articles on the state of race relations, alienating DuBois, cozying up to Roosevelt, being wholly unprepared for diplomatic relations, for leaving his wife and marrying a white woman, and even promoting skin-whitening cream for passing as white.[9]
Anderson depicts Truman and Eisenhower as far weaker and more reluctant than Dudziak, showing how Congress had the votes to pass the Bricker Amendment, which would have ground to a halt the President’s ability to conduct international affairs. This is likely the issue on which governmental support for the Declaration of Human Rights was hollowed out to the satisfaction of Southern Democrats and the fertile ground on which Anderson called the “politics of symbolic equality—executive orders issued with little or no funding…powerless commissions created to once again study ‘the Negro problem’…and directives issues from on high with no enforcement mechanism and no serious repercussions for noncompliance.”[10] Anderson offers not consolation that the opportunities of World War II can be retrieved, but that we should be wary of the past in order to make the next opportunity—a “Third Reconstruction”—one that will live up to its promises.[11]
The Cold War narratives of Dudziak and Anderson were transnational in scope and stretched the existing contours of the Long Civil Rights Movement within institutional frameworks of diplomacy. Newer scholarship has been more intentional in developing intersectional narratives within this movement. One book that does so beautifully is Erik S. McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (2011). In six chapters, McDuffie develops the argument that “the Communist Left served as a principal site and viable alternative for black women radicals to agitate for black freedom and black women’s dignity outside of women’s clubs, the church, and civil rights and black nationalist groups.”[12] In doing so, McDuffie identifies middle-class and working class Black women who experienced the “triple oppression” of being Black, female, and oppressed along class lines as constituting, in Claudia Jones’ words, “the vanguard for transformative change.”[13] Crafting the narrative from the early 1900s and ending in the 70s, McDuffie boldly ruptures the temporal boundaries of an inscribed master narrative and even stresses the fabric of the most devoted students of the Long Civil Rights Movement. He fixes his gaze at women who achieved national prominence, such as Claudia Jones and Angela Davis, as carefully as he does the lives of revolutionary women who didn’t have such a large public persona.
Indeed, Black women held meetings in their homes, making use of the domains in which they thought they would be least likely to attract attention. Neither were they shy about communicating with leaders in the Communist Party to voice their dissent when issues affecting Black women inevitably surfaced. They held no such belief that “adherence to middle-class respectability could protect black working-class women,” which moved them further left as women’s groups tended to shift to the right.[14]
McDuffie not only develops the suffering Black women experienced, but his extensive personal interviews and research reveal how many Black left feminists traveled to the Soviet Union to receive training; their memoirs and published work reveal real changes that brought back transferrable organizing skills that helped inform generations of Black women activists.
McDuffie addresses directly the critics of the Long Civil Rights movement, distinguishing his work as one that does not lay a thick veneer of continuity over the entire Black Freedom Struggle but instead “highlights both the breaks and the continuities in the black freedom movement and black women’s struggles before and after the red scare by examining the personal and political costs of anti-Communism on black left feminists.”[15] He details how the McCarthy era truly destroyed the organization of Black left feminists, but in so doing primed the seeds for future actions. The ruptures he describes that were created in the McCarthy era did not completely stamp out Black left feminism, and his culminating chapter warmly regards Angela Davis crediting Charlene Mitchell, a Black left activist, with Ms. Davis’s introduction to Communism.
Three landmark books dot the landscape of a much larger terrain of the Long Civil Rights Movement, and in so doing they highlight the challenges of such a broad timeline and scope of action. Eric McDuffie’s work most clearly deals with the question of how to manage a long timeline by emphasizing the continuities and discontinuities in a study that looks at generations of women activists by decades within an intersectional framework. It is now up to scholars to retread the Long Civil Rights Movements with more appropriate tools for our times—how do we look at the role of Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter White, and W.E.B. Dubois within a gendered framework? What happens when we include people who contributed to the Black Freedom Struggle who often go unrecognized? McDuffie offers another methodological key—focusing on both those who are recognized along with those who appear to have had more ancillary roles.
As Eric Foner and associated contributors develop a newer historiography of African American History, undoubtedly it will include an analysis that pays closer attention to race, class, and gender, along with the latest rumblings from scholars on the Long Civil Rights Movement. Certainly the constant tension the field is under will continue to create new possibilities for insight.
[1] “That narrative chronicles a “short” civil rights movement beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and concluding with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
Gaines, Kevin. “African American History.” In American History Now, edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, 411.
[2] Gaines devotes two paragraphs to these major schools. Jacquelyn Hall’s article strongly critiques what she interprets as a conservative and parochial intellectual hegemony that flattens the Civil Rights Movement (and the backlash to it) into a regionally and temporally specific inquiry. Hall sees this leaving out a number of important developments, including a bridge between civil rights and workers’ right struggles, women activists, national versus Southern-only struggles, ways the CRM was used in the 70s to push social change, and the conservative turn beginning with the Reagan years as having strong antecedents. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1241. Cha-Jua and Lang’s incisive and important response thoroughly addresses a much narrower range of concerns, focusing on the blurring of dichotomies between North and South (Jeanne Theoharris), a blurring of the distinction between the Black Power Movement and Civil Rights Movements (Tim Tyson and Peniel Joseph), and looks at localized vs. national movements. In using “vampire” as metaphor, Cha-Jua and Lang emphasize the undead and wandering nature (versus blood-sucking) of the Black Freedom Struggle. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265. Germane to the discussion of McDuffie is also Eric Arneson’s brief article critiquing scholars’ insistence of overstating the importance of the link between Black-left and union movements, taking the argument to reduction ad absurdum by questioning whether we shouldn’t begin with “recently enslaved Africans’ uprisings on board slave ships during the Middle Passage?” In doing so, Arneson invokes Vincent Harding, who does exactly that. Interestingly, none of the three scholars in this selection use Harding’s There is a River (1981) as a theoretical basis for arguing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Only one mention to Harding is found on page 157 in Dudziak, and it is for a different book and different premise. Eric Arneson, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement,’” Historically Speaking 10, no. 2 (2009): 32.
[3] Scholars similarly concern themselves with the extent of overlap between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movements and, by extension, the latter’s periodization, as well.
[4] Transnational lenses are not particularly novel in slavery studies, as evidenced by works such as Eric Williams Slavery and Capitalism (1944), but they seem to gain more traction in the 1960s.
[5] Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1255, 1258; Cha-Jua and Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” 270, 272, 276.
[6] Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 190.
[7] Dudziak, 150.
[8] Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133.
[9] Anderson, 125, 127, 149, 152, 157, 158.
[10] Anderson, 3.
[11] Anderson, 276.
[12] Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011): 3.
[13] McDuffie, 8.
[14] McDuffie, 51.
[15] McDuffie, 22.