A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us about Teaching Soviet History

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.

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Trouble in My Way

Shelter in a Time of Storm ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469648330.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 133-160

Author(s):

Jelani M. Favors

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Jim Crow ◽

University President ◽

State University ◽

Campus Environment ◽

Black Liberation ◽

Jackson State University ◽

History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

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“Herself but Black”: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the “Near Enemy” of Civil Rights

Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496831798.003.0011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 162-180

Author(s):

Rachel Watson

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Richard Wright ◽

Flannery O'connor ◽

Racial Hierarchy ◽

Political Thinker ◽

Jim Crow South

Rachel Watson takes up O’Connor’s role as a political thinker and writer by examining issues of racial hierarchy in O’Connor’s fiction and putting her work in conversation with that of Richard Wright. Watson notes that although O’Connor invokes the “manners” of the Jim Crow South, she does not offer a sentimental or abject form of pity for her characters, regardless of their race. It is in this pity, so often connected with Cold War totalitarianism, that Watson finds a connection between the work of Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright. This chapter shows the commonality between two authors whose work had previously seemed disparate, as Watson highlights their mutual fear of a racial and economic hegemony.

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American Social Science and the Invention of Affirmative Action, 1920s–1970s

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300000971 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 26 ◽

pp. 361-389

Author(s):

Hamilton Cravens

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Black Americans ◽

Legal Aspects ◽

Black College ◽

Howard University ◽

Great Passion ◽

Middle West

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University, the federally sponsored historic black college. In the last decade, Americans had become increasingly aware of the civil rights movement in American politics and society, and of the injection of the issues revolving around civil rights for black Americans into the national public discourse. President Johnson took a new angle of attack to the problem of discimination against black Americans. Instead of focusing on the political and legal aspects of Jim Crow legislation, or the constitutional struggles for civil rights in education and voting, or the plight of black Americans in the South, he spoke – with great passion – about the social and economic circumstances of African Americans throughout the nation, including those trapped in the large urban ghettos in the Northeast, the Middle West, and the West. “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope,” he argued.

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Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948–1951

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1111/j.1747-4469.2008.00130.x ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 33 (04) ◽

pp. 1003-1041 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Leandra Zarnow

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Legal Consciousness ◽

Board Of Education ◽

Color Line ◽

Legal Argument ◽

Indelible Mark ◽

Rape Case

This article considers the role of Bella Abzug, lead counsel for Willie McGee from 1948–1951, in shaping the defense of this Cold War era Mississippi rape case. Representing McGee left an indelible mark on Abzug: she made her first trip south, wrote her first Supreme Court petition, and faced her first death threat. Participation in the Left legal bar—especially the National Lawyers Guild and Left feminist circles—shaped Abzug's legal consciousness as she redirected the McGee defense significantly in 1950. By joining race and sex, Abzug's legal argument zeroed in on the taboo of interracial sexual relations at the heart of Southern rape cases, thereby exposing the innermost sexual color line. She urged the courts and cause lawyers—albeit unsuccessfully—to pursue a more radical civil rights agenda than outlawing public segregation, as ultimately achieved in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and typically recognized in Cold War civil rights scholarship.

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Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company andPorgy and Bess, 1955–56

Journal of the Society for American Music ◽

10.1017/s1752196317000384 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 11 (4) ◽

pp. 470-501 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

MICHAEL SY UY

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Cultural Exchange ◽

The United States ◽

Porgy And Bess ◽

Race Identity ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

The Cold War

AbstractFor three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company stagedPorgy and Bessin Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times byboththe United Statesandthe Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.

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Prison Power

Prison Power ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496809070.003.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 21-52

Author(s):

Lisa M. Corrigan

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Black Power ◽

Jim Crow ◽

The State ◽

State Repression ◽

Black Liberation ◽

Before And After ◽

Black Liberation Movement ◽

History Of ◽

New Phase

This chapter traces rhetorical and political history of imprisonment before and after the birth of Black Power, focusing on major moments of activist imprisonment as well as movement discourses written from prison. In charting the role of prison in the movement, the chapter also discusses the emergence and legitimacy of Black Power as a slogan, as a theoretical device, and as a series of rhetorical strategies designed to be a particularly historical intervention into the stagnating discourses of “civil rights” and “law and order.” This chapter contends that incarceration became a major strategy used by both black activists and white conservatives during the Black Power era; consequently, the period following 1966 marked a new phase of Jim Crow as Black Power became a rallying cry against state repression. This chapter suggests that the legitimacy of Black Power as a term of art, as a series of vernacular signs, and as an organizing principle in a new phase of the black liberation movement, hinged upon whether the state or the activists controlled the frame and how closely it became associated with violence. Because the Black Power slogan and ideology were articulated by activists with extensive rap sheets as the state circumscribed their activism, Black Power ideology took up the relationship between state repression and incarceration as a place to excavate new arenas for the black liberation struggle, particularly in the memoirs of movement activists.

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Richard Pipes

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32 ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781906764739.003.0030 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 507-512

Author(s):

Antony Polonsky

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Cold War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Doctoral Dissertation ◽

Public Intellectual ◽

Us Foreign Policy ◽

Soviet History ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

The Cold War ◽

Comprehensive Studies

This chapter gives an obituary for Richard Pipes, who died in Boston, Massachusetts on 17 May 2018. It recalls Richard as an eminent historian of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, as well as a public intellectual who made a major contribution to the formulation of US foreign policy in the last decades of the Cold War. It also mentions Richard's doctoral dissertation, which reflected his lasting interest in national questions and was published under the title The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 in 1954. The chapter looks into Richard's comprehensive studies of Russia, which stresses the conspiratorial nature of the Bolsheviks and the continuities between Russian and Soviet history. It explores Richard's final book Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism that was published in 2015.

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The Soviet Union's Partnership with India

Journal of Cold War Studies ◽

10.1162/jcws_a_00006 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 50-90 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Vojtech Mastny

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Mikhail Gorbachev ◽

The Third ◽

Nikita Khrushchev ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Indian Relations ◽

The Cold War ◽

Jawaharlal Nehru ◽

The Relationship

The relationship between the Soviet Union and India was a hallmark of the Cold War. Over nearly forty years, Soviet-Indian relations passed through three distinct periods, coinciding with the ascendance of three extraordinary pairs of leaders, each extraordinary for different reasons—Jawaharlal Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev, and Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev. The rise and decline of a political dynasty in India paralleled the trajectory seen in the Soviet Union. None of the periods ended well—the first in debacles with China, the second with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the third with the demise of the Soviet Union. The relationship in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a unique set of circumstances during the early Cold War. In the end, however, the relationship proved to be little more than a sideshow in the larger drama of the Cold War.

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Moving Beyond ““The Movement that Changed the World””: Bringing the History of the Cold War into Civil Rights Museums

The Public Historian ◽

10.1525/tph.2009.31.2.32 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 32-51

Author(s):

Renee Romano

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Self Interest ◽

History Of ◽

The Cold War ◽

International Liability ◽

The Relationship

Abstract A growing body of historical scholarship has demonstrated that the Cold War had a profound impact on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of newly independent nations in African and Asia, coupled with Americas quest to lead the ““free world”” against the Soviet Union, made American racism an international liability and created conditions that fostered civil rights reforms at home. Yet the Cold War's influence on the movement is largely absent at the nation's leading civil rights museums. This article surveys the ways in which four civil rights museums present the relationship between the movement and the Cold War, and suggests some reasons that museums have yet to internationalize their history of the movement. The Cold War interpretation shows how foreign policy concerns and elite whites' self-interest both helped generate and limit civil rights reforms. This interpretation, however, stands at odd with the celebratory narrative of the movement as a triumph of democratic ideals that these museums present.

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