Brown as an Anticommunist Decision

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Black And White ◽  
News Releases ◽  
Social Physics ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Brown Decision

The Coincidence Of Litigation aimed at eliminating the constitu­tional justification of state-sponsored racial segregation and the nation’s need to strengthen its argument that democratic government was superior to its communist alternative was more than just a happy coincidence. It was, as indicated in the previous chapter, a helpful and necessary prerequisite to racial reform. Early in my teaching career, I devised a sardonic formula for what I had come to understand as the basic social physics of racial progress and retrenchment. The formula went something like this:… Justice for blacks vs. racism = racism Racism vs. obvious perceptions of white self-interest = justice for blacks… Students both black and white got the point, and the Brown decision provided a definitive example of it. Again and again, perceived self-interest by whites rather than the racial injustices suffered by blacks has been the major motivation in racial-remediation policies. We may regret but can hardly deny the pattern. This was certainly the case in the school de­segregation cases. While blacks had been petitioning the courts for decades to find segregation unconstitutional, by 1954 a fortuitous symmetry existed between what blacks sought and what the nation needed. I do not intend by this conclusion to belittle the NAACP lawyers’ long years of hard work and their carefully planned strategies that brought the cases consolidated in Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the long crusade for racial justice has been marked by campaigns undertaken against great odds with the faith, as the old hymn puts it, that “the Lord will make a way somehow.” I agree with the legal writers who maintain that post–World War II civil rights progress would have come without Brown. None of us can deny that the Court had the NAACP school litigation as a legal canvas on which to paint its views. The motivation for what became the Brown portrait, as well as other post–World War II government policies supporting civil rights, were Cold War concerns. My views on this are impres­sively substantiated by the historian Mary Dudziak’s book, Cold War Civil Rights, based on her untiring searches through literally thou­sands of official government documents as well as international newspapers and news releases.

After World War II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Energy Supply ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Demographic Patterns

This chapter considers three impulses of the post-World War II era. Two of them deal with the economy, bracketing its course from an inspiration flowing out of the war through an ideological and policy retake a generation later. The other impulse covers one of the major developments of American, not to mention transnational, history—the civil rights revolution of those times. In the three impulses detailed here, economic planning devices, energy supply, the cities, travel, infrastructure, the tax code, industrial structure, the workplace, immigration, demographic patterns, the electorate, rights standards, and relations among the races, gained lasting imprints from U.S. government participation, among others.

scholarly journals Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

The New Conservatives

2017 ◽  
pp. 106-139
Author(s):  
Peter Kolozi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Right

Post World War II conservative thinking witnessed a marked shift in criticism away from capitalism itself and to the state. Cold War conservatives’ anti-communism led many on the right to perceive economic systems in stark terms as either purely capitalistic or on the road to communism.

Post–World War II Civil Rights Activism, Photojournalism, and the Domestication of Civil Rights Lynching Memories

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-112
Author(s):  
Marouf A. Hasian ◽  
Nicholas S. Paliewicz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Private And Public

This chapter provides readers with an analysis of the photojournalism and other visualities that were used by private and public organizations interested in civil rights activism who were working on anti-lynching consciousness-raising between World War II and 2000. The authors contend that this was the period that witnessed commentary about the “end” of U.S. lynchings, but this amnesia would be critiqued by those who learned about the evocative power of an anti-lynching travelling exhibit, entitled Without Sanctuary.

scholarly journals The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History

1999 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Southern Region ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The 1960S

This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

scholarly journals State-Building after Disaster: Jiang Tingfu and the Reconstruction of Post-World War II China, 1943–1949

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-206
Author(s):  
Rana Mitter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
State Building ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
New Thinking

AbstractPost-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

Internationalization of the State under Japanese Quasi-Hegemony: Marginalizing Northern Workers, 1980–2000

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Glassman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Value Added ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Exporting Firms ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Political Dominance

The internationalization of the Thai economy and the Thai state analysed in the last two chapters was—like all processes of internationalization—highly uneven. The modern Thai state was formed historically through collaboration between the Siamese monarchy, based in Bangkok, and British colonial officials, with Chinese merchants playing an important subsidiary role (Suehiro 1989; Chaiyan 1994; Thongchai 1994). By the early twentieth century, internationalization of capital and the state under this triple alliance had already led to the emergence of the Bangkok-centred political economy and strongly centralized state that has characterized Thailand throughout the past one hundred years (Dixon and Parnwell 1991). Thus, by the time rapid agrarian and industrial transformation began to take hold in the post-World War II period, it did so against a backdrop of already substantial Bangkok primacy and political dominance. The patterns of internationalization that have developed in the post-World War II period have largely strengthened this primacy and political dominance. Bangkok was the centre of the new triple alliance based on collaboration between military capitalists, Chinese merchants, and the US Cold War state (Suehiro 1989). As Cold War counter-insurgency and development projects proceeded, significant numbers of displaced peasants left agrarian society to seek urban-industrial employment and, as the overwhelmingly dominant centre of industry, Bangkok received a disproportionate share of the rural-tourban migration stream, with secondary cities remaining small and economically underdeveloped (Tables 4.1 and 4.2; London 1980; 1985). Consequently, the transformation of urban-industrial labour and the labour relations system described in Chapter 3 took place fundamentally in and around Bangkok, which remained the core area of manufacturing growth. For most of the post-World War II period up to 1985, the BMR’s industrial development was centred on low-wage, low value-added products such as textiles, garments, and low end electronics components, and though there were a number of very large firms in these lines, most manufacturers remained very small in scale, this being the case even among investment-constrained exporting firms. Small size was even more the norm with firms in upcountry regions, where manufacturing development was largely very rudimentary and generally centred in industries such as textiles, garments, and food processing (Table 4.3; Department of Labour 1985–6).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document