'How far the promised land?': World affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam

This work explores the interrelationship between world affairs and the American civil rights movement in the twentieth century. It examines how civil rights leaders viewed international developments and incorporated their understanding of oversees affairs into their reform message in order to energize, clarify, and legitimize the civil rights movement in the United States. Spanning a fifty-year period, from World War One to the Vietnam War, the work looks at the way a cosmopolitan group of black and white, male and female civil rights reformers purposively used the world wars, the emergence and development of communism and fascism, the Cold War, and the decolonization struggles to advance their domestic agenda.;Fundamental to the work, which blends civil rights history and foreign relations history, is the idea that many of the great international developments in this century have revolved around struggles between democracy and tyranny, freedom and oppression, which were precisely the questions that lay at the core of the American civil rights movement. The work examines the way race reformers in the NAACP and in other organizations recognized this parallelism and incorporated it into the reform enterprise by placing world affairs at the center of the message that they presented to their followers and the nation.;Of the many examples examined in the work, two are offered to illustrate how the reformers used overseas affairs to aid their cause. Over many decades, reform leaders sought to energize their supporters by speaking and writing about the heroic struggles that peoples of color were waging throughout the world against imperial rule--struggles the reformers compared to their domestic crusade against racial persecution. The race reformers used the freedom campaigns of Indians, Asians, and Africans in order to inspire their supporters who had committed themselves to working for racial progress in the United States. And during the 1930s, the reformers established an analogy between racial practices in Nazi Germany and those in the Jim Crow south in order to clarify the nature of American race prejudice for their countrymen. By constructing a persuasive analogy between Nazism--an anathema to most Americans--and "Jim Crowism," the reformers hoped to convince the American people that their cause was just. These are but two of the many examples examined in this work, which traces the race reformers' deliberate strategy of incorporating their understanding of world affairs into their domestic message--a strategy, it is argued, that exerted a profound influence on the course of race reform in twentieth-century America.