Thurgood Marshall's Global Impact

Thurgood Marshall is usually thought of as a figure in U.S. civil rights and legal history. His impact reached well beyond U.S. borders, however. It is not just that he worked with nationalists in Kenya seeking independence in the early 1960s, the story expored in Exporting American Dreams. His most important American civil rights victory, Brown v. Board of Education, was world-wide news, and informed the views of peoples of other nations about the nature of American democracy. These two issues come together, for civil right politics in the U.S. affected the global struggle against racism -- which informed anticolonial politics in Kenya. And Marshall's international prominence aided his work in Africa.

International interest in Brown v. Board of Education and American race discrimination is discussed in an article, Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, which appeared in the Stanford Law Review. This was my first publication on the intersection between U.S. civil rights politics and foreign relations. The article has been hard to find by readers without access to a law library, but is now easily available on-line, with permission from the Stanford Law Review. You can download the article here (click on "choose download location" and then click on SSRN or another option). Here's the article abstract:

At the height of the McCarthy era, when Congressional committees were exposing "communist infiltration" in many areas of American life, the Supreme Court was upholding loyalty oath requirements, and the executive branch was ferreting out alleged communists in government, the U.S. Attorney General filed a pro-civil rights brief in what would become one of the most celebrated civil rights cases in American history: Brown v. Board of Education. Although seemingly at odds with the restrictive approach to individual rights in other contexts, the U.S. government's participation in the desegregation cases during the McCarthy era was no anomaly. Rather, by the early 1950s, American leaders had come to believe that civil rights reform was crucial to the more central U.S. mission of fighting world communism. Based in part on diplomatic research in State Department archives, this article demonstrates that Cold War motives influenced the U.S. government's involvement in Brown and other cases.

Originally published in 1988 in the Stanford Law Review, this article was the first publication to use State Department records to examine the relationship between Cold War foreign relations and civil rights in the United States. Diplomatic records illustrate the growing concern among American diplomats and political leaders after World War II about the impact of race discrimination on the U.S. image around the world, and the global critique that the United States could not be an effective "leader of the free world" as long as the nation blatantly denied rights to its own peoples. This research confirmed the suspicions of Derrick Bell and others who argued before these records were opened that foreign affairs affected U.S. government civil rights policies, and it helped illuminate the world-wide impact of the civil rights movement. This research was expanded upon in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000), and in books and articles by other scholars. The larger body of work on race and foreign relations is an important aspect of efforts by historians to "internationalize" the study of American history.