Postwar Foreign Policy and African-American Civil Rights
The Cold War, the great power rivalry that evolved between the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, riveted international attention on segregation in America.61 Allies criticized the United States for fighting oppression abroad while discriminating against millions of African Americans at home, a fact Kremlin propagandists used in ample public relations opportunities. Members of the United States policymaking elite, who tended to cast the Soviet-American rivalry in terms of good versus evil, were keenly aware of the gap between their rhetoric about defending the “Free World” from communist “aggression” and democratic shortcomings at home. In September 1957, for instance, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called up the state national guard to block school integration in Little Rock. That action compelled the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration to dispatch elements of the Army’s 101st Airborne to integrate the city’s Central High School. Surveying the episode, widely respected foreign policy commentator Walter Lippmann noted, “The work of the American propagandist is not at present a happy one.” Segregation “mocks us and haunts us whenever we become eloquent and indignant in the United Nations. . . . The caste system in this country, particularly when as in Little Rock it is maintained by troops, is an enormous, indeed an almost insuperable, obstacle to our leadership in the cause of freedom and human equality.”62


Powell emerged as a foreign policy innovator. His Harlem district was one of the most diverse in the country, and he pushed for more liberal immigration policies, which were important to the large West Indian immigrant community in his district. He often met with visiting African heads of state and, as a freshman Member of the House, introduced legislation that allowed for the naturalization of Filipinos and South Asian Indians.69 Powell criticized the Eisenhower administration’s global policy to contain communism, and he opposed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s requirement that American allies conform to liberal democratic ideals. Powell was stingingly critical of racial discrimination in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Noting in 1953 that the United States was “the most hated nation in the world today,” Powell called for immediate civil rights reforms, warning that otherwise “communism must win the global cold war by default.”70

Diggs and Powell also became the first black Members of Congress to visit Africa. Diggs was part of an official U.S. delegation led by Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1957 that participated in Ghana’s celebration of independence from British rule and the inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister. Powell joined Diggs in an unofficial capacity in Ghana’s capital, Accra—Nkrumah had attended Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in the 1930s as a merchant seaman and as a foreign student.73 Diggs recalled that he and Powell “stood out there with tears coming down our cheeks” as the Union Jack (the British flag) was lowered and the new Ghanaian flag was raised in its place.74 Diggs later attended the All-African Peoples Conference in Accra, organized by Nkrumah, as a show of Third World solidarity. Diggs returned from that visit convinced that the United States was “in danger of losing the present advantage it holds in Africa to the Soviet Union.” He added, “our Nation needs to be educated on the tremendous significance of the development of Africa.”75 Believing he “could make a contribution” to improve relations between Washington and postcolonial African governments, Diggs requested and won a spot on the Foreign Affairs Committee in January 1959.

Footnotes
61For an important study of the topic, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
62Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow: The Grace of Humility,” 24 September 1957, Washington Post: A15.
63President Kennedy worried about Soviet propaganda arising from a horrific Associated Press photo from May 1963 in which officials in Birmingham, Alabama, unleashed police dogs on young civil rights protestors. See Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2006): 388, 472.
64See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
65Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: 2–8, quotation on page 2.
66At the height of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, HUAC’s influence soared and contributed to a climate of domestic fear stoked by its sensational and often unsubstantiated investigations. On HUAC, see Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1968); Congressional Record, House, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (3 January 1945): 10–15.
67White, A Rising Wind: 144.
68See, for example, Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
69Plummer, Rising Wind: 249.
70Ibid.
71Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: 96.
72Plummer, Rising Wind: 248–253; quotation on page 251.
73Ibid., 292.
74Carolyn P. DuBose, The Untold Story of Charles Diggs: The Public Figure, the Private Man (Arlington, VA: Barton Publishing House, Inc., 1998): 62–65.
75“Diggs Urges Better U.S. Attitude Toward Africa,” 23 December 1958, Chicago Defender: 7.