Abstract
Early into his presidency John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his foreign relations advisors well understood that the tumult of the global politics of “race” in the late 1950s and early 1960s presented a startling challenge to their foreign policy goals. In 1957 the controversy over desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, along with African American support of newly independent Ghana highlighted the freedom movement’s emergence out of the most repressive Cold War years. Between 1959 and 1961, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary victory, Rob Williams’s calls for armed self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina, the explosive sit-in movement in the southern United States, and the international furor raised over US and Belgian involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba all pointed to a surging transnational movement increasingly successful in challenging the racism and violence of Jim Crow and colonialism in local, national, and international settings.
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Notes
Sagarika Dutt, The Politicization of the United Nations Specialized Agencies: A Case Study of UNESCO (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995), 75.
William Preston, Edward Herman and Herbert Schiller, Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO, 1945–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 89.
Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 30.
James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guildfor Press, 1993), 29–30
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions (London: Sage, 2001), 6, 42.
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Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Mondernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2003), 3
Roland Robertson, Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 63.
Leon Poliakov, “A Look at Modern Anti-Semitism,” UNESCO Courier 13, 10 (October 1960): 15.
Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198–199.
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 126.
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Harvard Sitkoff, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 68.
Both Robeson and Baker had been staunch critics of state-supported racism in the United States since the 1930s. Please see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000), 62–3, 68–74
Penny von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 123–128.
Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 148.
Chris Osakwe, The Participation of the Soviet Union in Universal International Organizations: A Political and Legal Analysis ofSoviet Strategies and Aspirations inside ILO, UNESCO and WHO (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1972), 147.
UNESCO, Resolutions: General Conference, 11th, 1960. Paris, 1961. 11 C/ Resolutions, 74.
Peniel Joseph, “Introduction: Toward A Historiography of the Black Power Movmenet,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 13. “Amiri Baraka, the Congress of African People, and Black Power Politics from the 1961 United Nations Protest to the 1972 Gary Convention,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 60–61; Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 132–133.
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 155; Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 4.
Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 35–38.
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 143–147.
Vernon McKay, “Plans for the Eighth National Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO,” African Studies Bulletin 3, 4(December 1960): 9
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Phoebe and Simon Ottenberg, Africa and the United States, Images and Realities: Final Report, 8th National Conference, USNC for UNESCO (Boston, 1961).
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Melville Herskovits, The Anthropometry of the American Negro (New York: Columbia University, 1930); Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938).
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Morroe Berger, Racial Equality and the Law: The Role of Law in the Reduction of Discrimination in the United States (Paris: UNESCO, 1954). Portions of Berger’s work also appeared in the UNESCO Courier: “The Court Steps in,” UNESCO Courier 7, 6 (June 1954): 14–16; “Skilled Negroes Wanted: Employment Discrimination and its Reduction,” UNESCO Courier 7, 6 (June 1954): 9–12; “A Look at U.S. Race Relations: A Scoreboard for the Negro,” UNESCO Courier 7, 6 (June 1954): 4–8.
Tsamerian and Ronin, The Equality of Rights between Races and Nationalities in the USSR (Paris: UNESCO, 1962), 9.
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© 2012 Anthony Q. Hazard Jr.
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Hazard, A.Q. (2012). Resurgent Black Diaspora Politics and UNESCO. In: Postwar Anti-racism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003843_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003843_6
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