The Iron Curtain and the Color Line: Cold War Politics and Segregation in the Deep South

How did southern politicians situate their struggle to maintain the regional racial and socioeconomic status quo within the worldwide struggle against communism? The escalating conflict with the Soviet Union enabled southern Democrats to brand progressive measures and organizations as communist-inspired. In recent years, historians have started to pay more attention to the transnational context of the civil rights movement in the United States. They discovered that African Americans saw their fight to destroy Jim Crow as part of a larger, global battle against colonialism and for human rights. Third World decolonization formed a source of inspiration for U.S. civil rights activists. But was the reverse also true? Did southern advocates of segregation consider their defense of the Southern Way of Life as part of a global crusade to preserve capitalism and white rule? Although some scholars have studied the South’s views of the world, the connections southern whites made between developments on the national and international scene have not been analyzed extensively. This neglect has left a wide gap in the scholarship on the Cold War, decolonization, and the struggle for human rights, despite the fact that southern politicians exerted a decisive influence on the establishment of the global order that emerged after World War II. They dealt with domestic and foreign issues from a regional perspective, which was based on the protection of agricultural interests and a nascent military-industrial complex, but above all, on the defense of white supremacy