Better Day Coming: Civil Rights in America in the 20th Century

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• 1. World War Two
• 2. The Cold War
• 3. The Civil Rights Movement
• 4. Malcolm X and Black Power
• 5. Race relations in America today
• 6. Find out more
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The Cold War

Yet only three years after the war ended, Roosevelt's successor, Harry S Truman, embraced the cause of civil rights. He asked Congress to legislate against racial discrimination. He integrated the armed services. And when the Supreme Court was asked to rule upon the legality of segregated schools, the government sided with the NAACP, not with the white South.

Why this sudden about-turn by the federal government? One reason is that the war had helped to discredit theories of racial superiority. When Allied troops uncovered the full extent of the Holocaust, the world recoiled in horror. Racism, whether in the form of anti-Semitism or proclamations of white supremacy, could never again be respectable.

'... the Cold War had made racial discrimination an international issue.'

Furthermore, the Cold War had made racial discrimination an international issue. As the colonial empires of Europe broke up, the United States and the Soviet Union jockeyed for influence among the non-white peoples of Asia and Africa. Soviet propaganda lashed the United States for its treatment of blacks. Racial segregation suddenly became an embarrassment to Washington. Anxious to erase this stain on America's reputation, the Supreme Court, in its celebrated decision Brown v Board of Education (1954), declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Although the government did very little to implement the decision - President Eisenhower considered it a mistake - Brown helped to launch a second Reconstruction of the South.

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Published: 2003-04-01