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Remembering Legal Scholar’s Case That ’60s Civil Rights Reforms In U.S. Were Linked To International Embarrassment

Remembering Legal Scholar’s Case That ’60s Civil Rights Reforms In U.S. Were Linked To International Embarrassment

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Remembering a legal scholar’s case that 1960s civil rights reforms in the U.S. were linked to international embarrassment. Can this happen today? Dion Diamond, a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is surrounded by white youths during a sit-in demonstration at an Arlington, Virginia, drug store, June 9, 1960. Black people are seeking service at lunch counters where only white persons now are served. (AP Photo)

Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly believed that the police’s harsh treatment of young protesters fighting for Civil Rights would make the U.S. look bad internationally and shame it into making radical changes. 

That was in the 1960s. Fast forward to 2020 and the streets of the U.S. are filled with young people protesting the police murder of George Floyd and abuse of Black Americans.

The entire world has seemingly picked up the call. There have been protests from Dublin to Abuja, Nigeria in solidarity with the new Black civil rights movement. We have witnessed Black Lives Matters signs all over the world — a movement that many in the U.S. initially tried to disregard.

Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has pushed isolationism — keeping people out of America while withdrawing U.S. support for global organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). .

Can the U.S. be shamed into enacting civil rights?

Law professor Mary Dudziak says change can come even during a Cold War, as it did in the 1960s.                                

In her book, “Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy,” Dudziak examines how the fight against communism actually forced U.S. leaders, who had become embarrassed on the world stage by oppression at home,  to support desegregation. 

“When I started my research, the question I kept coming back to was “How is Brown v. Board of Education a McCarthy-era case?” Dudziak told the University of Southern California News. “Even though Brown was decided in 1954 during the McCarthy era, most people think of the Cold War and civil rights as unrelated. But they are linked quite strongly.

“Segregation made us look bad and cast doubt on American democracy among leaders in African, Latin American and Asian nations,” Dudziak said. “American presidents and diplomats feared that other nations would be slow to embrace democracy if they saw Americans denying basic rights to their own citizens.”

According to Dudziak, the brutalization of civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 marked a crisis moment in foreign affairs. “Birmingham was all over the world press. What was this telling the world about our democracy as a model to follow? The civil rights movement gained an advantage as the U.S. sought to improve its international image,” Dudziak said.

Now the murder of Floyd and police brutality against African Americans are under the international microscope.

U.S. racism against African Americans and all Black people everywhere has made international headlines on several occasions. In 2019, a 1971 conversation came to light between then-President Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, where Reagan referred to African United Nations delegates as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” At the time, Reagan was angry that some African nations had voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China, rather than Taiwan, which had held the seat since the U.N. was founded in 1945.

“The bald racism of the remarks makes it hard to look beyond the words themselves and focus on the worldview they expressed”, The Atlantic reported. “Reagan and Nixon were declaring their belief that the African delegates were rendered unfit for participation in world affairs by virtue of their ethnic background, a perspective that inevitably reflects on the rights of Black people in the U.S.”

Some people are calling on international authorities to step in and “re-activate the effort to bring the crimes that the U.S. has committed against its Black denizens to the attention of the U.N.,” Nigerian-American writer Clarkisha Kent and activist Wicked Womanist wrote in Wear Your Voice Magazine

The treatment of Black people in the U.S. today is much like the Gestapo in 1936, they wrote:

“The U.S. has committed numerous epic sins against Black and Indigenous peoples ranging from police Black sites, illegal arrests, brutal interrogation techniques, to missing persons and dead freedom fighters labeled as suicides; guns and drugs covertly pushed into vulnerable neighborhoods by intelligence agencies, dividing vulnerable young men; funding wars to deprive other Black and brown people of freedom.”

They continued, “The government, military, and police have enacted rape, torture, and extrajudicial killings; human experiments to ‘cure’ diseases, among other things, strange fruit hanging from familiar trees. The U.S. has also intentionally orchestrated the suppression of internal documents detailing the systematic infiltration and assimilation of white supremacists into police forces across the country.” 

This wouldn’t be the first time Black America has called for the U.N. to step in. Civil Rights leaders of the 1960s such as Malcolm X called on the U.N. to intervene in the “Black genocide” in the U.S. He wanted to elevate the Black Americans’ struggles from “civil rights” to international human rights. He was assassinated before he could push the concept forward.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 72: Jamarlin Martin Part 2. J Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, may not be around but his energy is present in new Black politics.

Will the current state of U.S. race relations embarrass the country enough on the world stage to initiate change?

Some experts don’t think so.

“While U.S. policymakers do study other governments’ initiatives more than they necessarily advertise, American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad,” The Atlantic reported. The Trump administration is even less likely to engage on this level. The president “has exhibited more hubris than humility.”

This is a president who recently claimed he has done more for Black America than “any president since Lincoln