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  • How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam
  • Gerald Horne
Jonathan Rosenberg , How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Of late, the question of the historical engagement of African-Americans with the international community has received significant attention from scholars such as Brenda Gayle Plummer, Mary Dudziak, and Penny von Eschen. Although these scholars differ in critical respects, they—and now Jonathan Rosenberg—tend to suggest that an intimate connection existed between the Cold War and the reluctant retreat from racial segregation in the United States. U.S. policymakers, they argue, realized that they could not credibly charge the former Soviet Union with human rights violations when African-Americans and other racial minorities were treated so atrociously in the United States.

These scholars—and now Rosenberg—perhaps unwittingly have inaugurated an innovative way of writing history by linking the domestic and the global. Others would be well-advised to follow their lead.

Despite the growing literature on this topic, Rosenberg makes his own unique contribution. He extends the scope of the subject back to World War I and forward to Vietnam. In many ways his book is an intellectual history in that he spends a considerable amount of time examining the stated positions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—and W. E. B. DuBois—on the key foreign policy questions of the moment. He emphasizes DuBois's concept of African-Americans as part of a "transnational solidarity of the oppressed" (p. 29), hinting at the potential danger for the United States of housing within its borders millions of [End Page 142] disgruntled citizens with an uncertain allegiance to Washington and a growing identification with foreign nationals. "Those committed to domestic race reform," Rosenberg writes, "aimed to internationalize America's race question" (p. 52) and thus indirectly diminish the U.S. government's sovereignty over its internal affairs. In retrospect it seems clear that the agonized retreat from Jim Crow, as Rosenberg's deft and engaging study suggests, was an essential component of the effort to shore up U.S. national security, rather than a benevolent gesture by enlightened U.S. officials, as it is so often portrayed today.

Rosenberg notes that "Du Bois made no effort to hide his positive preachments on Russia's foreign and domestic policies, and to his varied audiences he conveyed the idea that America had a great deal to learn from the Soviet Union" (p. 175). Rosenberg could have added that this was true of almost all of the "best and the brightest" among African-Americans, including Paul Robeson, Shirley Graham DuBois, and a host of other intellectuals of this elevated stature. At a time when African-Americans were treated as third-class citizens, they had an obvious incentive to succumb to the blandishments of the real and imagined antagonists of Washington. For those familiar with the horrors of the African slave trade, of slavery itself, and of Jim Crow, it was hard to accept the charmingly naïve idea that the United States was a paragon of human rights, not to mention a harmonious "melting pot" or an inspiring "city on a hill."

Thus, Rosenberg's book is worthwhile and thought-provoking, yet like any good book it raises further questions that scholars would be well-advised to pursue. For example, is there still a linkage between domestic race reform and international affairs in the post-9/11 world? As tensions rise between Beijing and Washington, and as the bitter aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to unveil unresolved and intertwined questions of race and class, might African-Americans once again look abroad to find support for their domestic concerns?

That Rosenberg's book inspires such knotty questions is a reflection of its value. The book merits close study by a wide audience.

Gerald Horne
University of Houston
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