Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988.(Book Review)

Edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer

We find ourselves in a time when America's actions as a superpower are called into question all over the world. Historian Brenda Gayle Plummer believes that race has played a long neglected role in foreign policy, and her academic career seeks to address that neglect and explode the assumptions that support it. Her work has been devoted to the study of black agency within nation states and the crises of diplomacy that agency creates. It's a study in the crazy radical things you can do when no one assumes you can do anything.

Window on Freedom is a collection of essays by 10 scholars. In one of the book's strongest essays, Mary Dudziak, professor of law and history at the University of Southern California, discusses the impact of America's image on foreign policy. Dudziak reports specifically on the confluence of events in Birmingham, Alabama, and at the Conference of African Heads of State and Government in May of 1963, and the response those actions elicited from the Kennedy administration. After Birmingham, President Kennedy delivered the most pro-civil rights speech of his career, incidentally on the night Medgar Evers was murdered, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk forwarded a copy to all U.S. diplomatic posts to use as propaganda against the Soviets. Dudziak shows the State Department approaching the "problem" of civil rights and its impact on foreign affairs with the question, "How does this [Birmingham] make us look?" without also asking the question "What does Birmingham make us?" It rings as hollow as a person taking great pains to not appear racist ...