What was the cold war's effect on the civil rights movement?
Answers
The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of the
most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, however, is
usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and
has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold War
on domestic United States race politics, and the process through which
the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands.
While past studies of the civil rights movement have properly emphasized such variables as demographic shifts, changes in the economy, and
social-movement organizational dynamics, the purpose of this article
is to stress the contributing importance of America's Cold War
struggle with the Soviet Union in the development of black civil rights;
and to demonstrate with this important case how the politicalprocess model for the study of social movements can be clari¢ed and
made more precise through insights from neoinstitutional theory, now
mostly identi¢ed with the cultural analysis of organizations. Combining the political-process model's emphasis on agency and opportunity
with neoinstitutional theory's stress on legitimacy can help develop the
language to explain the Cold War/civil rights connection.