Window on Freedom - Book Review

By Lindsay Resnick

Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988, edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer, does a good job of placing the United States's Civil Rights Movement into international context. Because this book is an anthology, its essays cover a wide range of topics and it is incredibly difficult to coherently summarize. However, for this review I will summarize some of the essays to give the reader a sampling of what he or she will read in the book. Due to it being a collection of essays, the book puts forth numerous arguments, but one of the most common threads running through it is that “racism undermined US global leadership and strained its relations with countries that had a stake in achieving global racial equality” (7).

The first essay, “Seen from the Outside: The International Perspective on America’s Dilemma” by Paul Gordon Lauren, was the most relevant to my research on how the Civil Rights Movement was reported on in the international press. Lauren argues that outsiders with no personal stake in certain goings-on can often help explain and clarify things about ourselves: “they can apply a certain objectivity, distance, broader perspective, freshness, and honesty that we are not always able or willing to produce on our own. They can often see through the rationalizations, excuses, self-willed naïveté, or myths that we create about ourselves” (21). He begins by discussing how some of the very first foreign visitors to America, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustav de Beaumont, saw the evident irony in American society— the rhetoric of equality and democracy but the reality of the oppression suffered by the “Negro and the Indian” (21). Lauren’s article then goes on to describe the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal’s report An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, the funds for Myrdal’s research and its publication were provided by the Carnegie Corporation. The report once again draws attention to the “stark contrast between the glorious ideals of liberty and equality on one hand, and blatant racial prejudice and discrimination on the other” (23). Lauren also gives examples of many international news outlets that wrote about American civil rights struggles after World War II ended. Of course, no criticism of the United States’s race relations was as strong and sharp as that from the Soviet Union, who used statistics about lynchings and disenfranchisement to prove to the world how flawed its capitalistic rival was during the Cold War. Lauren’s essay, while quite comprehensive and interesting, seems to be a little too broad in its focus, and jumps around too much between subjects, never really settling on one. Along with books and press coverage, he also discusses how international diplomats from non-“white” countries were treated poorly when visiting the US, foreign leaders (especially those from Africa) who “express[ed] solidarity with the US struggle through symbolic gestures,” and also the reaction of Americans to this foreign press coverage (34). I think that if he settled more on outsiders’ views as opposed to insiders’ reactions to those views, the essay would have been more successful in arguing its point.

Another piece that struck me was "Brown Babies: Race, Gender, and Policy after World War II," by the editor, Brenda Gayle Plummer, a historian of African American History and US Foreign Relations at the University of Wisconsin. This essay mostly caught my interest because it was about a phenomenon that has truly been swept under the rug in the United States — the plight of “babies born of European Women and African American soldiers during the World War II era” (67). While interracial sex was taboo at the time, and in some places, illegal, the fact that “brown babies” existed during the War era proved that it was happening. Unfortunately, due to many obstacles in race relations and the power relations between Americans and Europeans during the war, many of the babies produced of these relationships were orphaned or given up for adoption, where it was unlikely they would be adopted anyway, because of their skin color. Also, Plummer argues, the government created a catch-22 for black GIs, when they disapproved of interracial sex but also did not allow black women to be housed with the white women they hired to give the soldiers “company.” She also argues that many German women, desperate during the very lean times of the war, used American GIs, including blacks, as meal tickets, and that when the German economy began rebounding, the German women were much less friendly to the black GIs. Nevertheless, “some 1,500 brown babies were born” in Germany during the War, but even if the fathers and mothers wanted to marry, they were unlikely to be allowed by the top brass of the US Military to do so (68-69). In her essay, Plummer also discusses the reaction to these babies in the Black Press of the time, as well as the complicated legalities and illegalities surrounding these babies and their parents’ relationships with regards to American, US Military, and local laws. Also, she mentions the growing acceptance of black American couples to adopt these “mulattoes” from overseas, with help from press outlets such as the ‘’Baltimore Afro-American,’’ and the fate of many of the mixed-race children that ended up staying in Germany after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although she does not explicitly come out and say it, Plummer hints that these children were better off in Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany than in the home of their fathers, where many of their fathers still did not have the right to vote.

Overall, Window on Freedom is an interesting book covering a very broad range of topics relating to international relations and the US Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Plummer’s work is ambitious and broad, but I believe each of the essays is a good jumping-off point into further research about each topic. The essays are well-written and, for the most part, easy to understand, although I did find a few of them a little confusing, especially when trying to explain legal concepts and specific laws.