Argues that the Cold War helped speed and facilitate such key reforms as desegregation due to international pressure and the obstacle American racism created in attaining Cold War goals.
Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams tells the little-known story of Thurgood Marshall's work with Kenyan leaders as they fought with the British for independence in the early 1960s. Not long after he led the legal team in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall aided Kenya's constitutional negotiations, as adversaries battled over rights and land--not with weapons, but with legal arguments. Set in the context of Marshall's civil rights work in the United States, this transnational history sheds light on legal reform and social change in the midst of violent upheavals in Africa and America. While the struggle for rights on both continents played out on a global stage, it was a deeply personal journey for Marshall. Even as his belief in the equalizing power of law was challenged during his career as a Supreme Court justice, and in Kenya the new government sacrificed the rights he cherished, Kenya's founding moment remained for him a time and place when all things had seemed possible.
Thurgood Marshall became a living icon of civil rights when he argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. Six years later, he was at a crossroads. A rising generation of activists were making sit-ins and demonstrations rather than lawsuits and legal maneuvering the hallmarks of the civil rights movement. What role, he wondered, could he now play? When in 1960 Kenyan independence leaders asked him to help write their constitution, Marshall seized the occasion and threw himself into their cause. Here was a new arena in which law might serve as the tool with which to forge a just society, an opportunity to prove that legal means offered the brightest hope for progress. In Exporting American Dreams, Mary Dudziak recounts with poignancy and power the untold story of Marshall's journey to Africa. His experience in Kenya was emotional as well as intellectual, and during it he developed ties of friendship with, among others, Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta. Marshall served as advisor to the Kenyans, who needed to demonstrate to both Great Britain and to the world that they would treat minority races (whites and Asians) fairly once Africans took power. He crafted a bill of rights, aiding constitutional negotiations that enabled peaceful regime change, rather than violent resistance. Marshall's involvement with Kenya's foundation affirmed his belief in progress by legal means, while also forcing him to understand how the struggle for justice could be compromised by the imperatives of sovereignty. Marshall's beliefs were most sorely tested later in the decade when he became a Supreme Court Justice, even as American cities erupted in flames and civil rights progress stalled. But his journey to Africa remained a source of inspiration on which he continued to draw.
When is wartime? In common usage, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called 'an age without surrender ceremonies,' where the war on terror remains open-ended and presidents announce an end to conflict in Iraq, even as conflict on the ground persists. It is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary L. Dudziak argues that wartime is not a discrete or easily defined period of time. Indeed, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Yet policy makers and the American public continue to view wars as exceptional events that eventually give way to normal peace times--a conception that Dudziak believes has two significant consequences. First, because war is thought to be exceptional, 'wartime' remains a shorthand argument justifying extreme actions like torture and detention without trial. Second, ongoing warfare is enabled by the inattention of the American people. More disconnected than ever from the wars their nation is fighting, public disengagement leaves us without political restraints on the exercise of American war powers. Articulately exposing the disconnect between the way we imaging wartime and the practice of American wars, Dudziak illuminates the way the changing nature of American warfare undermines democratic accountability, yet makes democratic engagement all the more necessary."--Dust jacket.
Argues that the Cold War helped speed and facilitate such key reforms as desegregation due to international pressure and the obstacle American racism created in attaining Cold War goals.
Fulfilling the Sacred Trust explores the implementation of international accountability for dependent territories under the United Nations during the early Cold War era. Although the Western nations that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a means of maintaining the international status quo they controlled, newly independent nations saw the UN as an instrument of decolonization and an agent of change disrupting global political norms. Mary Ann Heiss documents the unprecedented process through which these new nations came to wrest control of the United Nations from the World War II victors that founded it, allowing the UN to become a vehicle for global reform. Heiss examines the consequences of these early changes on the global political landscape in the midst of heightened international tensions playing out in Europe, the developing world, and the UN General Assembly. She puts this anti-colonial advocacy for accountability into perspective by making connections between the campaign for international accountability in the United Nations and other postwar international reform efforts such as the anti-apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the drive for global human rights. Chronicling the combative history of this campaign, Fulfilling the Sacred Trust details the global impact of the larger UN reformist effort. Heiss demonstrates the unintended impact of decolonization on the United Nations and its agenda, as well as the shift in global influence from the developed to the developing world.
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