Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955. By Carol Anderson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii, 302 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-82431-1. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-521-53158-6.)

Extract

During World War II, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) recognized that African Americans required more than political and legal rights to gain racial equality. They needed both civil rights and human rights (economic and social rights) to overcome the damage inflicted by more than three centuries of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism. Carol Anderson very cogently helps us to understand how the struggle for human rights got derailed by white southern political opposition to any international agreements that might interfere with states' rights and by the Cold War hysteria that cast any guarantees of education, employment, health care, and housing as Communistic.

With exhaustive research into a rich array of sources, Anderson has given us a comprehensive portrait of the elusive struggle for the “prize” of human rights and racial equality from 1944 to 1955. The NAACP, in 1944, brought back W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder and former director of research and publication, after a decade's absence due to differences with the organization over the need for self-segregation to weather the Great Depression. He returned as director of special research to help prepare the naacp to address human rights and colonialism in international deliberations about the postwar world. Du Bois and Walter White, the naacp executive secretary, became consultants to the United States delegation to the United Nations (un) Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. Anderson, however, does not mention Mary McLeod Bethune, head of the National Council of Negro Women, who later joined Du Bois and White as an naacp consultant.