The Black Scare: Cold War Anticommunism and the Long Civil Rights Movement in America

Abstract

This thesis discusses the impact of the Cold War on the Long African American Civil Rights Movement in the US from 1945 into the early 1970s. I seek to address the historiography that argues that the Cold War was an animating or galvanizing force behind the Civil Rights movement. I argue that black strategies of activism and black thought during the long civil rights era were directly or indirectly influenced by Cold War politics. Strategies towards freedom and equality were manipulated, altered, and transformed due to anticommunism in America.