Re-reading W. E. B. Du Bois: the global dimensions of the US civil rights struggle

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the increasingly important insights of historians concerned with global and transnational perspectives, in this article I argue that Du Bois' international activism and writings on global oppression in the decades following the Second World War profoundly shaped the ways in which people in the United States engaged with race as a concept and social practice in the mid decades of the twentieth century. Du Bois' efforts to bring his insights on global racism home to the US domestic legal arena were to a large degree thwarted by a US foreign policy focused on Cold War politics and interested in pursuing racial equality not on the basis of universal human rights principles but as a Cold War political strategy. Nonetheless, I argue that Du Bois' writings, which were informed by a new rhetoric of global responsibility and universal citizenship, had unpredictable and significant consequences in shaping the direction of US racial politics in the civil rights era.