This particular perception of the relationship between the global and the national accelerated in the wake of the Second World War. The United Nations, a transnational organization chartered in 1945 and identified with human rights and anticolonialism, offered a politically diverse group of black leaders a forum for expressing their grievances against domestic racism. Accordingly, both the moderate National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the left-wing National Negro Congress sought to petition the UN to investigate the Jim Crow treatment African Americans endured. As the predominant member of this world agency, however, the U.S. government succeeded in shelving this embarrassing issue.

At the same time, the onset of the Cold War in 1947 affected in potent but contradictory ways the impact foreign affairs had on civil rights. On the one hand, black leaders used the nation’s anti-Soviet ideology to pressure Washington to live up to its own democratic rhetoric. President Harry S. Truman recognized the dilemma in trying to win over allies from newly emerging nations in Africa and Asia while tolerating white supremacy in the South. On the other hand, Truman’s anti-Communist policies isolated the left wing of the civil rights movement, depriving it of a critical and militant voice in support of economic equality and anti-imperialism. Influential black opposition leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson who questioned Cold War dogma became targets of governmental efforts to stifle dissent. In contrast, by embracing the anti-Communist consensus, the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights groups pragmatically backed Truman’s Cold War measures in the hope that their cooperation would help persuade the federal government to initiate a Second Racial Reconstruction of the South.

Although important, the Cold War neither fulfilled the expectations of black liberals nor confirmed the doubts of radical black critics. Liberals took satisfaction in Truman’s appointment of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, whose 1947 report established the national legislative agenda to combat segregation and disfranchisement over the next two decades. Though the president failed to enact any civil rights legislation during his tenure in office, he did sign an executive order leading to the desegregation of the armed forces. But black liberals paid a significant price for joining the anti-Communist crusade, because the forces of political reaction that it unleashed stemmed the tide of progressive reform, including that most beneficial to African Americans. Nevertheless, as Brenda Gayle Plummer has pointed out, whatever sacrifices liberal African Americans may have made in this bargain, “civil rights had always been and remained a greater priority for [them] than foreign policy.” Besides, even without the Cold War hardening attitudes against racial change, it is questionable that white southerners would have voluntarily dismantled the Jim Crow practices and institutions that kept black citizens oppressed or that the federal government would have forced them to do so.

Michael L. Krenn indirectly addresses this controversial issue. The Cold War takes up only a small part of his brief but sweeping study of the efforts of African Americans to integrate the highest levels of foreign policy formulation and implementation from 1945 to 1969. He contends that during the Truman years, “Department of State officials slowly came to the conclusion that race would play an important role in the postwar world” and realized “that America’s domestic racial problem was now a foreign policy problem” (p. 28). Krenn acknowledges that the government’s recognition of the racial interconnection of domestic and foreign affairs did not extend much beyond rhetoric to assure the appointments of high level officials in the State Department and Foreign Service. In 1950, of the thirty-three blacks in the Foreign Service, two-thirds were employed in traditionally black posts in Liberia. Except for the newly appointed ambassador, Edward P. Dudley, nearly all held low-grade positions. But, Krenn does not hold the Cold War primarily accountable for this situation; rather, he places most of the blame on institutional racism and elitism – the “old boys club” mentality that kept blacks and other outsiders from being recruited and employed in the foreign policy bureaucracy. Although Krenn merely hints at this, considerations of gender, ethnicity, and class as well as race severely limited the employment of women, Jews, and other marginalized groups. The preference for white men who were southern bred and/or Ivy League-trained to serve as career officers remained unchanged over the second half of the century no matter what the trajectory of the Cold War.

Krenn does provide a good deal of evidence to show that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union waged by Truman and his allies did not shut off attempts by blacks to link foreign affairs with civil rights objectives. From NAACP officials to newspaper editors, African Americans continued to attack colonialism during the 1950s and argued that racial problems at home handicapped attempts to win over nonwhite nations to the U.S. side in the struggle against communism. The desegregation crisis in Little Rock in 1957 underscored the lesson that the rest of the world, aligned and non-aligned, was watching closely how the country treated African Americans. Even the State Department, which under the Republican John Foster Dulles practiced gradualism and paternalism toward blacks, realized the importance of improving the United States’s image.

In a perceptive discussion of the “Unfinished Business” exhibit staged by the United States at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, Krenn demonstrates how good intentions fell victim to institutional and political conservatism. In the wake of Little Rock, the State Department fashioned a display of newspaper headlines attesting to the United States’s racial conflicts along with a large photograph of black and white children at play, suggesting that future generations would overcome these problems. Excessively cautious about communicating any shortcomings, the State Department separated this exhibit from the main U.S. pavilion, and only a few weeks following its inception dismantled the controversial presentation after a group of powerful southern congressmen complained about both the unflattering treatment of the South and the interracial image. Indeed, any attempt to use foreign affairs to promote civil rights was challenged and generally limited by the enormously influential southern bloc in Congress. While segregationists brandished communism as a weapon to smear civil rights activists, racial considerations came first in their opposition to social change.

Black Diplomacy emphasizes the theme of continuity. Not only does Krenn showthat African-American leaders sustained their concern over foreign affairs for the quarter century following World War II he also illustrates the consistency of the State Department in failing to make much progress in appointing blacks to policy and diplomatic posts. By 1969, blacks had broken out of serving only in conventional venues such as Liberia, but their numbers in the ranks of Foreign Service Officers had barely risen. Even the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which were much more racially liberal than Eisenhower’s, produced far less success in enlarging the black diplomatic corps than they did in extending desegregation and voting rights in the South. In a balanced manner, Krenn does point out the complications that hindered increased black appointments. Although many new positions arose as a result of the creation of independent African nations, blacks themselves were divided over whether they should concentrate on seeking these appointments or trying to gain jobs in more prestigious European locations. Yet they were united in their belief that official State Department explanations were false in claiming that nonwhite nations did not want black representatives for fear of being branded with second-class status. Furthermore, despite attempts in the 1960s to recruit black college graduates for the Foreign Service, the cultural biases of the entrance exam and the desire to elevate career personnel to ambassadorial posts combined to hamper African Americans from making much headway.

Overall, Krenn presents an illuminating analysis of the juxtaposition of race and foreign policy by concentrating on the hiring practices of the State Department. The book is balanced in its judgments and well informed by research in the archives of government agencies and civil rights groups, black newspapers, and oral histories. Furthermore, the author deliberately goes beyond the historical record by posing the counterfactual question: “What if there had been a greater black voice in America’s foreign policy during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s?” (p. 8). Yet he shrinks from answering this query, contending that the muted and limited presence of black diplomats precludes a response. Albeit correct, the author might have been more venturesome in considering possible answers. For example, he could have used the case of Carl Rowan, the black journalist who in the 1960s held important positions as head of the United States Information Agency and ambassador to Finland. At a time when blacks were dividing over the Vietnam War, Rowan conformed to official policy and did President Johnson’s bidding in trying to curtail dissent. In an article written for Reader’s Digest, he accused Martin Luther King, Jr., of having unsavory Communist connections that influenced his opposition to the war. Perhaps the prerequisite for those African Americans like Rowan who broke through the glass ceiling into the top diplomatic councils was to toe the line and not challenge prevailing beliefs. Unfortunately, Krenn does not discuss Vietnam at all, which was a source of serious disagreement among African-American leaders and groups. This omission underscores the need for future scholarship to examine closely the impact of the most serious Cold War crisis since Korea on the intersection of attitudes toward race nationally and internationally. Nor does Krenn explore the influence of Africa in the 1960s on the thinking of black leaders as diverse as John Lewis and Malcolm X.

Overall, Krenn’s study is a useful addition to the most important recent scholarship dealing with the interrelationship between African Americans and foreign affairs. It will help civil rights scholars to broaden their grand narratives to include the international implications of landmark events in such places as Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Albany, Georgia, as well as the domestic consequences of those in Sharpsville and Johannesburg, South Africa, and Bandung, Indonesia. At the same time, diplomatic historians can borrow a page from the current work of civil rights scholars and broaden their top down studies of the upper echelon of foreign policy councils. Accordingly, they should look beyond the NAACP and other national groups, no matter how significant they have been, to embrace as well blacks in local communities who perceptively understood their connection to the world scene. To cite only one example, they will find that in 1965, black Mississippians circulated a leaflet calling upon African-American youth not to “fight in Vietnam for the white man’s freedom, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi.” This piece of evidence only strengthens the conclusion of Krenn and other recent scholars that African Americans have thought globally even as they acted locally.