Cold War and Civil Rights

THE BERLIN WALL: THE PARTITIONING OF BERLIN

As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany’s territories. They split the defeated nation into four “allied occupation zones”: The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called "a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.

Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.

THE BERLIN WALL: BLOCKADE AND CRISIS

The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, “stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat,” as Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in 1949.

After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets–emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers)–blustered and made threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution. Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed—the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

THE BERLIN WALL: BUILDING THE WALL

That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall–the Berlin Wall–that divided one side of the city from the other.

Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt (“Checkpoint Alpha” in American military parlance), at Dreilinden (“Checkpoint Bravo”) and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse (“Checkpoint Charlie”). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.

THE BERLIN WALL: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) Over time, East German officials replaced the makeshift wall with one that was sturdier and more difficult to scale. A 12-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide mass of reinforced concrete was topped with an enormous pipe that made climbing over nearly impossible. Behind the wall on the East German side was a so-called “Death Strip”: a gauntlet of soft sand (to show footprints), floodlights, vicious dogs, trip-wire machine guns and patrolling soldiers with orders to shoot escapees on sight.

In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

THE BERLIN WALL: THE FALL OF THE WALL

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, “the greatest street party in the history of the world.” People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall–they became known as “mauerspechte,” or “wall woodpeckers”—while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today,” one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, “is the war really over.”

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost on yar after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY: BACKGROUND

Discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning a ban on nuclear testing began in the mid-1950s. Officials from both nations came to believe that the nuclear arms race was reaching a dangerous level. In addition, public protest against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was gaining strength. Nevertheless, talks between the two nations (later joined by Great Britain) dragged on for years, usually collapsing when the issue of verification was raised. The Americans and British wanted on-site inspections, something the Soviets vehemently opposed. In 1960, the three sides seemed close to an agreement, but the downing of an American spy plane over the Soviet Union in May of that year brought negotiations to an end.

The signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963, took place one day before the 18th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

In October 1962, leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense political and military standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the United States was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the United States agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for America promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

The Cuban Missile Crisis provided a major impetus for reinvigorating the test ban talks.

NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY SIGNED: AUGUST 5, 1963

In June 1963, the test ban negotiations resumed, with compromises from all sides. On August 5, 1963, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909-94), Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (1909-89) and British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home (1903-95). France and China were asked to join the agreement but refused.

The treaty was a small but significant step toward the control of nuclear weapons. In the years to come, discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union grew to include limits on many nuclear weapons and the elimination of others.

COMPREHENSIVE NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY ADOPTED

In 1996, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.” President Bill Clinton (1946-) was the first world leader to sign the treaty, which eventually was signed by more than 180 nations; however, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty in 1999. (Those who objected argued that a ban on testing would damage the safety and reliability of America’s existing nuclear arsenal, and claimed it would be impossible to guarantee treaty compliance by all countries.) Other nations, including India, North Korea and Pakistan, have not ratified the treaty.

The domino theory, which governed much of U.S. foreign policy beginning in the early 1950s, held that a communist victory in one nation would quickly lead to a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighboring states. In Southeast Asia, the United States government used the domino theory to justify its support of a non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist government of North Vietnam, and ultimately its increasing involvement in the long-running Vietnam War (1954-75). In fact, the American failure to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam had much less of a global impact than had been assumed by the domino theory. Though communist regimes did arise in Laos and Cambodia after 1975, communism failed to spread throughout the rest of Southeast Asia

ORIGINS OF THE DOMINO THEORY

In September 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence from France, beginning a war that pitted Ho’s communist-led Viet Minh regime in Hanoi (North Vietnam) against a French-backed regime in Saigon (South Vietnam). Under President Harry S. Truman, the U.S. government provided covert military and financial aid to the French; the rationale was that a communist victory in Indochina would precipitate the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Using this same logic, Truman would also give aid to Greece and Turkey during the late 1940s to help contain communism in Europe and the Middle East.

In an interview with the press in September 1963, President John F. Kennedy expressed his belief in the domino theory, stating that "We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw [from Vietnam]."

By early 1950, makers of U.S. foreign policy had firmly embraced the idea that the fall of Indochina to communism would lead rapidly to the collapse of other nations in Southeast Asia. The National Security Council included the theory in a 1952 report on Indochina, and in April 1954, during the decisive battle between Viet Minh and French forces at Dien Bien Phu, President Dwight D. Eisenhowerarticulated it as the “falling domino” principle. In Eisenhower’s view, the loss of Vietnam to communist control would lead to similar communist victories in neighboring countries in Southeast Asia (including Laos, Cambodia and Thailand) and elsewhere (India, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Australia and New Zealand). “The possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina],” Eisenhower said, “are just incalculable to the free world.”

THE DOMINO THEORY AND GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM

After Eisenhower’s speech, the phrase “domino theory” began to be used as a shorthand expression of the strategic importance of South Vietnam to the United States, as well as the need to contain the spread of communism throughout the world. After the Geneva Conference ended the French-Viet Minh war and split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th parallel, the United States spearheaded the organization of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a loose alliance of nations committed to taking action against “security threats” in the region.

John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower’s successor in the White House, would increase the commitment of U.S. resources in support of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam and of non-communist forces fighting a civil war in Laos in 1961-62. In the fall of 1963, after serious domestic opposition to Diem arose, Kennedy backed away from support of Diem himself but publicly reaffirmed belief in the domino theory and the importance of containing communism in Southeast Asia. Three weeks after Diem was murdered in a military coup in early November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas; his successor Lyndon B. Johnson would continue to use the domino theory to justify the escalation of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam from a few thousand soldiers to more than 500,000 over the next five years.

THE DOMINO THEORY IN HINDSIGHT

In hindsight, the domino theory failed to take into account the character of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong struggle in the Vietnam War. By assuming Ho Chi Minh was a pawn of the communist giants Russia and China, American policymakers failed to see that the goal of Ho and his supporters was limited to Vietnamese independence, rather than the spread of global communism.

In the end, even though the American effort to block a communist takeover failed, and North Vietnamese forces marched into Saigon in 1975, communism did not spread throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. With the exception of Laos and Cambodia, the nations of the region remained out of communist control.

Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence. “Jim Crow” laws at the local and state levels barred them from classrooms and bathrooms, from theaters and train cars, from juries and legislatures. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that formed the basis for state-sanctioned discrimination, drawing national and international attention to African Americans’ plight. In the turbulent decade and a half that followed, civil rights activists used nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to bring about change, and the federal government made legislative headway with initiatives such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Many leaders from within the African American community and beyond rose to prominence during the Civil Rights era, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Andrew Goodman and others. They risked—and sometimes lost—their lives in the name of freedom and equality.

BACKGROUND

Because large segments of the populace–particularly African-Americans, women, and men without property–have not always been accorded full citizenship rights in the American Republic, civil rights movements, or “freedom struggles,” have been a frequent feature of the nation’s history. In particular, movements to obtain civil rights for black Americans have had special historical significance. Such movements have not only secured citizenship rights for blacks but have also redefined prevailing conceptions of the nature of civil rights and the role of government in protecting these rights. The most important achievements of African-American civil rights movements have been the post-Civil War constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and established the citizenship status of blacks and the judicial decisions and legislation based on these amendments, notably the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topekadecision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Moreover, these legal changes greatly affected the opportunities available to women, nonblack minorities, disabled individuals, and other victims of discrimination.

The 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest against segregated public facilities in Alabama, was led by Martin Luther King Jr. and lasted for 381 days.

The modern period of civil rights reform can be divided into several phases, each beginning with isolated, small-scale protests and ultimately resulting in the emergence of new, more militant movements, leaders, and organizations. TheBrown decision demonstrated that the litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could undermine the legal foundations of southern segregationist practices, but the strategy worked only when blacks, acting individually or in small groups, assumed the risks associated with crossing racial barriers. Thus, even after the Supreme Court declared that public school segregation was unconstitutional, black activism was necessary to compel the federal government to implement the decision and extend its principles to all areas of public life rather than simply in schools. During the 1950s and 1960s, therefore,NAACP–sponsored legal suits and legislative lobbying were supplemented by an increasingly massive and militant social movement seeking a broad range of social changes.

MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT AND THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE,

The initial phase of the black protest activity in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider, thereby defying a southern custom that required blacks to give seats toward the front of buses to whites. When she was jailed, a black community boycott of the city’s buses began. The boycott lasted more than a year, demonstrating the unity and determination of black residents and inspiring blacks elsewhere.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who emerged as the boycott movement’s most effective leader, possessed unique conciliatory and oratorical skills. He understood the larger significance of the boycott and quickly realized that the nonviolent tactics used by the Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi could be used by southern blacks. “I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom,” he explained. Although Parks and King were members of the NAACP, the Montgomery movement led to the creation in 1957 of a new regional organization, the clergy-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with King as its president.

King remained the major spokesperson for black aspirations, but, as in Montgomery, little-known individuals initiated most subsequent black movements. On February 1, 1960, four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College began a wave of student sit-ins designed to end segregation at southern lunch counters. These protests spread rapidly throughout the South and led to the founding, in April 1960, of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This student-led group, even more aggressive in its use of nonviolent direct action tactics than King’s SCLC, stressed the development of autonomous local movements in contrast to SCLCs strategy of using local campaigns to achieve national civil rights reforms.

BIRMINGHAM AND THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

TheSCLC protest strategy achieved its first major success in 1963 when the group launched a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Highly publicized confrontations between nonviolent protesters, including schoolchildren, on the one hand, and police with clubs, fire hoses, and police dogs, on the other, gained northern sympathy. The Birmingham clashes and other simultaneous civil rights efforts prompted President John F. Kennedy to push for passage of new civil rights legislation. By the summer of 1963, the Birmingham protests had become only one of many local protest insurgencies that culminated in the August 28March on Washington, which attracted at least 200,000 participants. King’s address on that occasion captured the idealistic spirit of the expanding protests. “I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed–we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Although some whites reacted negatively to the spreading protests of 1963, King’s linkage of black militancy and idealism helped bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation outlawed segregation in public facilities and racial discrimination in employment and education. In addition to blacks, women and other victims of discrimination benefited from the act.

FREEDOM SUMMER

While theSCLC focused its efforts in the urban centers, SNCC‘s activities were concentrated in the rural Black Belt areas of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, where white resistance was intense. Although theNAACP and the predominantly white Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also contributed activists to the Mississippi movement, youngSNCC organizers spearheaded civil rights efforts in the state. Black residents in the Black Belt, many of whom had been involved in civil rights efforts since the 1940s and 1950s, emphasized voter registration rather than desegregation as a goal. Mississippi residents Amzie Moore andFannie Lou Hamer were among the grass-roots leaders who worked closely withSNCC to build new organizations, such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP). Although theMFDP did not succeed in its attempt to claim the seats of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, it attracted national attention and thus prepared the way for a major upsurge in southern black political activity.

After the Atlantic City experience, disillusionedSNCC organizers worked with local leaders in Alabama to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The symbol they chose–the black panther–reflected the radicalism and belief in racial separatism that increasingly characterized SNCCduring the last half of the 1960s. The black panther symbol was later adopted by the California-based Black Panther party, formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

SELMA TO MONTGOMERY MARCH

Despite occasional open conflicts between the two groups, both SCLCs protest strategy and SNCC’S organizing activities were responsible for major Alabama protests in 1965, which prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce new voting rights legislation. On March 7 an SCLC planned march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery ended almost before it began at Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, when mounted police using tear gas and wielding clubs attacked the protesters. News accounts of “Bloody Sunday” brought hundreds of civil rights sympathizers to Selma. Many demonstrators were determined to mobilize another march, andSNCC activists challenged King to defy a court order forbidding such marches. But reluctant to do anything that would lessen public support for the voting rights cause, King on March 9 turned back a second march to the Pettus Bridge when it was blocked by the police. That evening a group of Selma whites killed a northern white minister who had joined the demonstrations. In contrast to the killing of a black man, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a few weeks before, the Reverend James Reeb’s death led to a national outcry. After several postponements of the march, civil rights advocates finally gained court permission to proceed. This Selma to Montgomery march was the culmination of a stage of the African-American freedom struggle. Soon afterward, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which greatly increased the number of southern blacks able to register to vote. But it was also the last major racial protest of the 1960s to receive substantial white support.

RISE OF BLACK NATIONALISM

By the late 1960s, organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, andSNCC faced increasingly strong challenges from new militant organizations, such as the Black Panther party. The Panthers’ strategy of “picking up the gun” reflected the sentiments of many inner-city blacks. A series of major “riots” (as the authorities called them), or “rebellions” (the sympathizers’ term), erupted during the last half of the 1960s. Often influenced by the black nationalism of Elijah Muhammad andMalcolm X and by pan-African leaders, proponents of black liberation saw civil rights reforms as insufficient because they did not address the problems faced by millions of poor blacks and because African-American citizenship was derived ultimately from the involuntary circumstances of enslavement. In addition, proponents of racial liberation often saw the African-American freedom struggle in international terms, as a movement for human rights and national self-determination for all peoples.

POST 1960’S CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Severe government repression, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the intense infighting within the black militant community caused a decline in protest activity after the 1960s. The African-American freedom struggle nevertheless left a permanent mark on American society. Overt forms of racial discrimination and government-supported segregation of public facilities came to an end, although de facto, as opposed to de jure, segregation persisted in northern as well as southern public school systems and in other areas of American society. In the South, antiblack violence declined. Black candidates were elected to political offices in communities where blacks had once been barred from voting, and many of the leaders or organizations that came into existence during the 1950s and 1960s remained active in southern politics. Southern colleges and universities that once excluded blacks began to recruit them.

Despite the civil rights gains of the 1960s, however, racial discrimination and repression remained a significant factor in American life. Even after President Johnson declared a war on poverty and King initiated a Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, the distribution of the nation’s wealth and income moved toward greater inequality during the 1970s and 1980s. Civil rights advocates acknowledged that desegregation had not brought significant improvements in the lives of poor blacks, but they were divided over the future direction of black advancement efforts. To a large degree, moreover, many of the civil rights efforts of the 1970s and 1980s were devoted to defending previous gains or strengthening enforcement mechanisms.

The modern African-American civil rights movement, like similar movements earlier, had transformed American democracy. It also served as a model for other group advancement and group pride efforts involving women, students, Chicanos, gays and lesbians, the elderly, and many others. Continuing controversies regarding affirmative action programs and compensatory remedies for historically rooted patterns of discrimination were aspects of more fundamental, ongoing debates about the boundaries of individual freedom, the role of government, and alternative concepts of social justice.

The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.