Run: Book One

The civil rights movement, while often seen as a quintessentially American struggle, also had global dimensions. From the early involvement of pioneering leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois—who attended the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945 and unsuccessfully pushed for a provision on racial equality—to Malcolm X’s efforts in the 1960s to garner international support for condemning American racism at the UN, the movement always had an eye on global influence. As Lewis’s experience shows, this outward-looking perspective, or internationalization, became more prominent after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended formal segregation, and the movement became more conscious of liberating forces around the world.

A major contributing factor in this shift of perspective, as Lewis notes, was the escalation of the Vietnam War, which by 1965 “involved hundreds of thousands of American troops…a disproportionate number of whom were Black” (40). The grueling experience in Vietnam demonstrated to many Americans that high-minded talk of spreading democracy was a guise for oppressing people around the world, most of them nonwhite. Racism at home was thus a logical component of a broader system of racial injustice. This called for a union of peoples around the world, such as the Pan-Africanist movement which sought unity among “progressive, Black-led political parties like the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) [which] were banned and forced underground” by white supremacist governments (78).