Summary Of Eshen's Democracy Or Empire

In chapter 2, “Democracy or Empire”, in Eshen’s work Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, Eshen sheds light on the relationship between anti-colonial struggles and the African American freedom struggle first by looking at the Atlantic Charter. In this portion of the text she shows how it didn’t apply, in Churchill’s words, “to colored races in the colonial empire” similarly to how in the Unites States at this time, there was obvious racism and treatment of African-Americans that was comparable to this. You had laws and Supreme Court rulings that were supposed to be carried out, but weren’t when it came to African-Americans. Also, depending on the stand Roosevelt took on the charter, like if he claimed it applied to everyone, it could extend to African-Americans and not just other
Next, she looks at the relationship between India trying to achieve freedom in relation to African-Americans and how they, in a way, supported each other from afar. In the next section, she discusses the use of black soldiers in the war as a way to fight Jim Crow and also imperialism. In America, this was the “Double V” campaign. In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Dudziak shows how the Cold War impacted the United States and the civil rights movement. Throughout the chapter she tells of all the different pressures the US received from around the world such as in India or Kathimerini in Greece on top of the propaganda of the Soviet Union. On page 27, she mentions how the Soviet Union created anti-America propaganda and “US concern over the effect of race discrimination on Cold War foreign relations” led to the Truman administration’s pro-civil rights stance in order to promote democracy and contain communism. On page 43, she tells that in 1946, the United Nations Commission on Humans Rights was established and one