Andrew S.

Terrell
Spring 2010

Précis: Anderson, Carol. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Carol Anderson explores the failed hopes of the NAACP and African Americans as a

whole in the decade following the end of WWII. The Black community believed the demise of

white supremacists in the Third Reich was a sign of renewed attention to civil rights in the world,

especially in the United States. However, things remained quite opposed to civil rights

advancement despite rhetoric. The struggle for civil rights came under attack by Southern

democrats and superficial promises of hope from other liberals. The Black community sought to

expose the realities of their situation to the United Nations, but their attempts met little more than

domestic recourse and retrenchment from former, supposed allies and greater repression from

adversaries. Anderson approaches this decade of the Civil Rights movement through Cold War

politics, which was a pioneering idea in 2003, and puts the failures of Black efforts into the

larger context of the changing domestic and international scene. She argues that the Cold War

systematically eliminated human rights as a viable option for the mainstream African American

leadership. In doing so, she shows how McCarthyism mutated human rights into a cultural clash

where Americans associated the Civil Rights movement at large with Communist subversion.

Once Eisenhower entered office, international attention to African Americans’ struggle was

abandoned and added to the list of Communist interference. Black organizations largely headed

by the NAACP were then politically, and socially, trapped. Anderson uses plenty of documents

in defending her larger arguments, but does she give enough attention to the new and rising US

political force that rapidly expanded throughout WWII and came to prominence upon the death

of FDR? Does glazing over the shift in US ideology against colonialism during and immediately

after WWII weaken her narrative of the UN Charter and the drafting politics?