The civil rights movement in the United States drew strength from supporters of human rights worldwide. Once U.S. policy makers--influenced by international pressure, the courage of ordinary American citizens, and a desire for global leadership--had signed such documents as the United Nations charter, domestic calls for change could be based squarely on the moral authority of doctrines the United States endorsed abroad. This is one of the many fascinating links between racial politics and international affairs explored in Window on Freedom. Broad in chronological scope and topical diversity, the ten original essays presented here demonstrate how the roots of U.S. foreign policy have been embedded in social, economic, and cultural factors of domestic as well as foreign origin. They argue persuasively that the campaign to realize full civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities in America is best understood in the context of competitive international relations. The contributors are Carol Anderson, Donald R. Culverson, Mary L. Dudziak, Cary Fraser, Gerald Horne, Michael Krenn, Paul Gordon Lauren, Thomas Noer, Lorena Oropeza, and Brenda Gayle Plummer.

Demonstrates how US foreign policy has been embedded in social, economic and cultural factors of domestic and foreign origin. It argues that the campaign to realize full civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities in the US is best understood in the context of competitive international relations.

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.

As a little girl, Trelithia was always loved for her huge smile, high energy, and big dreams about being in the Olympics. This little girl who only saw the world in color was introduced to darkness by foul hands that stripped away her innocence. Trapped by dark secrets from generational traditions and a fear of really living life, Trelithia started down a path of destruction. "Does happiness exist? Can you genuinely love again? Where is God? Why do I overthink? Does fear leave the same way it came?" She battled these questions in every relationship in her adult life. Through the spirals of life that came at her hard and fast and that often left her crumbled and gasping for air, she discovered that there was something strong inside of her waiting to be birthed and found that there was no force dark enough to kill the purpose God put inside of her.

In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as "the capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change. Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings. Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty.