March 3rd-”Radio Free Dixie,” Chapters 3 & 4

Scholarly Source:Human rights at the UN : the political history of universal justice / Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi ; foreword by Richard A. Falk.

Bird-4th Floor

Call Number: JZ4984.5 .N67 2008

Status: Available

Public Discourse: http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1997/mlk/links.html (Timeline of Civil Rights Movement-Dates and Descriptions)

Electronic/Internet Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0861704.html (History of United Nations General Assembly)

Response/Reaction to Reading: In the aftermath of World War II, the landscape of domestic politics was in a new era and was in a stage of transition, or at least an attempted transition.  Tyson talks about how the post war era of World War II gave “African Americans an unprecedented power to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the World.”  With the approaching and contiuning realism of the Cold War and the “red scare,” the United Nations General Assembly was created, which as a State Department report conceded” has sometimes tended to follow a color line, white against non-whites, with Russia seeking to be recognized as the champion of non-whites.”  Furthermore, the dark-skinned peoples of the Third World, largely sought the formation of the United Nations General Assembly in efforts to compete with the superpowers and largely interms with their own racial and anticolonial concerns.  Like the leaders of these “dark-skinned” counrties, leaders of the NAACP saw the creation of the United Nations as a “powerful podium from which to adress racial issuses.”  In a 1947 petition to the United Nations, the NAACP stated that “it is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi…not Stalin and Moloto, but Bilbo and Rankin (state sneators).”  This petetion released by the NAACP, which mainly decried for the “denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of negor descent in the United States, created an international sensation.”  With the newly formed United Nations General Assembly, not only did dark-skinned leaders of Third World countires have a podium to discuss their racial issues, but even groups such as the NAACP had a stage as well where they could voice their opinions and concerns, where the entire world could hear them.  The formation of the United Nations was a major factor in the slowly growing recognition of the problem that was affecting the United States in the post World War II era, racism and the civil rights movement.