Race and the Propaganda Wars

This was a short piece I wrote for my students last year as part of a lesson that analyzed civil rights within a global context.  I couldn't find a way to make the poster below readable; but the point is to describe the successes of Carver, to portray the United States as a place where people of color can succeed, and to express the thankfulness the US feels for Carver's contributions.   

The lesson helped me to understand that most students only recognized propaganda when the focus was either to demonize people or had an explicit government message, such as Uncle Sam's "I Want You!" or Rosy the Riveter's "We Can Do It!"  They also assumed that because the image portrayed African American's in a positive light that it must have been created by people who supported civil rights.  Because of this, in our discussion about the image before the reading I asked them how different groups of people could USE this image for their own ends: could even racist groups benefit from using this image?      

The poster applauding George Washington Carver shown below was created by the US government during World War II.  How could distributing posters like this internationally have benefited the United States?   

  

The answer to this question is an important but little discussed part of civil rights.  In 1943, when the poster was created, the Japanese were creating propaganda showing the United States as an extremely racist nation towards all people of color.  They spread this propaganda across the world, hoping to convince people of color - or "countries of color" - not to ally with the United States. 

This propaganda was a major threat to the United States.  If Japan could convince the world's “countries of color” to side with it because of racism in the United States, America would obviously have a major problem.  In fact, for a time, many people in the world thought that a war between white countries and the “colored people of the world” was entirely possible.

After World War II ended, the global propaganda wars about race increased.  During the “Cold War,” the Soviet Union and the United States tried to gain allegiance from all the other nations of the world.  The Soviet Union tried to gain this allegiance by creating propaganda revealing the racism of the United States, and asking the nations of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America why they would side with a country like the United States that looked at them as inferior.  In fact, the Soviet Union once invited Langston Hughes to travel to Russia and make a film depicting the horrors of slavery.  Their hope was that the movie would help reveal to the rest of the world the brutal faults about the “land of freedom.”  Hughes did go to Russia, but the film was never made.   

As time went on, the United States felt more and more of a need to convince the rest of the world that its ideals were not hollow, and that it truly was a land of freedom.  In order to do this, the US created a "counter-propaganda" campaign, flooding the world with images and stories about successful people of color in the United States.  But the US understood it had to go farther than mere images and words: Starting in the 1960’s, American politicians felt more and more of a need to support civil rights in order to gain the support of the rest of the world. 

  

For more on the international context of the civil rights movement, see: The international context of Brown vs. Board and the dialog between George Washington Carver and Gandhi.