"The effect of the cold war on African-American civil rights: America and the world audience, 1945-1968."

The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, however, is usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold on domestic United States race politics, and the process through the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands. While past studies of the civil rights movement have properly emphasized sized such variables as demographic shifts, changes in the economy, and social-movement organizational dynamics, the purpose of this article is (1) to stress the contributing importance of America's Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union in the development of black civil rights; and (2) to demonstrate with this important case how the political-process model for the study of social movements can be clarified and made more precise through insights from neoinstitutional theory, now mostly identified with the cultural analysis of organizations. Combining the political-process model's emphasis on agency and opportunity with neoinstitutional theory's stress on legitimacy can help develop the language to explain the Cold War/civil rights connection.