Excerpt from Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 25th Anniversary edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2025)
Jimmy Wilson’s name has not been remembered in the annals of Cold War history, but in 1958, this African American handyman was at the center of international attention. After he was sentenced to death in Alabama for stealing less than two dollars in change, Wilson’s case was thought to epitomize the harsh consequences of American racism. It brought to the surface international anxiety about the state of American race relations. Because the United States was the presumptive leader of the free world, racism in the nation was a matter of international concern. How could American democracy be a beacon during the Cold War, and a model for those struggling against Soviet oppression, if the United States itself practiced brutal discrimination against minorities within its own borders?
Jimmy Wilson’s unexpected entry into this international dilemma began on July 27, 1957. The facts of the unhappy events setting off his travails are unclear. Wilson had worked for Estelle Barker, an elderly white woman, in Marion, Alabama. He later told a Toronto reporter that he had simply wanted to borrow money from her against his future earnings, as he had in the past. As Wilson told the story, Barker let him into her home one evening, they had an argument, she threw some money on her bed and he took it and left. The coins would not be enough to cover the cost of his cab home. Barker told the police that his motives were more sinister. After taking the money she had dumped on her bed, she said he forced her onto the bed and unsuccessfully attempted to rape her.
Wilson was prosecuted only for robbery, for the theft of $1.95. Over the objections of Wilson’s attorney, Barker testified at trial about the alleged sexual assault. Wilson was quickly convicted by an all-white jury. Robbery carried a maximum penalty of death, and the presiding judge sentenced Wilson to die in the electric chair. When the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Wilson’s sentence, news of the case spread across the nation. Because other nations followed race in the United States with great interest, the Wilson case was soon international news.
Headlines around the world decried this death sentence for the theft of less than two dollars. The Voice of Ethiopia thought “it is inconceivable that in this enlightened age, in a country that prides itself on its code of justice, that, for the paltry sum of $1.95, a man should forfeit his life.” An editorial in the Ghanaian Ashanti Pioneer urged that the underlying law be repealed. According to the paper, it was “the High, inescapable duty of every right thinking human being who believes in democracy as understood and practised on this side of the Iron Curtain to venture to bring it home to the people of Alabama.” The Jimmy Wilson story was widely publicized in West Africa, prompting American businessmen to call the U.S. embassy in Monrovia to express their concern that Wilson’s execution would undermine “American effort to maintain sympathetic understanding [of our] principles and government” in that part of the world.
Petitions and letters of protest poured in. Hulda Omreit of Bodo, Norway, describing herself as “a simple Norwegian housewife,” wrote a letter to the U.S. government. She wished “to express her sympathy for the Negro, Jimmy Wilson, and plead for clemency for him. It makes no difference whether he is black or white; we are all brothers under the skin.” Six members of the Israeli Parliament sent a letter of protest. The Trades Union Congress of Ghana urged American authorities “to save not only the life of Wilson but also the good name of the United States of America from ridicule and contempt.” The Congress thought Wilson’s sentence “constitutes such a savage blow against the Negro Race that it finds no parallel in the Criminal Code of any modern State.” The Jones Town Youth Club of Jamaica was just one of the groups that held a protest in front of the U.S. consulate in Kingston. In one extreme reaction, the U.S. embassy in The Hague received calls threatening that the U.S. ambassador “would not survive” if Wilson were executed. After a story about the case appeared in Time magazine, someone in Perth, Australia, hung a black figure in effigy from the flagpole of the U.S. consulate. Above it was a sign reading “Guilty of theft of fourteen shillings.”
John Morsell, a spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), thought that it would be “a sad blot on the nation” if Wilson were executed. The NAACP was worried about the international repercussions. According to Morsell, “We think the communists will take this and go to town with it.” Sure enough, the communist newspaper in Rome, L’Unita, called Wilson’s death sentence “a new unprecedented crime by American segregationists,” while front-page stories in Prague appeared under headlines proclaiming “This is America.” Even those friendly to the United States were outraged, however. A group of Canadian judges was disturbed about the sentence and passed a resolution conveying its “deep concern” to Alabama Governor James Folsom. The judges warned that “[i]f Alabama electrocutes Jimmy Wilson it will shock the conscience of the world.” From St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Canon John Collins urged every Christian in Britain to protest the execution. The secretary of the British Labour Party thought it was unfortunate that “those who wish to criticize western liberty and democracy” had been given “such suitable ammunition for their propaganda.”
Before long, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was involved in the case. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had urged Dulles to intervene, calling the Wilson case “a matter of prime concern to the foreign relations of the United States.” CORE warned that “if this execution is carried out, certainly the enemies of the United States will give it world-wide publicity and thus convey a distorted picture of relations between the races in our country.” A flood of dispatches about the case from U.S. embassies around the world would make Dulles’s participation inevitable.
Secretary Dulles sent a telegram to Governor Folsom, informing him of the great international interest in the Jimmy Wilson case. Folsom did not need to be told that the world had taken an interest in Jimmy Wilson. He had received an average of a thousand letters a day about the case, many from abroad. The governor had “never seen anything like” it and was “utterly amazed” by the outpouring of international attention. He called a press conference to announce that he was “‘snowed under’ with mail from Toronto demanding clemency” for Wilson. Folsom told Dulles that he stood ready to “aid in interpreting the facts of the case to the peoples of the world.” After the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Wilson’s conviction and sentence, Governor Folsom acted with unusual haste to grant Wilson clemency. The reason he acted so quickly was to end what he called the “international hullabaloo.”
Jimmy Wilson’s case is one example of the international impact of American race discrimination during the Cold War. Domestic civil rights crises would quickly become international crises. As presidents and secretaries of state from 1946 to the mid-1960s worried about the impact of race discrimination on U.S. prestige abroad, civil rights reform came to be seen as crucial to U.S. foreign relations.
Yet the Cold War would frame and thereby limit the nation’s civil rights commitment. The primacy of anticommunism in postwar American politics and culture left a very narrow space for criticism of the status quo. By silencing certain voices and by promoting a particular vision of racial justice, the Cold War led to a narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse. The narrow boundaries of Cold War—era civil rights politics kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda. In addition, to the extent that the nation’s commitment to social justice was motivated by a need to respond to foreign critics, civil rights reforms that made the nation look good might be sufficient. The narrow terms of Cold War civil rights discourse and the nature of the federal government’s commitment help explain the limits of social change during this period.
In addressing civil rights reform from 1946 through the mid-1960s, the federal government engaged in a sustained effort to tell a particular story about race and American democracy: a story of progress, a story of the triumph of good over evil, a story of U.S. moral superiority. The lesson of this story was always that American democracy was a form of government that made the achievement of social justice possible, and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to dictatorial imposition. The story of race in America, used to compare democracy and communism, became an important Cold War narrative.
American race relations would not always stay neatly within this frame. Racial violence continued to mar the image of the United States in the 1950s, even as the Voice of America heralded the Supreme Court’s ruling that school segregation violated the Constitution. During the 1960s the civil rights movement and massive resistance in the South forced the federal government to devote more attention both to racial justice in the nation and to the impact of the movement on U.S. prestige abroad.
Out of this dynamic comes a rather complex story. Domestic racism and civil rights protest led to international criticism of the U.S. government. International criticism led the federal government to respond, through placating foreign critics by reframing the narrative of race in America, and through promoting some level of social change. While civil rights reform in different eras has been motivated by a variety of factors, one element during the early Cold War years was the need for reform in order to make credible the government’s argument about race and democracy. [1]
[1] Excerpt from the Introduction to Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 25th Anniversary edition (Princeton University Press, 2025). Reprinted with permission. Extensive citations to sources appear in the published version.