"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 tury. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, howeve usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, 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 dem While past studies of the civil rights movement have properly em sized such variables as democraphic shifts, changes in the econom social-movement organizational dynamics, the purpose of this a is (1) to stress the contributing importance of America's Cold W struggle with the Soviet Union in the development of black civil rig and (2) to demonstrate with this important case how the politi process model for the study of social movements can be clarifie made more precise through insights from neoinstitutional theory mostly identified with the cultural analysis of organizations. Coping the political-process model's emphasis on agency and opportu with neoinstitutional theory's stress on legitimacy can help devel language to explain the Cold War/civil rights connection.