As teachers, we divide the narrative of history into discrete topics, a unit plan on the

Revolutionary War, another on the progressive movement, another on the Depression.

This strategy reflects the curriculum standards that we are asked to work with, and our

need to craft a narrative that's coherent for our students. But it also puts This strategy reflects the curriculum standards that we are asked to work with, and our need

to craft a narrative that's coherent for our students.

But it also puts historical events into different silos, very separate from one another.

Then, every so often, a resource comes around that explodes those silos and challenges us

to rethink that neat sequence of unit plans. For me, that resource was Mary Dujak's Cold War Civil Rights.

I realize that I'm dating myself here.

Dujak's book is now over 20 years old, but it is still relevant.

In Cold War Civil Rights, Dujak explores the history of the civil rights movement

within the international context of the Cold War.

She argues that the limits of American democracy at home

with regard to what was commonly known at the time as

the Negro problem,

but which we know as the violence and structural racism of Jim Crow, constituted an international public relations crisis,

a crisis that Cold War adversaries like the Soviet Union seized at every opportunity.

Even during World War II, writer Pearl S. Buck noted that America's racial problems

were fodder for enemy propaganda.

Buck wrote,

Every lynching, every race riot, gives joy to Japan.

The discriminations of the American Army and Navy and the Air Forces against colored soldiers and sailors,

...