Cold War embarrassment drove the US government to defend Black civil rights.

Evidence

Civil rights activists were also pleased when Truman’s Justice Department filed a brief for Shelley v. Kramer. The case was decided on May 3, 1948, with the Supreme Court holding that the courts could not enforce all those Whites-only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation. “The United States has been embarrassed in the conduct of foreign relations by acts of discrimination taking place in this country,” the Justice Department’s brief stated. It was the first time the US government had intervened in a case to vindicate Black civil rights. It would not be the last. Truman’s Justice Department filed similar briefs for other successful desegregation cases in higher education during the 1940s and early 1950s, ever reminding the justices of the foreign implications of discrimination. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 916

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mary Dudziak’s Cold War civil rights thesis and to the reader’s standing interest in how self-interest precedes policy change. — connects to: Cold War embarrassment and northern black migration forced the desegregation of the armed forces. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3907
• SEED: Angle: US civil rights progress as a Cold War foreign-policy instrument — how international embarrassment, not moral awakening, moved the federal government.