A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details American Segregationist Ideology and White Southern Africa, 1948-1975 Zoe L. Hyman DPhil American History, Literature and Social Studies University of Sussex September 2011 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Zoe Hyman UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Zoe L. Hyman DPhil American History, Literature and Social Studies American Segregationist Ideology and White Southern Africa, 1948-1975 SUMMARY This thesis examines the relationship between segregationist organisations, publications and individuals in the United States and their pro-apartheid counterparts in southern Africa. It uncovers a sustained and extensive foreign policy of segregationists that has hitherto been overlooked and a relationship between the countries that goes beyond existing analyses of Cold War cooperation or comparative studies of the countries’ racial systems. When the civil rights movement began, steadfast segregationists in the American South looked further afield for support, inspiration and ideological affirmation of their belief in white supremacy. They found this in South Africa and its apartheid policies as well as in other right-wing organisations and individuals outside the American South. Through the archives of segregationist organisations, civil rights organisations, anti-communist groups, individuals, governmental records and newspapers, this thesis charts the journey southern segregationists took from the creation of massive resistance in 1954 – a movement focused on regional problems – to a dramatically less isolationist standpoint one decade later. By 1965, white southern Africa had really captured the imagination of segregationists, alliances had been forged and when massive resistance failed, segregationists did not retreat from their international agenda. Although South Africa was a focal point of segregationists’ attention during massive resistance, they also became committed to white rule in Rhodesia after 1965. This thesis examines the groups across America that supported the isolated bastions of white supremacy in southern Africa and demonstrates that the Cold War alliance between U.S. and southern African governments inadvertently helped to maintain and conceal the racism that drove segregationists to form fruitful links in southern Africa. The tangible and ideological links segregationists made abroad internationalised a concept of white supremacy in which race trumped nationality. This global white supremacy has endured and reveals that segregationists were not insignificant reactionaries with a short lived movement but people who affected race relations in the long term. For my parents, Catherine and Leslie Hyman CONTENTS Acknowledgments ————— vii Introduction ————— 1 Chapter One ————— A Hot Alliance in a Cold War: America’s Foreign Policy towards South Africa, 1948-1965 31 Chapter Two ————— Transnational Civil Rights: The NAACP, South Africa and the International Fight for Racial Equality, 1948-1965 72 Chapter Three ————— The Foreign Policy of Massive Resistance: Segregationists and South Africa, 1954-1965 108 Chapter Four ————— Massive Resisters after Massive Resistance: Segregationists, South Africa and Rhodesia, 1965-1975 157 Chapter Five ————— Organised Assistance: Rhodesia’s American Friends, 1965-1975 189 Conclusion ————— 235 Bibliography ————— 245 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It would not have been possible to write this thesis without the help and support of those around me. I extend my sincere gratitude to my supervisors at the University of Sussex. It has been a privilege to learn from Clive Webb and Saul Dubow and I am indebted to them both for their contributions to this thesis. I would like to thank Clive for the time and effort he has put into my development as a historian over the years. In autumn 2002, Clive taught a course on American history in the twentieth century. I was a second year undergraduate in that class and Clive inspired in me a passion for the subject. His mentoring and encouragement ever since has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Saul for his support and assistance throughout this project and for introducing me to research and lines of enquiry that I might not otherwise have come across. I am also grateful to the faculty of the American Studies department at Sussex for supporting my ambitions and offering such helpful advice and encouragement along the way. There are also a number of friends who have given me intellectual and emotional support throughout this project: Nadja Janssen, Roger Johnson, Kate Nowicki, Basmah Fahim and Kate Mason. I would like to thank Adam Hyman, who is a wonderful brother, and Ben Postlethwaite, who has been at my side for most of this project and given me love and encouragement throughout. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my parents, Catherine and Leslie Hyman, for their unquestioning love and support. Without them, none of this would have been possible. 1 Introduction In April 1978, conservative political columnist Holmes Alexander reported the passing of the segregationist old guard. ‘With its unfailing sense of drama’, he wrote, ‘history contrived that Mississippi Sen. Jim Eastland, 73, announced the termination of his three- decade national service at approximately the time Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith conceded the end of white minority rule in his country’. For Alexander, this was more than just coincidental timing; the symbolism of these two men bowing out just days apart represented a momentous change. ‘When an Eastland retires and an Ian Smith sits down in an executive council with Africans’, he wrote somewhat remorsefully, ‘you know this is a different world than the one most of us were born into’.1 The course of race relations in the United States and southern Africa did appear to be shifting with key players in the perpetuation of racial inequality finally beginning to relent and retire. Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, a relic of segregation and massive resistance, announced that he would not seek re-election to the United States Senate. Since his election in 1941, Eastland had been a staunch conservative on all issues, especially race, and gained notoriety during the 1950s and 1960s for blocking and delaying civil rights reform. Mississippi had been the citadel of white supremacy in the American South and Eastland’s commitment to segregation remained long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965 had put the final nail in Jim Crow’s coffin. Less than ten years later, however, the re-enfranchisement of African Americans ensured that Eastland 1 Holmes Alexander, ‘The Masters Of A Divine Plan’, News and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 9 April 1978, 14-A. 2 was all but certain to lose a re-election campaign. Eastland’s retirement coincided with the beginning of a transition to black majority rule in Rhodesia, a settlement reached in no small part due to pressure from the United States and South Africa for Rhodesia’s Prime Minister, Ian Smith, to capitulate. Smith had ruled Rhodesia, with the support of Americans like Eastland, since his white minority government unilaterally declared its independence from Britain in 1965. Rather than concede to black rule, Smith stubbornly governed an illegal state for fifteen years. Just five months later, in September 1978, the National Party elected Pieter Willem Botha to be its leader and prime minister of South Africa. He took over the apartheid state with a language of reform and challenged white South Africans to ‘adapt or die’.2 Botha had taken office at a difficult time. His predecessor, John Vorster, had been forced to resign after a scandal in which government funds were used for propaganda purposes overseas; the southern white bloc that had buffered South Africa had disintegrated, leaving the country more politically isolated than ever; and for the first time the United Nations had adopted a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa.3 Like his predecessors, Botha was a fierce opponent of black rule, but he also recognised that reform was needed – not because he doubted the philosophy of apartheid, but because he saw political reform as the only way to ensure the ‘security and survival’ of whites.4 2 Deon Geldenhuys, The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African Foreign Policy Making (Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa, 1984), 36. 3 The independence of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and negotiations in Rhodesia bought black rule to the southern region of Africa, which had previously been characterised by white minority and colonial rule. United Nations Resolution 418 (4 November 1977) revoked the 1963 voluntary arms embargo and replaced it with a mandatory one. 4 James Barber and John Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security, 1945- 1988 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 248. See also Robert M. Price, ‘Apartheid and White Supremacy: the Meaning of Government-Led Reform in the South African Context’, in Robert M. Price and 3 Botha’s reform would be mixed with severe repression and it would take until 1994 for South Africa to make the transition to black majority rule. However, Alexander was right; it was a markedly different world. Out of the horrors of World War II, oppressed minorities and majorities across the globe had begun to demand freedom and equality. By 1978 the vast majority of Africa had been decolonised and in the American South the civil rights movement had defeated legally-sanctioned segregation.