| This dissertation explores the development of a moderate, interracial, and globally-conscious civil rights community in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1954. It argues that Los Angeles, a city catapulted into prominence by war, fostered an activist agenda that bridged two civil rights periods usually considered in isolation---the 1940s and the 1960s---and made the city an ideological as well as a racial and international frontier. By linking race, ethnicity, internationalism, and regional development, this study revises longstanding historiographical assumptions about civil rights, establishing that these struggles not only originated well before Brown v. Board of Education but were fundamentally multiracial, influenced by international affairs, and centered in the West. In addition to highlighting the often overlooked connections between American history and world history, this project insists that civil rights historians move beyond an eastern-centered perspective and a binary black-white model.;This story uses the interconnected histories of four minority groups---African, Japanese, Jewish, and Mexican Americans---to demonstrate the interplay between the international arena and domestic reform. Arguing that global changes influenced how these groups pursued strategies to achieve equal treatment, and that international events helped determine their success, it uses organizational records, personal letters, newspapers, and oral histories to account for activists' evolving strategies to achieve equal treatment. As it traces the shift from 1930s' ethnic particularism to 1940s' interracialism to a 1950s' emphasis on community improvement, the dissertation emphasizes the continuity of civil rights struggles and shows how the Brown decision could follow on the heels of one of the most conservative periods in American history, the early Cold War. World War II and the Cold War facilitated social justice campaigns but also forced collaboration and moderation. Ultimately a moderate interracial approach triumphed over more radical visions as the international and domestic Cold War marginalized radicals and ceded increasing access to moderates, who were gradually incorporated into local, state, and national political agendas. This moderate interracialism ultimately shaped the contours of American civil rights policy, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, and in legislation like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Immigration Reform Act (1965). |
