Jazz, race, and American cultural exchange: An international study of United States cultural diplomacy, 1954--1968

In 1971, when Duke Ellington, one of the premier band leaders of the 20th century traveled to the Soviet Union on a good will tour for the United States government, he became a cultural symbol of U.S.-Soviet détente. Such tours had first become possible in 1954—a watershed year in U.S. domestic and foreign affairs. With Brown v. Board of Education, the United States ended its legally sanctioned system of racial apartheid. McCarthyism, though it lingered in the American mind well into the 1960s, underwent a decline when Senator Joseph McCarthy was denounced in 1954. And in July 1954, President imperative, called for the creation of a worldwide cultural exchange program for the performing arts to improve the world's perception of cultural and political life in the United States. Thereafter, hundreds of performing artists traveled around the globe as representatives of the United States government. From the height of the Cold War in 1954 to the burgeoning of détente in the early 1970s, U.S. cultural exchanges had profound implications for U.S. diplomatic, cultural, and race relations throughout the world.; This dissertation explores U.S. cultural diplomacy with Africa, the Soviet Union, and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968, in the context of the Cold War. It examines the intersection of international race relations, domestic civil rights, and the cultural exchange of U.S. jazz musicians and proposes to broaden the concept of cultural relations by defining race as a component of U.S. culture. It also integrates the idea of culture into the study of American foreign policy by assessing: how U.S. jazz exchanges in Africa and the USSR influenced perceptions of U.S. race relations; the extent to which they affected foreign perceptions of the United States; and the degree to which these exchanges transformed Americans' perceptions of themselves.