Steward of world peace, keeper of fair play: The American hydrogen bomb and civil rights, 1945--1954

This dissertation traces and evaluates the campaign for fair employment waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League during the early Cold War. At the center of their initiative was the Savannah River Plant, a massive complex of nuclear reactors and support facilities critical to the production of the hydrogen bomb. Nuclear weapons' centrality to the struggle against the communist menace augmented Savannah River's appeal (already substantial due to its location in the heart of the segregated South) as the strongest candidate for the campaign. Civil rights organizations employed a variety of means at the local and national levels to turn the public spotlight on the hydrogen bomb plant and to make the linkage between racial justice and national security. Presidential committees established by Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to prohibit bias in the execution of federal contracts were significant measures of the fair employment campaign's legacy.; The civil rights groups and presidential committees fell well short of their objectives, however, as racial discrimination persisted at the Savannah River Plant and in most American industrial concerns throughout the 1950s. The dissertation assesses the limited gains achieved, attributing the lack of success to hostile or indifferent corporate and government officials as well as to the straitened political atmosphere of the Cold War. As the Urban League and NAACP recast their organizational strategies and tactics to the new political and social realities of domestic containment, they nonetheless linked fair employment with the vanguard of the atomic arsenal, the Savannah River Plant. This decision demonstrated that rather than challenging Cold War premises, the civil rights movement sought to carve out a place within the national security establishment. Their efforts received rhetorical support from national elites, but little in the way of practical results such as political access or desirable employment in the rapidly expanding military-industrial complex.