Cold war Colorado: Civil rights liberals and the movement for legislative equality, 1945--1959

Historians have established that during and after World War II, the fight against Germany and its Nazi ideology influenced the arguments of national civil rights advocates in the United States, the formulation of national civil rights policies and the Cold War foreign policies of numerous presidential administrations. However, few, if any historians have undertaken an in-depth analysis of the impact of World War II and the Cold War on the passage of statewide civil rights legislation.;In Colorado, World War II and the subsequent Cold War combined to create an exploitable moment for a comparatively small number of educated and middle-class racial liberals in Denver. This coalition sought to convince the Colorado legislature of the soundness of their own vision of racial equality: the enactment of legislation that prohibited discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing. Utilizing newspaper articles and editorials, and the archived records of the key participants in the movement for statewide civil rights protections, this study analyzes how the battle against Nazi Germany---which first subjected America's racist institutions, practices and assumptions to international scrutiny---and the global racial politics of the subsequent Cold War resulted in the passage of a significant body of statutory civil rights protections in Colorado between 1951 and 1959.;During the 1950s, civil rights movements---comprised of diverse organizational and individual proponents of racial equality---flourished in states outside of the South, lobbying local and state governments for the enactment and enforcement of civil rights laws. They were joined by local and state-level politicians, newspaper editors, civic and business leaders and others who viewed anti-discrimination laws less as moral or democratic imperatives, than as crucial weapons with which to battle communist representations of white supremacy in the United States. However, American civil rights historiography does not yet reflect this complexity. By analyzing the impact of national and international developments on civil rights advocates and legislators in Colorado, this paper will enlarge the scope of Cold War and state civil rights scholarship, and will also contribute to the expanding territorial geography of civil rights studies generally.