“Atlanta Needs U.N. Help”

As James Forman—Executive Secretary of SNCC, student of the organizing tradition, and bold internationalist uniformed in bib overalls to signal his solidarity with working class Southerners—noted in his autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, “in the fall of 1963, [SNCC] was approaching a new era in the struggle.”Footnote ¹¹ Though SNCC was only 3 years old, the organization had offered a profound challenge to the elders of the movement during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In particular, SNCC Chairman John Lewis questioned the unholy alliance between Cold War liberals and the civil rights establishment. He, in his trademark prophetic passion, proclaimed to more than 200,000 on that sweltering August day, “We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their career on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation.” Lewis continued, “What political leader can stand up and say, ‘My party is the party of principles?’ The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?”Footnote ¹²

Moreover, SNCC workers were becoming increasingly critical of the emphasis some in the movement placed on nonviolent resistance. In his 6 month report given in December 1963, Lewis acknowledged that the longstanding theopolitical dispute between SNCC activists on “nonviolence as a technique” as opposed to “nonviolence as a philosophy of life” had reached new proportions.Footnote ¹³ Nothing made this clearer than many activists' emotional rejoinder to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. A time-delayed, dynamite blast rocked the Birmingham civil rights sanctuary, killing four young girls only minutes after that September morning's Sunday school lesson. Forman wrote that this unspeakable attack on innocent children made a “mockery” of the nonviolence preached during the March on Washington. Although SNCC, a group that Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped would become the student wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had been founded on Gandhian principles of nonviolence, Forman observed that after the Sixteenth Street church bombing, “the urge toward retaliatory violence was growing stronger and stronger” among the student activists.Footnote ¹⁴

SNCC organizers were also beginning to reframe their demands for racial equality in the fall of 1963. During Thanksgiving weekend of that year, SNCC's Washington, DC affiliate hosted a national conference entitled “One Man, One Vote: Jobs and Food.” The conference organizers aimed to compel government leaders “to propose laws which take some money from the wealthy and give it to the poor” and to “challeng[e] private enterprise … to make jobs available, because every individual has an inherent right to food, clothing, and shelter.”Footnote ¹⁵ The theme “One Man, One Vote,” a concept popularized by the African National Congress, had become popular in the Southern wing of the freedom movement during 1963, largely because leading SNCC activists, such as Lewis and Forman, had recast their domestic struggle for voting rights in more “revolutionary,” anticolonial terms. These developments signaled how by late 1963, SNCC activists were making more explicit connections between the United States civil rights movement and liberation movements abroad, and deepening their criticisms of the political economy by “attack[ing] problems… [blacks] as a people face in [their] daily lives: jobs, housing, education, welfare and medical care.”Footnote ¹⁶

As Forman acknowledged, however, in many places throughout the South, civil rights activists were still struggling to desegregate public accommodations in 1963.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the federal civil rights bill proposed by President Kennedy gained additional support after the March on Washington, Southern cities, such as Atlanta, Georgia, witnessed violent street clashes over the future of American constitutional law: the meaning of equal protection, the scope of private property rights, and the potential uses of the commerce power.Footnote ¹⁸ SNCC had toiled at the intersection of law reform and social change, and in the fall of 1963, its contingent in Atlanta was entering a new phase of this racial saga.

During the civil rights movement, Atlanta, considered the “capital” of the United States South, was hailed as “the city too busy to hate.”Footnote ¹⁹ Atlanta was home to the nation's most extensive collection of historically black colleges, and the city, brimming with an impressive array of black-owned businesses and luxury homes, boasted the country's largest black middle class. Local officials routinely reminded Atlanta's impatient student activists and “outside” onlookers that “Atlanta was no Birmingham,” because as Atlanta's moniker suggested, its city fathers claimed to be far more interested in economic development than in simple racial domination. Atlanta's mayor, Ivan Allen, Jr., was the only Southern mayor to testify before Congress in favor of the proposed civil rights bill, and he often credited the longstanding racial brokerage system—an informal arrangement through which select members of the Atlanta's black aristocracy privately negotiated the terms of desegregation with their counterparts in the local, white business community to assuage racial tensions—for the city's racial reputation.Footnote ²⁰ However, in 1963, segregationists in downtown Atlanta had censured him for airing the city's problems before federal officials, and rejected his pleas to desegregate local public accommodations.Footnote ²¹ Allen later reflected on that moment in the movement: “Atlanta had made strides during the first three years of the sixties, but the battle lines had been drawn quite clearly at the restaurants and the hotel. Everything I had tried in those areas had failed.”Footnote ²²

With a federal civil rights bill looming and Atlanta still a Jim Crow city, the local battle over desegregation intensified in the fall of 1963. Most notably, SNCC and the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), an Atlanta University Center based organization, developed new plans for a wave of protests to break the grip of downtown proprietors. Furthermore, as the student activists strategized for an all-out assault on Jim Crow, a loose coalition of Atlanta area ministers, operating under the umbrella of SCLC's Operation Breadbasket, were negotiating with downtown proprietors regarding segregated business practices.Footnote ²³ This local activism culminated on October 19, 1963, when nine civil rights groups and “more than two hundred outstanding leaders of the Atlanta Community” formed an umbrella organization, the Atlanta Summit Leadership Conference (SLC). The SLC devised a comprehensive “battle plan” to attack discrimination in eight key areas: public accommodations, employment, voter registration and education, public school desegregation, health, housing, law enforcement, and political issues.Footnote ²⁴ The Atlanta Daily World, the city's prominent and conservative black newspaper, remarked that the SLC exemplified an “unusually high degree of unity,” as the ideologically diverse coalition agreed to make Atlanta an “open city” to all races.Footnote ²⁵

However, over the next several months, the sluggish pace of desegregation frustrated even many of the relatively conservative leaders in the SLC. In the city's tradition of brokerage politics, the SLC's steering committee, co-chaired by 78-year-old, A.T. (“Colonel”) Walden, Atlanta's most prominent black attorney and long-time political leader, and Clarence D. Coleman, regional director of the National Urban League, met with various white political, economic, and civic leaders, aiming to encourage negotiations under intense pressure to desegregate. From October to December 1963, the steering committee, now in charge of executing the SLC's “battle plan” to end Jim Crow in Atlanta, participated in a series of meetings with the Chamber of Commerce, the Atlanta School Board, the Atlanta Housing Authority, the Fulton–DeKalb Hospital Authority, the Board of Family Services, and various hotel and restaurant owners.Footnote ²⁶ Many of these “moderate” bodies adopted empty resolutions championing the SLC's fundamental goals, but no progress was made. Amid the lingering racial stalemate, and despite an early winter freeze, the SLC mobilized 3,000 Atlantans for a “Pilgrimage for Democracy,” a demonstration styled after the March on Washington.Footnote ²⁷ The December rally featured a rare local appearance by the “moral leader of the nation” and Auburn Avenue's own, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Pilgrimage organizers, citing the failed biracial negotiations, challenged the city's leadership and downtown businesses to make real “Atlanta's race relations image, often proudly used to bolster America's image abroad.”Footnote ²⁸

Groups of white proprietors, in response to the SLC, took out full-page advertisements in the Atlanta Constitution emphasizing the “constitutional” nature of segregation. One advertisement reasoned, “This matter has transcended the consideration of civil rights alone. It now involves the basic right of an individual, any individual of whatever race, creed or color, to engage in business, to purvey any commodity or service which is lawful, to cater to a clientele of its own choosing and, once selected, to honor his obligation to provide the goods and/or services which first prompted the customer's allegiance to the establishment.”Footnote ²⁹

The SLC's failure to fully desegregate Atlanta re-ignited the intergenerational debate within black Atlanta about respectable and effective civil rights advocacy. In an internal memorandum dated December 16, 1963, SNCC field secretary, Debbie Amis, noted that “the students have followed the leadership of the Summit Conference …[yet] this has kept them from taking any initiative or thinking creatively.” Amis maintained that “through all the negotiating with the city fathers and financial tycoons, very few of the requests were met with positive action.” Citing the generational gap between the “militant activists groups …ready to ‘hit the streets’” and the “negotiators,” Amis concluded that “there can be a student movement independent in program and thinking—in other words, more detached from the conservative adult thought.”Footnote ³⁰

Accordingly, by late December 1963, the Atlanta student activists commenced protests independent of the SLC, and these demonstrations forged new political strategies and alliances within the global freedom struggle. On December 21, Kenyan Minister of Home Affairs Oginga Odinga, toured Atlanta during his trip to the United States to accept Kenya's new membership in the United Nations.Footnote ³¹ According to Forman, Odinga's schedule, organized by the United States State Department, did not include a visit to SNCC's Atlanta office, “[s]o we decided to visit him.” Forman recalled, “A group of us went to the Peachtree Manor where he was staying, brought him gifts, sang freedom songs and chanted ‘Uhuru’—freedom—with him.” Forman continued, “Inspired by the visit, we went on to a Toddle House restaurant for coffee.” However, as the activists readily understood, the Toddle House was a racially segregated establishment. The Toddle House refused to serve the SNCC activists and Odinga, and twenty-one protesters, including members of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Atlanta office staff, were arrested.Footnote ³² Odinga declared that American race relations were “very pitiful” and proclaimed that the United States “practices segregation—which is what we are fighting in Africa.”Footnote ³³

Matthew Jones, the SNCC Freedom Singer who penned the movement anthem, “Oginga Odinga,” reflected on meeting the Kenyan revolutionary: “It's a funny thing about that word freedom. It doesn't make any difference if it's Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, English or French, it's got that certain ring to it. We …thank Mr. Odinga for revitalizing the movement in Atlanta.”Footnote ³⁴ Embarrassed by the negative publicity surrounding the protests and arrests during Odinga's visit to Atlanta, Dobbs House, owner of Toddle House Restaurants, entered negotiations with SNCC, and subsequently desegregated all Dobbs House and Toddle House Restaurants nationwide.Footnote ³⁵

As the new year started, the independent-minded and energized student movement did not relent. On January 7, 150 demonstrators, under the guidance of SNCC and COAHR, “played hooky for freedom” to protest the “overcrowded conditions and inadequate facilities” in black Atlanta schools.Footnote ³⁶ The organizers maintained that in the spirit of the “21 students [who] spent Christmas in jail to desegregate [the] Dobbs and Toddle Houses,” students should “join the March on Atlanta [to] learn civics in the streets, history at the counters, and teach Mayor Allen democracy.”Footnote ³⁷ The group soon descended upon Mayor Allen's City Hall office and thereafter attempted to receive service at two segregated fast-food restaurants.Footnote ³⁸ Although there were no arrests during the march, eighty-nine students were suspended from school for their involvement.Footnote ³⁹ SNCC Chairman John Lewis was unapologetic about the students “playing hooky for freedom” and radically reframed the students' activism: it was his “feeling that most of the students involved will learn more in one day in a freedom school than they will learn in a whole year in a segregated school.” Nevertheless, the mayor refused to meet with the students, whom he labeled “truants.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Atlanta Daily World predictably voiced the conservative perspective within black Atlanta, contending, “With the dropout rate among teenagers at an all-time high, our students can ill-afford to flout discipline in the classroom and ‘learn civics in the streets’ or ‘history at the counters.’”Footnote ⁴¹

The late December and early January, protests reflected the students' evolving political consciousness. As Ed Nakawatase, a Japanese-American SNCC activist who spent 5 days in jail after he attempted to desegregate the Toddle House during Odinga's visit, remembered, “[T]here was a resonance with this leader of a newly independent African nation by most of my African-American comrades. The visit gave some reality to the notion that we were engaged in a … larger international struggle.”Footnote ⁴² Moreover, this alternative vision of freedom defied the demands of older civil rights leadership and their middle-class notions of public decorum. Few African-American professionals decried student activism at upscale hotels and restaurants. However, SNCC's protests at local diners and fast-food restaurants reflected their growing lack of concern with the conventions of black middle-class politics.Footnote ⁴³

Over the next several weeks, hundreds of high school and college students and local citizens were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and trespassing. Inside segregated eateries, sit-in demonstrators braved restaurant waitstaff wielding butcher knives and baseball bats. They dodged the fists and bowls of condiments hurled at them. Police soon followed with bruising billy clubs and chokeholds. Protesters poured into the Fulton County Jail, only to be segregated by race again and endure renewed rounds of beatings—this time from hardnosed inmates. In January 1964, SNCC was revealing to the nation that despite Atlanta's liberal reputation, Jim Crow continued to undermine the life chances of black Atlantans. As a New York Times article noted, “The student committee has led virtually all the recent demonstrations that have marked a stepped up campaign by civil rights organizations for goals more extensive than those won by Northern Negroes. Those include broad-scale improvements in education, employment, health, government and public accommodations.”Footnote ⁴⁴

World audiences were also taking notice of Atlanta's winter of discontent. International media outlets in places as diverse as Toronto, Kingston, and Bombay covered the Southern capital's quickly escalating, racial crisis. SNCC's new offensive, according to the Indian newspaper, had even left some Klansmen with “cold feet.” Rather than confront SNCC activists demonstrating outside of a segregated restaurant in January 1964, “ten robed members of the Ku Klux Klan had locked themselves in and with the lights turned off.” Forman, the Indian Express reported, then “taunted the Klansmen through the closed doors.” Such a confrontation would have been unimaginable to many black Atlantans only several years earlier. Forman announced to onlookers and readers, “The day has come when the Ku Klux Klan is afraid to come out.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Morris Abram and the Fight to Internationalize the First Amendment

In the midst of this new wave of radicalized student activism, the Sub-Commission prepared to convene in Atlanta to learn more about American progress toward ending racial segregation. Mayor Allen welcomed the fourteen member Sub-Commission to Atlanta as a personal favor to Abram, a Georgia native and the sole United States expert on the Sub-Commission.Footnote ⁴⁶

Abram personified the interest convergence between the Cold War and moderate factions of the civil rights movement.Footnote ⁴⁷ Abram, an Air Force Major during World War II, a staff member of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials, and the first general counsel of the Peace Corps, understood that promoting civil rights at home would strengthen the United States's image abroad. In fact, President Kennedy had selected Abram for the Sub-Commission post, in part, because of Abram's willingness to tackle Jim Crow in Georgia. He had nobly fought to expand black voting rights and civil liberties in the Peach State, convinced Mayor Allen to testify on behalf of the bill that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and even helped engineer Dr. King's release from an Atlanta jail in 1960.Footnote ⁴⁸ But for Abram, like Kennedy, civil rights was not simply a moral issue. Civil rights was also a foreign policy issue. Jim Crow had undermined American attempts to win the Cold War. Demonstrating that United States officials were sympathetic to civil rights would allow the nation's diplomats to argue more persuasively that United States-style democracy was the model for foreign governments and the U.N. to follow.Footnote ⁴⁹ Accordingly, Abram, who served as the primary drafter of ICERD during the Sub-Commission's January 1964 session, acknowledged to his colleagues on the Sub-Commission that the United States still struggled with racism; however, he used the nation's growing commitment to formal equality during the civil rights movement to counter foreign criticism of American race relations. “I felt that… no matter how lax we were in enforcing [civil rights], we were without fault compared to the rest of the world,” Abram remembered.Footnote ⁵⁰ “I was keenly aware that I was representing the only great power that stands for human rights, though the United States in the 1960s took great abuse from quarters in which freedom and liberty were unknown.” Abram believed that by showing the Sub-Commission the changes occurring in the civil rights South, he could “flaunt the glorious difference between [United States] society and that of a country such as the Soviet Union, whose vast engine of repression operates in the name of government.”Footnote ⁵¹

Abram hoped to reproduce Atlantans' respect for the First Amendment throughout the world.Footnote ⁵² He had devised the Sub-Commission's Atlanta visit—the group's first trip to the South and anywhere in the United States outside of the U.N. headquarters in New York for that matter—with this specific goal in mind. Atlanta's racial ambassadors would demonstrate that the city's transition away from Jim Crow was possible under a juridical framework, such as the First Amendment, which protected the rights of both civil rights organizations and hate groups.Footnote ⁵³ In turn, the Atlanta visit would persuade the Sub-Commission's members to trust that they could end racial discrimination by adopting a draft convention that was modeled on the United States's protections of freedom of speech and association.

Only weeks before the trip to Atlanta, however, the U.N. had ratified the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, including its controversial Article 9 provision, which had tarnished the image of American democracy. Under Article 9, state signatories to the Declaration were urged to denounce “[a]ll propaganda and organizations based on ideas or theories of the superiority of one race and “prosecute and/or outlaw organizations which promote or incite to racial discrimination.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Article 9 of the Declaration conflicted with the First Amendment's protection of hate speech and hate organizations, and the Soviets seized upon this apparent contradiction in United States constitutional politics; that a nation allegedly committed to improving race relations would legally protect the activities of hate groups. Thus, throughout the Sub-Commission's 1963 debates on this contentious provision, Boris Ivanov, in violation of the Sub-Commission's protocol, taunted Abram in front of the human rights community for the continued existence of Klan activity in the United States. Ivanov drew parallels between the United States's protection of hate speech and Nazi Germany's endorsement of anti-Semitism, emphasizing “the danger of allowing individuals and organizations to preach racism with impunity because, as experience in Germany had shown, such license could not only affect State policy but might even become State doctrine. Hitler had actually converted the racist propaganda current in Germany before the second World War into official Government policy, with consequences which should not be permitted to recur.” Ivanov then fanned the flames of the Cold War, sarcastically remarking, “He was confident, however, that Governments including the United States could take measures to close any loopholes in their legislation which might permit racist and fascist propaganda, without impairing freedom of speech.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Abram was livid.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Declaration's condemnation of both hate speech and hate groups had given moral weight to the Soviet Union's legitimate concerns that the continued activity of hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, undermined black strivings in the Jim Crow South. Simultaneously, the Declaration rendered the United States's toleration of hate and, by extension, the American ideas of free speech and association, as racial outliers in global governance. The United States was humiliated by the Soviet bloc. American diplomats grumbled that they were unable to vote for a Declaration provision, “which if we were to implement it, would violate what our Constitution establishes as the inalienable rights of our citizens,” and the State Department issued press releases across the globe attempting to explain the United States's seemingly lukewarm support for the U.N.'s fight to eliminate racial discrimination.Footnote ⁵⁷

Thus, in 1964, State Department officials considered the ban of hate speech and groups the “key section of the Draft Convention.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Abram remained optimistic that he would be able to use the Sub-Commission's ICERD debates to counter Soviet advances on the hate speech question. This new round of Sub-Commission debates was significant for several reasons. First, a convention, unlike a declaration, is legally binding upon state parties. Accordingly, the Sub-Commission's 1964 session provided Abram with an opening to translate American constitutional understandings of free speech into a binding international legal document. Abram recognized this substantial distinction early in these debates, arguing, “The declaration, however, is not offered as legislation and of course this was widely known to the Assembly when it was adopted. Now we are drafting a convention. It is not sufficient to merely lift clauses from the declaration and to rewrite the proclamations as commands.” Abram stressed, “No convention is practicable which demands a serious abridgement of freedom of speech, since a significant part of the world enshrines this right as a cornerstone of its society. In these states certain individual rights are not merely well regarded; they are indispensable.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Sub-Commission's 1964 session also offered Abram a second opportunity to win the ideological battle with the Eastern bloc over the racial efficacy of the First Amendment. During the Sub-Commission's 1963 session, the Soviets had successfully portrayed the First Amendment as a legal barrier in the worldwide march to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. In 1964, State Department officials instructed Abram to emphasize that the American constitutional protections were consistent with human rights norms and that Article 9 of the Declaration and the provision that would become Article 4 of the Convention were deviations from longstanding human rights traditions.Footnote ⁶⁰ “[F]rom a reading of Article 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Abram professed to the Sub-Commission early in the 1964 session, “I should have thought that freedom of speech, opinion, assembly and association was at least the goal of almost all of mankind.” Abram's assertion was technically correct. His texualist reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the U.N's first articulation of the rights endowed to all people, seemed to support the United States's position on hate speech and groups, and with the UDHR hailed as a founding document of the contemporary human rights community, the U.N. General Assembly (GA) endorsed the position that the UDHR should guide each U.N. organ's elaboration of subsequent human rights provisions, including the hotly contested article. “In any event a very large number of people have lived in stable societies under free speech for a very long time. On principle these people support the right of their neighbors to express ideas with which they and their government frequently disagree and which they occasionally find hateful,” he continued. “They have learned from experience,” Abram reasoned, “that this system which permits free speech is durable—far more so than some which tolerated no diversity of opinion.”Footnote ⁶¹

Abram, nevertheless, was unable to persuade the Sub-Commission that racial progress could occur under a legal regime that permitted the promotion of racist viewpoints. With the Sub-Commission largely unconvinced of Abram's position, the body, during the early 1964 debate, tentatively agreed on criminalizing hate speech and hate groups in the draft Convention. The State Department was particularly troubled by section (b) the proposed article. Under section (b), state parties to the Convention were to “declare illegal and prohibit organizations, and also organized and all other propaganda activities, which promote and incite racial discrimination, and shall recognize participation in such organizations or activities as an offence punishable by law.”Footnote ⁶² The United States, despite Abram's impassioned advocacy, was, again, a racial outlier in the human rights community's stance on hate speech.

Abram's response to the controversial provision was simple. With a week of Sub-Commission debates left, Abram hoped that the trip to Atlanta—“the city too busy to hate”—would spur the Sub-Commission to reverse its position on the article and compel the U.N. experts to incorporate new, more robust protections of free speech and association in the draft Convention. Viewing the Southern metropolis first hand would make Abram's point in a way that sterile and far-removed, Sub-Commission debates in New York could never do.Footnote ⁶³ The State Department recognized this fact. “Delegates from other countries who have had the opportunity for first-hand observation in the South have usually been quick to support the United States in U.N. discussion of race problems,” one official reminded Abram.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, Abram declared, “The hope is that the visit will put in focus the uninformed impressions of some members about the South as a whole.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Local People, International Law

In the days immediately preceding the Sub-Commission's tour of Atlanta in January 1964, civil and human rights watchers across the nation anxiously waited to see if Abram would be able to use Atlanta to impress the Sub-Commission and, more importantly, use the tour of the city to convince the Sub-Commission that it needed free speech and association provisions in the draft Convention. The Los Angeles Times announced, “A Southerner who is eager to prove the merits of free speech is taking a group of critical United Nations delegates on a tour of segregation—and integration—in Atlanta, Ga.” Abram confidently asserted to the West Coast reporter that “Georgia's progress on racial integration will speak for itself.” The article concluded, “He conceived of the trip himself, not to persuade his colleagues that all is well in Georgia, but to demonstrate the progress being made under American laws. In this way, the trip can be considered part of his argument to the subcommission that any conventions on racial discrimination must also include protections for freedom of speech.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Other national newspapers highlighted the significance of Sub-Commission's trip to Atlanta. On January 23, the Washington Post reprinted the Los Angeles Times article and later noted that Abram devised the Atlanta trip to provide “insight into the American concept of democracy and freedom of speech.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The New York Times reported that Abram scheduled the Sub-Commission's visit to Atlanta “to observe the relationship between whites and Negroes” but also underscored that “students of the city's Negro colleges prepare[d] for a mass protest …for the benefit of a visiting United Nations group.”Footnote ⁶⁸ And the Atlanta Constitution, the South's largest and most influential newspaper, ran several articles covering Abram's attempt to change world opinion on the United States South.Footnote ⁶⁹ These national news accounts confirmed Abram's intentions to remake the Convention's most debated article in the image of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. “It would be helpful if members were given a better appreciation of the way a free society adjusts to change,” he wrote to State Department officials on the eve of the Sub-Commission's visit to Atlanta, “without a revision of its constitutional guarantees of free speech.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Under Abram's leadership, the U.N. group visited the city from Friday, January 24 to Sunday, January 26, 1964 to observe “how a democratic nation wrestles with its problems.”Footnote ⁷¹ He reiterated that he had “no intention to portray Atlanta or any part of the U.S. as a model community.” Nevertheless, his selection of Atlanta over other Southern cities, such as Jackson, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama was clearly a strategic choice aimed to advance American foreign policy interests during the Sub-Commission's ICERD debates.Footnote ⁷² “In Atlanta,” Abram emphasized, “the members of the Subcommission will see a southern city which has made great strides and continues to do so in the areas of human relations.”Footnote ⁷³ For Abram and many other Cold War liberals, Atlanta was an ideal city for a State Department-sponsored visit to the United States, because Atlanta, renowned for its spirit of biracial communication among business-oriented, racial moderates, seemed to embody American exceptionalism and exemplify much-needed progress in Southern race relations. In a letter inviting Jose Ingles, the Filipino expert on the Sub-Commission, to Atlanta, Abram bragged of the Georgia capital, “One of the most notable circumstances …is the remarkable development in the field of housing available to members of the Negro race. There are literally scores of new, fine and tasteful homes, I think probably without parallel elsewhere.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Abram's letter also highlighted that “Atlanta [had] just elected a Negro to the Georgia Senate, the first to serve since Reconstruction” and boasted that the city was “a center of Negro education; there are five accredited universities and colleges there, perhaps the greatest complex of its type in the world.”Footnote ⁷⁵ During the Sub-Commission's ICERD debates, Soviet racial experts repeatedly rebuked American officials for allowing rabid segregationists to assail nonviolent demonstrators and for failing to ensure the economic, social, and cultural rights of black Southerners. Abram was hopeful that Atlanta's well-publicized history of interracial cooperation, extensive network of historically black colleges, and remarkable stock of housing for the black bourgeoisie would give State Department officials the ideological weaponry they needed to counter Soviet attacks on the racial economy in the United States South; these features of Atlanta “never failed to bring rather surprised comment from outside visitors.”Footnote ⁷⁶

State Department officials were not alone in understanding the importance of Atlanta in the Sub-Commission's debates. Many Atlantans, themselves, recognized the city's central role in the Sub-Commission's affairs, because of local media's extensive coverage of the U.N. organ in January 1964. Throughout the month, both the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Daily World repeatedly touted Abram's connection to the city as a “former Atlanta attorney,” and identified the homegrown diplomat as the primary drafter of ICERD. One January 1964 Constitution article, for example, announced that Abram, the “Atlanta-born New York attorney who has been the U.S. expert on the subcommission for the last three years,” had presented “a sweeping international treaty” to the U.N. body. The article continued, “Abram proposed eight articles for the treaty and said a ninth–aimed at hate groups would be added after he works out more exact language.” Local media had also illuminated the global significance of the U.N. delegation's Southern expedition. On the eve of the Sub-Commission's visit, Eugene Patterson, editor of the Constitution, authored a strongly worded column to “Atlanta's U.N. Visitors,” mirroring Abram's faith that Atlanta would improve international perceptions of racial politics in the United States. “To the United Nations Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities: Welcome to Atlanta. You will find no better American city to observe,” the self-assured, editorialist wrote. “Race relations here aren't as good as they ought to be,” he added, “but they may be better than some citizens of your homelands have thought.” Patterson, “genuinely proud” of the city's racial progress, hoped that the U.N. experts would view America's commitment to democracy through the prism of Atlanta's ostensible respect for human rights. “As a city representing the United States of America,” the Constitution journalist and Abram ally puffed, “Atlanta welcomes your appraisal.” “In Atlanta, justice will be done. We would like the world to know it, for liberty and justice to all is a living American ideal.”

Although Abram claimed that he did not intend to showcase Atlanta as a “model community,” he had actually cancelled the Sub-Commission's planned trip to the city in January 1963 due to a local racial catastrophe that attracted international attention. As wealthy black Atlantans began to shop for new homes in exclusive areas of the southwest city, blockbusting convinced Mayor Allen to erect concrete barriers to limit traffic flow to these areas. Specifically, city planners blocked access to the affluent white, Cascade Heights neighborhood from Peyton Road, a thoroughfare frequently travelled by black home-seekers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Black Atlantans were furious. Aspiring black homeowners and activists alike, clad in conservative dark suits and Sunday morning dresses, exposed the racial fault lines of the Cold War America by sending the world iconic images of sympathetic protesters carrying signs, reading, “Atlanta's Image a Berlin Wall” and “We Want no Warsaw Ghetto–Open Peyton Road.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The “Peyton Road Affair,” as it came to be known, “caused [Abram] to make an excuse for the committee not to go” to Atlanta. Abram subsequently rescheduled the Sub-Commission's tour for January 1964, hoping that “there would be no mass movements in Atlanta until after February 1, 1964, when the weather would be more favorable and students had finished their semester examinations.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Moreover, despite Abram's assertion that Atlanta officials “have nothing to hide” from the Sub-Commission, he and Mayor Allen, in the city's ritual of easing racial tension through brokerage, spoke with local black leaders to ask that no protests occur during the Sub-Commission's visit.Footnote ⁸⁰ During this period of radicalization, SNCC activists were emboldened to continue their demonstrations anyway, even if it would, in the mayor's eyes, “embarrass the city while the U.N. was in town.” In the spirit of this newly emerging militancy, Julian Bond, the velvet-voiced communications director of SNCC, retorted to Mayor Allen, “But it would embarrass us not to have the demonstrations.”Footnote ⁸¹

Undeterred by charges that the campaign was “inspired by communists,” SNCC activists aimed to make segregationists “squirm” by showing that Atlanta was not the “progressive Southern city” city officials held it out to be. The student organizers, well known for their guerrilla tactics, somehow learned the unpublished itinerary of the Sub-Commission and seemed to ambush the international delegation and their local hosts at every turn. Picketers met the Sub-Commission as they arrived at Municipal Airport and at the Riviera Hotel, where the Sub-Commission was staying, holding large placards that declared, “Atlanta's image is a fraud” and “Welcome to Atlanta, a Segregated City.”Footnote ⁸²

SNCC also delivered an individually addressed letter to each Sub-Commission member's hotel room. The letter, echoing the sentiments from the demonstrations that greeted the Sub-Commission, stressed, “We are interested that you get a realistic view of this city and the South.” SNCC's memorandum asserted that Atlanta was not the “Open City” its political and business leaders claimed it to be and that “this city, and the South, needs [the Sub-Commission's] aid and that of the United Nations.” The letter maintained that although the most recent direct action had focused on integrating public accommodations, SNCC's campaign sought to secure “the rights America guarantees to all of her citizens, [including] the right to vote, the right to earn a decent living, to buy a home where he chooses, or to send his children to a decent school.” The activists concluded, “Attempts at voluntary integration or voluntary compliance with the law of the land have failed. We are convinced that such pressures must continue until all men are equal here and across the South.”Footnote ⁸³

SNCC then distributed protest literature throughout the local community to explain the organization's rationale for targeting the U.N. experts for demonstrations and the significance of that January's “militant nonviolent direct action.” One leaflet, entitled “Why We Protest,” opened, “We welcome the United Nations [Sub-Commission] on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to Atlanta, although a visit to southwest Georgia might have proved more revealing. Nevertheless there is much to be seen in Atlanta.” In the leaflet, SNCC repeated its claim that Atlanta had “failed to live up to its image as a progressive city ‘too busy to hate,’” and attacked the city's segregated public accommodations, “the impressions scarred deep in children's minds by inadequate and restricted education” in Jim Crow schools, and the continued existence of “those who would beat demonstrators or don the archaic cloth of the Ku Klux Klan.” “Why We Protest” then exposed a deep irony underlying the recent prosecutions of the city's activists: “Atlanta has now assigned Negro policemen to supervise demonstrations and arrest demonstrators—but why is it only to watch over and arrest his brother that a Negro officer of the law is assigned downtown.” The budding internationalists from SNCC, carefully positioning their local activism within the American tradition of patriotic dissent and the global struggle to end racial discrimination, proclaimed, “We have no shame in showing the world the truth, for we are acting out of the strongest belief in American democracy and the knowledge that Justice and Freedom are real and can be for all people.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Another SNCC flyer aimed at the Sub-Commission underscored to the stark economic conditions facing poor black Atlantans living in litter-lined neighborhoods such as Buttermilk Bottom. “Located in the heart of downtown Atlanta is the teeming slum of Buttermilk Bottom,” the circular read. “Over 16,000 people live in the Bottom on a median income of below $2,500 a year. That is poverty. The city of Atlanta has forgotten its poor.” The flyer charged that the Bottom had “witnessed virtually no improvement in the last 50 years.” Moreover, the city perpetuated this injustice by denying Bottom residents access to basic municipal services, resulting in unpaved and unlit streets, uncollected garbage, cold and dilapidated homes rented in violation of local housing codes, and “dirt roads [that] become rivers of mud” after rainfall. SNCC resolved, “If we are to be so proud as to invite international delegates to the clean white buildings of Peachtree Street then we must be honest enough to pave the streets of the Bottoms of Atlanta.”Footnote ⁸⁵

But Abram moved quickly to ensure that the members of the Sub-Commission would not have the ability to communicate directly with SNCC activists on the state of local or global race relations. He refused to invite members of the Atlanta student movement to participate in the weekend's events, instead filling the Sub-Commission's agenda with local black leaders who were willing to denounce the student protests and promote the goals of Abram's mission. On the day before the international delegation trekked to Atlanta, Abram wrote to State Department officials, “The top Negro leadership of the city will be quite hospitable.” He maintained, however, “There is a distinct possibility that members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee will be demonstrating in Atlanta, but they will receive no support as such from the broad spectrum of Negro leadership.”Footnote ⁸⁶

From the moment Sub-Commission arrived Atlanta on Friday evening, elite black Atlantans, handpicked from Abram's personal rolodex, used their world stage to offer crass endorsements of the city's race relations and the views Abram expressed during formal Sub-Commission meetings. Robert Thompson, Executive Director of the Atlanta Urban League and confidant of Abram, kicked off a weekend of turbulence by claiming that the Sub-Commission would see “democracy at work” in Atlanta. “You will see students demonstrating or saying, in effect, they do not like this or that. This, in my opinion, is freedom of speech, and we think this is very important in this kind of country.” Thompson paused and his creaking voice then deepened in rasp. “I'm sorry that Mayor Allen is not here,” he half-heartedly apologized to the Sub-Commission, “because I would say to him that as a member of the minority, I still have the right to say to Mr. Allen, ‘You may go to hell,’ if he were to do something I don't like.” Thompson's oddly timed and clumsily worded declaration filled the room with an uncomfortable silence; however, he prolonged the gauche moment. “I can still say to the President of the United States, ‘You go to hell, I don't like what you're saying,’” Thompson muttered.Footnote ⁸⁷ Paul Good, an ABC journalist covering the Sub-Commission visit, aptly characterized Thompson's crude remarks as “an unfortunate speech, the kind of declaration made by men who have lived under unnatural tensions all their lives and in a moment of release are carried too far by the momentum of long-bottled emotion.” Thompson analogized his bumbling pronouncement to the students' intrepid exercise of the First Amendment, but the Sub-Commission remained unmoved by the Host Committee's heavy-handed tactics.Footnote ⁸⁸

On the following day, Saturday, January 25, Abram again asked the student activists to cease all protests, asserting that the Sub-Commission's task of drafting a convention to eliminate racial discrimination had “nothing to do with any grievances [SNCC] may have.”Footnote ⁸⁹ SNCC, nonetheless, rallied nearly 300 students, an unexpected greeting for the Sub-Commission members emerging from a private luncheon and briefing at the Atlanta University Center complex. A Washington Post beat writer relayed, “As the experts walked past, the students broke into ‘freedom’ songs, to the accompaniment of clapping hands and bongo drums.” The Atlanta Hospitality Committee attempted to push its U.N. guests through the protest; however, several of the Sub-Commission members, including Soviet expert Ivanov and Chilean expert and Sub-Commission Chairman Hernan Santa-Cruz, lingered in the crowd because of their burgeoning interest in the SNCC demonstration.

“‘What are they singing?’ a Soviet member of the commission asked a student.

‘Freedom songs,’ the student replied.

‘Ah, freedom,’ the Russian said quietly to himself. Then he turned to another commission member and talked of the placards the students were carrying. One read, ‘Atlanta Needs U.N. Help.’”Footnote ⁹⁰

Following the Atlanta University Center (AUC) rally, SNCC marched a swelling throng of 400 students 2 miles in lines of two to an area near the restaurant where the Sub-Commission's had just dined with Mayor Allen. Once the protesters reached downtown, they poured into Leb's, a New York-style delicatessen that had refused to desegregate, unlike several of its neighboring restaurants.Footnote ⁹¹ When owner Charles Lebedin arrived at the demonstration, he quickly closed the restaurant and asked two black police officers to arrest the sit-in activists. The police officers, however, perhaps seeing the irony of arresting organizers working on their behalf, refused Lebedin's request and cited their need to have a warrant demonstrating just cause. A stalemate between Lebedin and SNCC ensued, and over the next few hours, the number of student protesters dwindled to approximately 100. Grand Dragon Calvin Craig subsequently summoned a group of Klansmen, who had been protesting desegregated downtown hotels and restaurants, and Craig arrived at Leb's with twenty robed Klansmen to intimidate the marchers. Undaunted by the Klan's presence, some SNCC protestors chanted, “The old KKK ain't what it used to be,” while others shouted, “The KKK must go!”Footnote ⁹²

SNCC's otherwise peaceful march ended when the Klansmen began filing between the lines of the demonstrators. Pushing quickly followed and fistfights erupted thereafter. During the clash, at least two whites were visibly injured, one with a bruised forehead and another with a bloody nose. Although fifty police officers, most of them black, dispersed the crowd, ending “the most ‘volatile’ civil rights activity in the city in years,” no one was arrested.Footnote ⁹³

The students' forceful responses to the Klan's intimidation were not meaningless acts of racial violence. During its tumultuous visit to Atlanta, Sub-Commissioners had been impressed by their local hosts but had also witnessed deeply conflicting accounts of America's racial problems and proposed solutions. The Sub-Commission had feasted on the Southern hospitality of liberal white Atlantans, such as George Goodwin, Henry and Adah Toombs,Footnote ⁹⁴ and Cecil and Hermione Alexander,Footnote ⁹⁵ all of whom supported desegregation. The U.N. experts additionally heard from more moderate white leaders, such as Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, whose newspaper reprimanded the student activists during the recent wave of protests for their use of the “dangerous and utterly cynical tactic of deliberate provocation.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The Sub-Commission also listened to the concerns of Atlanta's established black leadership, who “believed that there had been progress in solving the race problem in their city, ‘but hoped that further progress could be more rapid.’”Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite the persistence of Jim Crow, the Sub-Commission lodged in a desegregated downtown hotel, sipped tea and coffee in the lavish home of black entrepreneur, Geneva Haugabrooks,Footnote ⁹⁸ enjoyed elegantly catered dinners in interracial settings, and toured “the fantastic development of private housing in Negro communities in the western section of Atlanta.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The Atlanta Hospitality Committee had delighted the Sub-Commission's members in the pleasantries of the South, and in these social gatherings, the local hosts had intentionally surrounded the racial experts from the U.N. with elite black Atlantans well-schooled in “respectable” racial etiquette. Abram understood that the city's black brokers were essential to showing the world that Atlanta, the South, and the nation were at the vanguard of global progress toward ending racial discrimination. The group's high socioeconomic status, “racially authentic” voices, and measured assessments of white supremacy would dampen the negative impact of local student activism and demonstrate “progress being made there under democratic procedures.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In contrast to many of the black elders in Atlanta, the brazen student organizers used their violent confrontations with the Klan as “an opportunity to dramatize their cause,” and these demonstrations made an indelible impression on the Sub-Commission. George Goodwin, Chairman of the Atlanta Hospitality Committee, remarked, “As nearly as I can tell, the only possible disappointment expressed by any of the Subcommission members was the fact that they were not driven down West Peachtree Street through the demonstration when they left Mayor Allen's dinner on Saturday night. I wonder if they understand that this was for their own safety.” Goodwin estimated that the “scuffle between the Klan and the pickets broke out” only “two or three minutes” after Sub-Commission's bus left the dinner. He concluded, “Had the UN bus gone via West Peachtree, it would have been at that exact minute, in the midst of the most dangerous situation Atlanta has had in half a century.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Because many Sub-Commission members felt that they had been shielded from the controversy in Atlanta, they asked to meet with student demonstrators, and a meeting was hastily arranged at the Butler Street YMCA only hours before the Sub-Commission's departure. Dick Gregory and James Forman represented SNCC at this impromptu session. Gregory, gifted with a searing sarcasm and known for his blistering critique of white supremacy, declared to the Sub-Commission, “The Negro in this country has a callous around his soul and is anxious to get rid of it.”Footnote ¹⁰²

As the Sub-Commission prepared to leave Atlanta, the Sub-Commission held a brief press conference and there began to deviate from the polite script that had characterized the weekend's interactions between the Atlanta hosts and the Sub-Commission. Judge Mohammed Mudawi, the Sub-Commission member from the Sudan, offered a simple, yet profound assessment of the racial politics in the Southern city. Although he had hope for future change, Mudawi proclaimed to Atlanta and United States officials, “You have a big [racial] problem.” Ivanov stoked the flames of the Cold War during the press conference by implying that Atlanta's race relations were far from exemplary. For Ivanov, the Sub-Commission's turbulent weekend in Atlanta was a part of a larger pattern of racial unrest in the United States, as “he had seen similar demonstrations in New York.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Notably, after Ivanov's visit to Atlanta, Moscow began to pay close attention to Atlanta's unfolding racial strife. Pravda, the official publication of the Soviet Communist Party, even reprinted a photograph of 17-year-old SNCC activist Taylor Washington being strangled by an arresting officer during Atlanta's early winter demonstrations. This iconic image of police brutality in Jim Crow America—the frail-framed, boyish-faced high schooler wriggling for air and easily overpowered by a brawny, stoic, and unnamed embodiment of white supremacy—was captioned “Behind the Façade of the Free World.” Pravda depicted Washington's personal struggle to survive the officer's vicious chokehold as a metaphor for the movement's struggle to preserve black humanity. The photograph's byline, translated from Russian, accordingly read, “Thus, in the U.S. they attempt to suffocate the struggle of the Negro people for freedom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The battle for desegregation in Atlanta had become new fodder for Soviet propaganda. The city's weekend of protests also aroused the passions of Santa Cruz, the Chilean expert and Chairman of the Sub-Commission. Santa Cruz argued that although “there was a sizeable group of ‘progressive’ whites in Atlanta who wanted to end racial discrimination,” there remained “great possibilities for improvement of relations” in Atlanta.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Santa Cruz was well aware of the implications of the Sub-Commission's trip to the Jim Crow South. Although Abram had publicly claimed that the “Sub-Commission ha[d] no agenda in Atlanta,” the Sub-Commission's Chairman stated otherwise. “I am sure what we have seen and heard will be of great help in the work we are doing,” Santa Cruz predicted.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Abram's plan had misfired. The Atlanta tour had not changed the Sub-Commission members' positions on banning hate speech and groups. Abram told reporters after SNCC's Saturday afternoon protests at the Atlanta University Center, “Ever since I've been on the commission, the biggest fight I've had is to make sure that any covenant we decide upon includes the American concept of freedom of speech.” Abram, seeking to salvage a crumbling diplomatic effort and keep face before the human rights community, maintained, “It's hard to sit in the formal atmosphere of a U.N. conference room and make that point. Perhaps these demonstrations will bring it home.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Many others, locally, nationally, and internationally, offered a different take on the late January weekend. ABC News Southern bureau chief, Paul Good, for example, called the weekend “bizarre” and wrote that the Sub-Commission “possibly could have been invited at a worse time, but no Atlantan could imagine when that might have been, except in 1864 when Sherman burned the city.” According to Good, Abram recognized that the SNCC protests had botched his diplomatic mission, and throughout the turbulent weekend, he “wore the air of a man who had mistakenly invited a ladies' garden group to visit a bordello.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The Washington Post wrote that the Atlanta Host Committee was mortified by the SNCC-led exercise in international diplomacy, because the student demonstrations “provided an insight into the American concept of democracy and freedom of speech” that Abram and local leaders had not “originally planned.” The Host Committee had hoped to exclude SNCC from the weekend's agenda, because the students, they feared, might attempt to blot the city's reputation through their creative forms of dissent. The Host Committee's fears soon materialized. By the second day of Sub-Commission's tour, city officials had begun to “view [] the demonstrations and arrests as embarrassing,” the Washington Post noted. City officials also publicly worried that the student protests posed “possible danger to the U.N. group itself, since many of the placards referred to the city's promoting of the visit.” But the international delegation, unlike the Host Committee, neither found the members of the Atlanta student movement personally threatening nor chastised the students for their radical protests. Instead, the Post maintained, “the Commission on Racial Discrimination [was] impressed by the Negro student protest.” An emotionally charged and rather undiplomatic outburst from the Sub-Commission's chairman, of all people, epitomized the Sub-Commission's newfound affinity for the Atlanta student activists. As the Sub-Commission exited Saturday's luncheon and briefing at the Atlanta University Center, Santa Cruz was overwhelmed by the swelling crowd of young revolutionaries clapping their hands and playing bongo drums to the rich Southern rhythms of freedom songs. “Several of the U.N. representatives paused” to hear SNCC singing, the Post article stated, “despite efforts of their hosts to push on.” The article continued, “But it was the chairman of the commission, Hernan Santa Cruz of Chile, who seemed most of all to understand the freedom-of-speech implications of the singing. He joined in for a few verses of ‘We Shall Overcome.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The cultural and political significance of this particularly moving moment—located at the crossroads between extraparliamentary activism and international lawmaking—was not lost on black America. Jet Magazine proudly covered the Sub-Commission's historic visit to Atlanta and SNCC's critical intervention in the State Department's representation of domestic race relations. “The Sub-Commission was impressed by the massive protests, the civil disobedience (going limp), and especially the hand-clapping and freedom songs,” the prize-winning weekly proclaimed. The student demonstrations had been so evocative that “[o]ne visitor requested that the students sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Media outlets across the globe broadcast the racial strife smoldering in the streets of Atlanta. Newspapers throughout Africa covered the mass arrests that followed the racial confrontations at Leb's—“a colour bar incident at a whites-only restaurant,” and according to one African daily, during these demonstrations, “the city too busy to hate” had transformed into a “racially tense city.” In these accounts stretching the continent, from Lagos to Kampala, African journalists underscored the level of police brutality civil rights activists endured. “James Forman, an official with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was taken to the hospital with a back injury,” both the West African Pilot and Uganda Argus reported to their newly independent readerships, because “he was ‘kicked and dragged’ to a police car.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, news of the Atlanta demonstrations and arrests circulated the Pacific world. Singapore's Strait Times described the “café clash” between “[w]hite-robed Ku Klux Klansmen [who] packed the restaurant [and] Negroes [who] paraded outside in protest,”Footnote ¹¹² while Sydney's Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age observed that dozens of black protesters had arrested in Atlanta, including “Negro comedian Dick Gregory.”Footnote ¹¹³ In Europe, unflattering press coverage of the Atlanta protests was not relegated to the periodicals produced by the Eastern bloc; this news also blanketed Western Europe, from Glasgow to Geneva.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In Dublin, for example, the Irish Times tagged the SNCC demonstrations as the “Racial Clashes in Atlanta.” The Protestant nationalist organ then began its news story on the demonstrations in a manner unlikely to delight the State Department or the Atlanta Host Committee: “A United Nations subcommission probing discrimination, wound up its visit to Atlanta, Georgia, yesterday in the wake of disorders during the night between Negro students and Klu [sic] Klux Klansmen.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Even the United States' neighbors grabbed readers' attention through sensational headlines, such as “Race Crisis Flares Anew in Atlanta” and “Violence follows U.N. group's visit.” In Windsor, Calgary, and Ottawa, news writers placed SNCC's activism within a global context, chronicling the “racial demonstrations in downtown Atlanta [which] resulted in the arrest of scores of persons Sunday in the wake of an inspection tour by a United Nations anti-discrimination group.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In Toronto, the Globe and Mail reprinted the iconic photograph of Taylor Washington's brutal arrest: the same portrait of police brutality that Soviets saw on the pages of Pravda. However, the Toronto photojournalists went further than Soviets in showing the world the inhumanity of Jim Crow. The Canadian paper coupled the photo of Washington's arrest with another snapshot of Southern justice: two white, powerfully built, and anonymous hands of an Atlanta police officer around the collar of a young and clearly overwhelmed SNCC marcher. The police's vicious treatment of the students was not only state sanctioned, but also appeared to receive a hearty public endorsement. The young marchers, the Toronto outlet reported, were being “hauled into paddy wagons to the applause of white spectators.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ And in Havana, Fidelistas used the Atlanta demonstrations as an opportunity to renew that government's criticisms of United States race relations. Prensa Latina dubbed SNCC's march for human rights “[a] new phase of racial strife in America.” The Cuban news agency also published two front-page photographs of contrasting images of United States democracy. One picture showed the “members of the bloody, racist U.S. organization known Ku Klux Klan parading in front of a restaurant in Atlanta,” and the other displayed “a group of black citizens conduct[ing] a demonstration, a few steps from a restaurant, claiming their right to visit and be served in any public business.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

When the Sub-Commission returned to New York City to finish the draft Convention, it remained steadfast to its position and Article 4 was ultimately forwarded to the Commission on Human Rights for review over the sustained protestations of the Convention's primary drafter. The presence of organizations, such as the Klan, troubled the authors of Article 4, and Abram had been unable to allay those concerns, even though he later claimed that the trip was a success. The Sub-Commission's visit had not caused the legislative shift that Abram and the State Department had hoped for. In a 1965 report to President Lyndon Johnson, federal officials privately admitted that Abram had tried, and failed, to use race relations in Atlanta to reverse the Sub-Commission's position on Article 4. “This Article was by far the most difficult and controversial aspect of the Convention, and was of primary interest to the United States inasmuch as it concerned the question of freedom of speech and association,” the internal memorandum conceded. “When the Subcommission on the Protection of Minorities and Prevention of Discrimination was formulating its views on the Draft Convention, the United States Expert, Mr. Morris B. Abram, gave the members of the Subcommission an example of American democracy in action.” Abram had “personally escorted members of the Subcommission and as many observers who wished to go, to Atlanta, Georgia to observe at first hand developments and progress in race relations in a southern community. The members of the Subcommission had the opportunity of seeing demonstrations by both civil rights groups and segregationists, e.g., The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Ku Klux Klan.” However, despite this example of American “democracy in action,” the Sub-Commission decided to retain the ban on hate speech and organizations, the memorandum acknowledged, leaving the United States delegation “particularly concerned to protect the principles of freedom of speech and association as stated in the Universal Declaration.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Remembering Abram's diplomatic mission to Atlanta shines new light on ICERD's legislative history and provides an alternative approach to writing that story. Article 4 was easily the most controversial provision of the draft Convention. However, scholars can better appreciate how fractious the Article 4 debates were by considering the global significance of the Sub-Commission's Southern voyage. Abram was so invested in changing the Sub-Commission's position on the article that he circumvented the Sub-Commission's well-established protocol and dreamed up a once-in-a-lifetime trip for his foreign colleagues. Other federal officials were so concerned with the image of American democracy abroad, and the article's implications for the First Amendment, that the State Department allowed Abram to invite a U.N. delegation, including three officials from communist countries, to the city that represented the promise of the new South. In ratifying Article 4, the Sub-Commission had, in other words, relied on the heated discussions inside of the U.N.'s drafting rooms as well as the deliberations that occurred outside of those drafting rooms. Historians of ICERD should, therefore, employ a diverse group of primary and secondary documents, drawn from U.N. and non-U.N. sources, to reconstruct the treaty's rich drafting history. Put slightly differently, because Abram attempted to use an extralegislative space to create a political environment favorable to amending the controversial article, using archives that offer glimpses into the Sub-Commission's formal and informal deliberations can help to provide a more comprehensive account of ICERD's drafting history.

Finally, the Sub-Commission's tumultuous weekend offers a new prism for understanding the international dimensions of the Southern freedom struggle. As evidenced by the chaos in the city during Sub-Commission's visit, Atlantans were not simply pawns in the global Cold War. SNCC, in particular, used the Sub-Commission's visit as a platform for the organization to advance its own vision for domestic and international race relations. They offered a powerful counternarrative to the stories told by local and national leaders through the creative usage of sandwich board signs, flyers, letters, freedom songs, and face-to-face meetings with the international delegation. It is equally important to recognize when the Sub-Commission protests occurred. The idealistic student activists petitioned the U.N. organ in late January 1964; more than 2 months before Malcolm X boldly challenged those in the movement to “expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human rights” and “take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the U.N.”Footnote ¹²⁰ However, it is Malcolm's brilliant, human rights oratory in “Ballot or the Bullet,” and not SNCC's earlier appeal to the Sub-Commission, that has been enshrined in popular and scholarly memory. Perhaps implicit in this unspoken narrative is a line of reasoning that suggests that Malcolm embraced internationalism before his Southern counterparts, because he was a “radical” Northerner engaging a “more sophisticated” Northern audience. Nonetheless, this forgotten moment in SNCC's history challenges the dominant assumptions about the Southern wing of the movement. More specifically, by recovering the January 1964 U.N. protests, scholars might reperiodize their analyses of black internationalism in the movement, rethink their regional biases, and produce more deeply historicized works on these activists' appreciation for an emerging, international legal order.

Democratic Legitimacy in International Human Rights Lawmaking

However, scholars must be mindful of the limits of SNCC's human rights endeavors. The irony of ICERD's legislative history is that although SNCC activists in Atlanta were participating in the Convention deliberations, the Sub-Commission was actively excluding SNCC and many other victims of racial segregation from its formal drafting processes. The January 1964 trip to Atlanta should have demonstrated to the Sub-Commission the vital importance of expanding the formal drafting process to include more critical, non-state actors of color, if the Sub-Commission were truly interested in understanding how law might be used in diverse areas of the world to end the varied manifestations of racial discrimination. Discussion with the victims of Jim Crow should have, therefore, been an integral part of the Sub-Commission's formal agenda rather than the result of global diplomacy from the streets of Atlanta.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet as the Atlanta tour powerfully demonstrated, Sub-Commission experts, such as Abram, were often wary of inviting increased participation from disenfranchised segments of civil society in the legislative process. Thus far, this article has explored a hidden transcript in the ICERD's legislative history and explained how SNCC, through its unconventional approach to international diplomacy, ultimately became entangled in the Articles 4 debates, in spite of a legislative design centered on the interests of powerful state actors and elite, non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Accordingly, this section unmasks the normative dimensions of the Sub-Commission's ICERD debates. Here, I explore many of the foreign policy considerations that drove ICERD's drafting, and highlight the democratic deficits in the Sub-Commission's legislative process.

In Abram's autobiography, The Day is Short, he noted that early in his tenure on the Sub-Commission, “I was being constantly taunted by the Russians about the glaring inequities in my own country, particularly before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in places of public accommodation in some of the southern states.” He continued, “My answer was to invite twelve delegates of the U.N. Commission, including two Russians, to be my guests on a visit to Atlanta, Georgia.”Footnote ¹²² In January 1964, Abram faced the Scylla and Charybdis of American Cold War diplomacy. He had “tactfully withdrawn” the Sub-Commission's invitation visit to Atlanta in January 1963 because of the infamous Peyton Road incident. To cancel or postpone the trip again would not only be in poor taste but might also signal to the Sub-Commission that he was embarrassed by Atlanta's race relations. On the other hand, Abram was clearly aware that SNCC was currently leading a renewed round of racial protests in the “city too busy to hate,” and voyaging into the city's racial maelstrom could easily shame Atlanta and the United States in front of the world. Abram chose the latter. “When we arrived Atlanta was pure tumult,” he admitted. “[E]very pocket of the city was seething.”Footnote ¹²³

Abram, nevertheless, had devised a plan to mitigate foreign criticisms of Jim Crow and advance American interests during the Sub-Commission's ICERD debates. He planned to recognize the existence of segregated public accommodations in the city, but would also have the Sub-Commission dine and lodge in desegregated settings. He conceded the existence of segregated urban slums but then bussed the Sub-Commission through Atlanta's affluent black suburbs, even stopping off “for tea and morning coffee at one of the gracious, sprawling homes that made up the neighborhood.” He acknowledged that the SNCC protests were fueled by the students' frustrations with race relations in the United States, but simultaneously reframed the student demonstrations as “democracy in action,” arranged meetings between the Sub-Commission and white Atlantans, such as “Mayor Allen …an important capitalist who has been working like hell to achieve racial justice,” and surrounded the Sub-Commission with black brokers who condemned the tactics of SNCC.Footnote ¹²⁴ Abram, a devout Cold Warrior, opted to host the Atlanta trip despite the demonstrations, because he believed “that in any fair debate our society, for all of its flaws, could stand inspection, but Soviet society could not.”Footnote ¹²⁵ He remained steadfast that the city's openness to criticism and reform were quintessentially American, but in a 1993 interview, he confessed that he had hoped that the Atlanta visit would limit Soviet influence on the Sub-Commission by “educat[ing] foreigners on the United States and what we regarded as a model city.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Abram's Cold War strategy epitomized the shortcomings in international human rights lawmaking. As the goals of the Atlanta tour revealed, the ICERD debates offered a new battlefield for launching Cold War attacks and, more generally, advancing a nation's foreign policy objectives. Human rights discourse was integral in this endeavor, because the language of human rights—with its purported “natural” origins, apolitical process, and egalitarian ends—masked and legitimized the ideological conflict, which permeated the ICERD debates. Abram later disclosed in his memoir that “in 1964, if Ivanov and I had engaged in an informed and honest discussion …I would have been obliged to confess that generations of prejudice and neglect left the United States with a group of blacks who were not making it.”Footnote ¹²⁷ During the ICERD debates, human rights often took a back seat to the Cold War. Abram, therefore, attempted to exclude SNCC from the Sub-Commission's agenda in Atlanta, because he understood that the student organizers might undermine the foreign policy goals he aspired to achieve in his human rights advocacy. The results were paradoxical. Abram, the primary drafter of a race treaty designed to end de jure and de facto discrimination, sought to silence activists, who organized daily in the South's segregated slums and represented many of interests of those most vulnerable to Jim Crow's hardships.

Had the Sub-Commission formally acknowledged the role of the Atlanta freedom struggle in the Article 4 debates, they might have also exposed a host of other conceptual faults in the U.N.'s formal legislative process. At the heart of these democratic deficits was the U.N.'s conception of racial expertise. The U.N. officially recognized the Sub-Commission's members as racial “experts.” Such a designation explicitly privileged the knowledge and perspectives of state actors, not the views of organizations such as SNCC, in the human rights debate. The U.N.'s selection of the term “expert” became even more troubling when considering the geographical composition and ideological direction of the Sub-Commission. Of the fourteen racial “experts” on the Sub-Commission, seven were from Europe alone. The Sub-Commission's legislative agenda was dominated by state actors from the global North from the start of the January 1964 session. Three draft Conventions—those of Morris Abram (United States), Peter Calvocoressi (United Kingdom), and Boris Ivanov (Russia) and Wojceich Ketrzynski (Poland) jointly—served as the bases for the Sub-Commission's work, and accordingly structured the terms of the ICERD debates around the foreign policy goals of the world's superpowers.Footnote ¹²⁸ The 1964 Sub-Commission's legislative structure placed inordinate amounts of power in the hands of the very nations that had perpetuated many of history's most egregious human rights violations. Those same nations were contemporaneously engaged in an imperialistic struggle to control the destiny of the Third World. The Sub-Commission's legislative process reinforced long-standing hierarchies in global race relations, as it dismissed the black South and much of the so-called “Third World” as sites for the epistemological production of human rights.

The U.N.'s faith in many of the state actors invited to participate in the formal ICERD deliberations was misplaced. Perhaps nothing demonstrated this more than a letter from Marie-Helene Lefaucheux, French diplomat and Chair of the U.N. Commission on Women, to Abram in the days following the Atlanta protests. Although Lefaucheux had “tried to increase [her] understanding of the American situation,” she confessed to Abram, “Truthfully said, it is scarcely possible for the French people to understand the core of these [racial] difficulties.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Lefaucheux's own words divulged her lack of qualifications to help draft a treaty, which aimed to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. She closed her letter to Abram, “In the specific area of my commission regarding the situation of women, I can conclude that no discrimination ‘based on sex’—to adopt the term of the Universal Declaration—exists with respect to negro women.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Lefaucheux's ignorance, particularly given her position at the U.N., was egregious, and the Sub-Commission's exclusion of critical women of color from the legislative process had serious, long-term consequences. The all-male Sub-Commission adopted a single-axis approach to addressing worldwide manifestations of racial discrimination. In turn, the gendering of the legislative process and Convention itself impeded women's abilities to raise cognizable human rights claims under ICERD. The Convention endorsed a sexist logic, which established that women were “worthy” of legal protection only in those instances in which their experiences corresponded with men's experiences. The Convention, at the same time, legitimized national laws and customs that punished women of color for failing to conform to the norms expected of men. Intersectional discrimination and violence, particularly in the private sphere, went uninvestigated and unpunished by human rights “experts” for decades after the ratification of ICERD.Footnote ¹³¹ Because the U.N. has historically treated race and gender discrimination as separate issues and developed separate mechanisms for addressing each form of subordination, U.N. officials admit that even today, many women of color are left “unsure of where to turn for redress.”Footnote ¹³² By failing to confront the multiple dimensions of subordination, the Convention's sexist framework has undercut the U.N.'s goal to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.

The Sub-Commission's exclusionary practices highlight a larger, more systemic flaw in the U.N legislative processes of the early 1960s. Article 71 of the U.N. Charter and GA resolution 288 B(X) of 1950 outlined the legal relationship between U.N. organs and NGOs, and these provisions established the principle that only NGOs with “consultative status” may formally provide commentary and technical analysis to U.N. bodies, such as the Sub-Commission.Footnote ¹³³ The results of these legal provisions were predictable. During the early 1960s, in particular, consultative status encumbered participation in the human rights debates by NGOs from the global South, and accordingly undermined the democratic legitimacy of the international legislative process. These NGOs frequently lacked the resources for sustained foreign lobbying and travel, and were often unable to develop meaningful institutional connections within the U.N. Law transformed into an instrument of racial subordination, privileging the participation of elite NGOs from the global North, and failing to facilitate the participation of those individuals whom the Convention was designed to benefit. Consequently, like the ideological tenor and geopolitical composition of the Sub-Commission, the Sub-Commission's reliance on NGOs with consultative status in the formal drafting process reinforced the “savior–victim” binary that persists in international human rights lawmaking.Footnote ¹³⁴

The exclusion of Southern NGOs from the January 1964 session is particularly problematic when considering the Sub-Commission's emphases during the ICERD debates. For example, although the Sub-Commission was preoccupied with ending apartheid in South Africa, the Sub-Commission failed to invite any South African freedom fighters to inform and enrich its discussions of the proposed Convention.Footnote ¹³⁵ Of the 37 NGOs with consultative status who formally participated in the Sub-Commission's January 1964 session, only one NGO was from the Third World.Footnote ¹³⁶ SNCC became part of the Sub-Commission's informal agenda in late January 1964, simply because of the organization's unremitting, extraparliamentary efforts. Despite the Sub-Commission's liberatory rhetoric and ostensible commitment to racial justice, its formal legislative process largely muted the voices of racially oppressed people—ultimately positioning them as passive objects to be spoken for by more “enlightened” actors from the global North.