Civil Defense and Civil Rights
"In 1953, black Americans and white Americans in Georgia were not even allowed to drink out of the same water fountain - and yet, in theory, they were to be protected by a federal agency in an equal fashion if war came."- Historian Andrew Grossman
In the fall of 1962, James Meredith (right) was being introduced to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He would be the first African-American to be enrolled there, escorted on campus by federal troops amidst protests from a mostly white community. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred just a month later, threatened to overshadow this momentous event in the public consciousness. But it could not erase the social issues boiling underneath.
The rise of civil defense in America coincided with a rise in the Civil Rights Movement. In an age of inequality, nuclear weapons were the great equalizer, killing without regard for race, gender or class. Yet the programs that made up civil defense did little to address the issues; and so did more damage by omission than they did to protect everyone equally. In this way, the same social order - marked as it was by exclusion and roles of citizenship - was reinforced by these defense policies.
The connection between civil rights and civil defense was established in the very early days of the federal agency's formation. The Truman administration's choice for the first director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was the ex-governor of Florida, Millard F. Caldwell (left). Although he was an accomplished politician who would ultimately serve in all three branches of government, Caldwell was also a Southern Democrat with a segregationist background. He would initialize the "community bomb shelter plan," which placed the responsibility for protecting citizens in the hands of local and state organizations - where many programs were guided at least in part by Jim Crow principles.
from the archive
Most if not all media and marketing released by the FCDA during the first three decades of the Cold War targeted "white" suburbia. Nowhere was this more evident than in the push for private fallout shelters. Populations in urban areas - made up mostly of minorities - benefitted little from this campaign. The fact that evacuation offered little hope as an alternative is evident through a survey of residents in Atlanta during the era, which demonstrated that 88% of whites living in the city had at least one contact in the suburbs, while only 45% of minorities had such a contact. The obstacles were evident: converting a basement to a bomb shelter meant first owning a house just as evacuation to the suburbs meant first owning a car.
Civil Defense publications projecterd a "patriotic" belief in the nuclear family as the best defense against nuclear attack. This meant also reinforcing roles whereby "traditional values" would be maintained to promote this order. Schools promoted domestic arts to complement this strategy, such as is evident in this photograph (left) of an Extended School Program in Fulton County. Click on the publication (far left) to analyze how this message was conveyed - and who it was conveyed to.
Civil Defense and Civil Rights are mutually evident in this featured photograph (large, right) documenting an integration sit-in led by Fulton County School System students at an administration building in Atlanta (1970). Sixteen years after Brown v. Board, and six years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the issues over racially integrating the public schools were still an issue. Enlarge the featured photograph. Can you find the connection to civil defense?