Civil rights and ‘civil riots’: anti-colonialism, anti-communism, and the US radical right during the 1960s

During the early 1960s, some conservatives in the USA saw the civil rights movement in a global context. Those among what scholars have termed the ‘radical right’ understood the civil rights movement to be the US arm of global anti-colonialism. Both movements, they believed, were Communist tools to destroy Western civilization through violence. US radical rightists believed themselves to be the vanguard of a global anti-Communist effort to save civilization from anti-colonial violence, even as representatives of their own federal government began to support the civil rights movement in the US and anti-colonial movements abroad. Radical rightists focused especially on decolonization movements in Algeria, Angola, and Congo, arguing that in both Africa and the USA, Communists were reframing class-consciousness as race consciousness and promoting disrespect for ‘law and order.’