Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955

Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. By Carol Anderson. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 302. Paper, $22.99, ISBN 0-521-53158-6; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-82431-1.)

In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson argues that both liberal and leftist African American leaders of the middle to late 1940s believed that the struggle for black equality required more than "civil rights," or the removal of the formal legal and political restrictions that characterized the Jim Crow era (p. 1 ). Rather, liberals, such as NAACP leader Walter White, and leftists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, envisioned a broader movement for "human rights" that would remedy the disparities in education, health care, housing, and other social goods...