One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The Cold War also weaponized culture and propaganda.79 The Soviet Union prided itself on meeting the basic material needs—housing, employment, health care—of its people. There was, of course, a steep price to be paid in terms of individual freedom and liberty. The Soviet weakness, therefore, played directly into the Americans’ strength: democracy. But, given Jim Crow, those vaunted democratic ideals turned out to be the U.S.’s Achilles heel as well—a fundamental hypocrisy the Soviets set out to exploit at every turn.80 Each lynching, each bombing of a black home or business, each miscarriage of justice became grist for the Kremlin’s mill. One article in the party-controlled Soviet press laid out the “numerous examples of racial terrorism in the U.S.A., such as the lynching of the Negro [Emmitt] Till, the brutal persecution of the Negro girl Autherine Lucy, the arrests of Negro leaders in Montgomery and the explosions of bombs near the homes of Negroes in northern and southern states.”