Diplomacies of Race: America, Iran, and Global Civil Rights

In 1968, with much anticipation, the Human Rights Conference opened in Iran, from April 22nd until May 13th. The focus on global racial struggles defined the early sessions of the conference. Two countries, the United States and South Africa, were confronting intensified domestic unrest as their Black communities demanded political and economic enfranchisement. Roy Wilkins, as representative of the United States, delivered a speech in which he referenced the shah’s White Revolution, which had brought reforms in literacy, land reform, and women’s rights, among other domains. To appeal to his Iranian audience, Wilkins even compared the fundamental teachings of the Iranian prophet, Zoroaster, with the ethos of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

The presence of Wilkins as US representative to the Tehran Human Rights Conference had enormous significance beyond its symbolic value of a Black diplomat engaging a host nation in race relations. Many Iranians of the era had proved naïve, if not downright ignorant, about the abuses of global slavery, segregation, and apartheid as it then raged in the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere. The conference publicly broached important conversations in Iran about civil and human rights in a global context.

Around the same time, young Iranians abroad engaged with the civil rights struggles of Blacks in America. This paper will explore the diplomacies of race in the context of the Cold War. It will also connect these domestic conversations with Iranian understandings of race abroad in the context of its burgeoning diaspora community in the United States.