A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us about Teaching Soviet History

Abstract

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.