During World War II, African American heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis enlisted in the Army and promptly became the poster boy (literally – the government created propaganda materials with his visage) for American progressivism. In his visits to military bases around the world, Louis served two principal functions: he boosted soldier morale, and he promoted the image of America's superiority over the Nazis’ racist creed. With the advent of the Cold War nearly a decade later, as Damion L. Thomas explains in Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics, the United States government developed a more sustained and concerted strategy to utilize black athletes as propaganda fodder in the fight for American prestige abroad.

In his five chapters (plus introduction and epilogue), Thomas demonstrates that efforts either supported or promoted by the federal government to incorporate African Americans in international Goodwill programs functioned as a replacement for substantive changes in the condition of black Americans. The goal of the cultural exchanges designed during the Cold War was to alter the perception of race relations rather than their reality. By sending black athletes to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the government sought to advance the “American way of life” by suggesting that within a capitalist economic system anyone with individual merit – including African Americans – could achieve personal success.

To quash dissenting perspectives that might damage the international reputation of the United States, government officials treated black protesters and critics of domestic policy as threats to national security. Hence, as Thomas delineates in his compelling first chapter, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were effectively silenced after they both issued strong rebukes of civil rights in America. The prevailing, government-sponsored narrative framed the story of race relations as one of progress and triumph, with black athletes representing the evidence of African Americans’ dramatic improvement. Within a broad historic context, black people had, in fact, exhibited a “meteoric rise” (39) in their condition.

Thomas effectively highlights the essential role of propaganda in addressing Cold War diplomatic concerns, and he situates both race and black athletes at the heart of the United States government's effort to win the hearts and minds of formerly colonized peoples around the world. Domestic problems profoundly affected the worldwide perception of America and therefore shaped foreign-policy initiatives. However, as black Americans became more assertive in their resistance to mistreatment, the government faced increasingly greater challenges in combating the negative publicity that damaged its image abroad. For this reason, according to Thomas, President Kennedy finally introduced civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

But aside from the strong chapters (especially the first and third) addressing the government's use of black “cold warriors” for its propaganda goals, this book suffers from something of an identity crisis. Based principally on secondary sources, the narrative lacks input from the very athletes whose international appearances were central to the government's strategy in combatting negative publicity. For example, Thomas includes a long section on the Harlem Globetrotters, providing a history of the team, its involvement in international Goodwill diplomacy (although mostly without official government sponsorship), its efforts on the home front to be a financially viable organization in a racially charged climate, and an extensive discussion of the team owner, Abe Saperstein. But almost no players’ voices are heard throughout this section, despite Thomas's insistence that the minstrelsy that served as the hallmark of the team's antics was really grounded in an African American tradition. He claims that the players were simply “donning a mask” in front of white audiences, but he offers no substantiation from the athletes themselves. Thomas's heavy focus on the Globetrotters’ style of play, team composition, and owner diminishes the chapter's effectiveness in contributing to the larger question he explores in his book.

Globetrotting would have benefitted mightily from stronger editing. Its typographical and grammatical errors are distracting. More substantively, the absence of chronological flow undermines the clarity of how strategies evolved over time, especially in relation to the growing activism of African Americans at home. When the government drew down its commitment to cultural and athletic exchange programs in the mid-1960s, did it do so because it abruptly concluded that propaganda was not useful in winning the Cold War (as Thomas implies), or was it the result of black activism and a growing refusal on black athletes’ part to permit themselves to be used in this way? The failure to adhere to any sense of chronology produces seemingly contradictory conclusions and a great deal of repetition. Much of Thomas's argument could have been dramatically condensed. Doing so would have opened space for a more comprehensive exploration of the black athletes themselves, especially their perspectives on being used to assert American preeminence abroad while enduring Jim Crow at home. This broader discussion would have further enriched our understanding of how race shaped Cold War policies, both foreign and domestic.