Book Excerpt Of The Week, "Muhammad Ali: Through The Eyes Of The World" By: Various Contributors

"During the Cold War, the U.S. establishment very much wanted to project itself as a liberal and tolerant, and multi-racial society because they were in a competition with the Soviet Union for influence over the emergent nations in Africa and Asia. The problem was that the U.S. wasn't actually like that. The world that emerged after World War II was polarized into the two great power blocs, both dominated by White people. The advent of the American civil rights movement, and more broadly, the African-American freedom struggle was the key moment at which the whole thing exploded, because it proved the lies and hypocrisy on both sides of the power game and it exploded certainly Cold War America's self-image and the image it wanted to project to the world.

So the Black liberation struggle in America was one of the starting engines for all of those struggles that we call 'the struggles of the 60s.' The other principal ones were the struggles of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa." - From, "Muhammad Ali: Through The Eyes Of The World" By: Various Contributors

[SIDEBAR: The included punctuations and sentence structures are as printed in the book.]