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Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government, was interviewed for a National Public Radio series exploring the Korean War's impact on race relations. Korea: The Armed Forces Integrate aired on NPR Weekend Edition and can be heard using RealPlayer.

Excerpt:

LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.  I'm Linda Wertheimer.  ... tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War.  Korea was at the forefront of a profound change in American society.  Thousands of Americans first experienced racial integration there on the front lines, blacks and whites fighting side by side in a newly desegregated military. 

...Philip Klinkner says Korea would lay crucial groundwork for the growing civil rights movement in the US.

KLINKNER: I think it showed African-Americans, as well as white Americans, that integrated institutions could work; that a lot of the sort of intellectual and pragmatic arguments that were made for Jim Crow institutions really were shown to be myths and that America could move towards a more integrated society without some sort of crisis setting in.

In his co-authored book, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of America's Commitment to Racial Equality (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Klinkner disproves the idea that the United States has been on a "steady march" toward the end of racial discrimination. Rather, progress has been made only in brief periods, as in times of war, and it has always been followed by periods of stagnation and retrenchment. This book received the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award from Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department and W.E.B DuBois Institute.   Klinkner is an expert on American politics, including parties and elections, race relations, Congress, and the Presidency. He has been a professor at Hamilton since 1995 and is the former director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center. Klinkner has written extensively on a variety of topics related to American politics. His other books include The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 (Yale University Press, 1994) and Midterm: The 1994 Elections in Perspective (Westview Press, 1996).

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