After the Second World War, as the Cold War took hold and many countries in the global south began to break free of colonial rule, the United States sought to promote its version of democracy across the world. In Africa, the U.S. Information Agency invested in a major program of activity within which photography served to imagine capitalist, consumerist, and democratic futures for the continent, modeled in its own image. From the mid-1950s, however, as African decolonization gathered pace and the U.S. civil rights movement took on new momentum, racial injustice presented an unprecedented challenge to this task, with images of racial violence circulating widely across the globe and undermining the image the U.S. sought to project. This presentation examines the ways in which the U.S. Information Agency responded to this challenge. For a brief period, civil rights protest was presented as a form of "democracy in action."