Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story”

261 Pages·2009·3.253 MB·English

by  Robbie Lieberman, Clarence Lang (eds.)

Anticommunism and the African American
Freedom Movement
CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY
Manning Marable (Columbia University) and
Peniel Joseph (Brandeis University)
Series Editors
This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlining
the importance of the study of history as a form of public advocacy and political activism.
It focuses on postwar African American history, from 1945 to the early 1990s, but it also
includes international black history, bringing in high-quality interdisciplinary scholarship
from around the globe. It is the series editors’ firm belief that outstanding critical research
can also be accessible and well-written. To this end, books in the series incorporate differ-
ent methodologies that lend themselves to narrative richness, such as oral history and eth-
nography, and combine disciplines such as African American Studies, Political Science,
Sociology, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Criminal
Justice.
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Anticommunism and
the African American
Freedom Movement
“Another Side of the Story”
Edited by
Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang
ANTICOMMUNISM AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM MOVEMENT
Copyright © Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-60524-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37274-4 ISBN 978-0-230-62074-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230620742
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anticommunism and the African American freedom movement :
“another side of the story” / edited by Robbie Lieberman and Clarence
Lang.
p. cm.—(Contemporary Black history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. African Americans—Civil rights—History. 2. Civil rights
movements—United States—History. 3. Feminism—United States—
History. 4. Mexican Americans—Civil rights—History. 5. Social
movements—United States—History. 6. Anti-communist movements—
United States—History. 7. Radicalism—United States—History.
8. United States—Social conditions—1945– 9. United States—
Race relations—History—20th century. I. Lieberman, Robbie,
1954– II. Lang, Clarence.
E185.61.A585 2009
323.11896(cid:2)073—dc22 2008042811
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: May 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Aaron, who will one day understand this history
—R.L.
For Nile, Zoe, and the hope for a just tomorrow
—C.L.
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
Foreword by Ellen Schrecker xiii
Preface and Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang
1. “ Another Side of the Story”: African American Intellectuals
Speak Out for Peace and Freedom during the Early
Cold War Years 17
Robbie Lieberman
2. Q uieting the Chorus: Progressive Women’s Race and
Peace Politics in Postwar New York 51
Jacqueline Castledine
3. The March of Young Southern Black Women: Esther
Cooper Jackson, Black Left Feminism, and the Personal and
Political Costs of Cold War Repression 81
Erik S. McDuffie
4. C orrespondence: Journalism, Anticommunism, and
Marxism in 1950s Detroit 115
Rachel Peterson
5. F reedom Train Derailed: The National Negro Labor
Council and the Nadir of Black Radicalism 161
Clarence Lang
6. C hallenges to Solidarity: The Mexican American Fight for
Social and Economic Justice, 1946–1963 189
Zaragosa Vargas
Notes on Contributors 229
Selected Bibliography 231
Index 243
Series Editors’ Foreword
The historiography of what is still generally called the “Civil Rights
Movement era” has undergone a striking transformation in recent years.
Throughout the twentieth century, the most influential historians of the
African American experience tended to define the civil rights movement
to a narrow chronological period, roughly from the 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education decision to the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act. It
tended to focus exclusively on political and social events taking place in
the United States, and primarily in the South, in the collective efforts to
overturn legal segregation. The older historiography often emphasized
the roles of prominent national leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and major civil rights organizations, in the struggle for racial integra-
tion. And for many of these historians, the black nationalist-inspired
protest movement called “Black Power” was perceived as a repudiation
or rejection of the ethos of racial harmony and coalition-building. The
mass exodus of whites from groups like the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
in 1965–1967 was seen as a nihilistic lurch into black separatism and
racial isolationism by white liberal historians and journalists of the
movement.
Fortunately, a new generation of scholars has emerged in the past
decade and more, scholars who have rejected the tired assumptions of
white privilege and have asked different, and more relevant, questions of
the historical record. Many have documented how the various struggles
to desegregate public accommodations, and to pass antidiscrimination
laws in state legislatures, was a process that took place in the North a
decade before the movement erupted in the South. The new subfield of
“Black Power historiography” has amply illustrated how the ideological
and political origins of what would become Black Power were established
in the 1950s, not in the mid-to-late 1960s, and that militant groups like
the Black Panther Party were also successful in fashioning local programs
that were often pragmatic and effective in addressing the black commu-
nity’s needs. Outstanding feminist historians such as Barbara Ransby,
x SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
author of a major biography of Ella Baker, have provided a richer appreci-
ation and understanding of the central roles of African American women
in the successful development of the freedom struggle, in both its civil
rights and black power phases.
One area the new historiography and scholarship on the post-1945
black experience has not adequately addressed, however, was the pro-
found impact of the Cold War and the Red Scare represented by politi-
cians such as Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon in the 1940s and 1950s.
Of course, even liberal historians have long expressed regret for the polit-
ical silencing of actor/activist Paul Robeson, the federal prosecution of
NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois, and the persecution and jailing of
black Communists such as Harlem Councilman Benjamin Davis. But
for the most part, there remains a lack of recognition of how disruptive
and damaging McCarthyism and cold war terror were to the ranks of
the black freedom struggle. Some historians recently have even claimed
that the Cold War was on balance “beneficial” to the civil rights cause,
in part because international competition with the Soviet Union and its
allies forced the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy Administrations to
adopt civil rights measures—such as Eisenhower’s nationalizing of the
Arkansas National Guard during the 1957 Little Rock school desegrega-
tion crisis.
This argument unfortunately ignores substantial evidence that anti-
communism was a destructive force within civil rights groups, and more
broadly, within the black community. Inside CORE, for example, some
independent Marxists and communists had participated in the organiza-
tion from the early 1940s. However, in 1949 when a group of Trotskyists
joined the San Francisco CORE branch, the national office barred its
affiliation. In 1948, CORE’s executive committee approved a “Statement
on Communism,” which denounced all associations with “Communist-
controlled” groups. Despite CORE’s efforts to insulate itself from
McCarthyite attacks, its members were frequently harassed as danger-
ous subversives. A similar dynamic occurred within the NAACP. When
the Truman Administration’s Justice Department filed charges against
Du Bois, NAACP executive secretary Walter White ordered Association
branches not to provide financial or political support to the venerable
black scholar. As unions purged and expelled hundreds of black labor
leaders and organizers with ties to the Left, the national leadership did
nothing. It failed to comprehend that its inaction undermined the strug-
gle for civil rights and desegregation in many profound ways.
Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang present a powerful and per-
suasive analysis of the fractured internal contours of the black freedom
SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD xi
struggle in the years after World War II. The terrible human costs of
McCarthyism, the destroyed careers and private lives, all contributed to
delay and retard the democratic impulse toward desegregation and racial
equality within American society. Anticommunism and the African
American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story,” presents an
extremely important dimension of recent American history.
Manning Marable