Abstract
The aftermath of any war affects those on the side of its victors even more than it does those who have lost. For many Afro-Americans who celebrated V-J Day in the late summer of 1945, there was an intense sense of joy and dread: fears that there might be another anti-black ‘Red Summer’ such as had swept the nation in 1919; hopes that the progressive economic changes that had occurred for blacks during the wartime era could be expanded; unanswered questions about the new administration of Harry S. Truman, its commitment to the modest social democratic policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the limited pursuit of civil rights. Two decades later, black social critic Harold Cruse described his feelings at that ambiguous moment in history:
World War II shattered a world irrevocably. But people who thought as I did were called upon in 1945 to treat the postwar era with intellectual and critical tools more applicable to the vanished world of the thirties — a world we had never had time to understand as we lived it. I spent the years from 1945 to about 1952 wrestling with this perplexity.…1
It is the problem of the Russian People to make changes there. We cannot advance a progressive development by threatening Russia from the outside.… America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists there are here. In my eyes, the ‘Communist conspiracy’ is principally a slogan used in order to put those who have no judgment and who are cowards into a condition which makes them entirely defenseless. Again, I must think back to the Germany of 1932, whose democratic social body had already been weakened by similar means.…
Albert Einstein, open letter to Norman Thomas, 1954
There are class divisions among Negroes, and it is misleading to maintain that the interests of the Negro working and middle classes are identical. To be sure, a middle-class NAACP leader and an illiterate farmhand in Mississippi or a porter who lives in Harlem all want civil rights. However, it would be enlightening to examine why the NAACP is not composed of Negro porters and farmhands, but only of Negroes of a certain type.
Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution
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Notes
Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow, 1968), p. 12.
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 270.
Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (New York: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 9, 18.
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 573, 575.
David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 539–40.
Richard Pollenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 87–8.
Lillian Hellman , Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
On Randolph’s political career, see William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977);
Theodore Kornweibel, ‘The Messenger Magazine, 1917–1928’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1971);
Manning Marable, From the Grassroots: Social and Political Essays Towards Afro-American Liberation (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 59–85.
Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 66.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 293.
Ibid., p. 334. The shift in the NAACP’s position on the Soviet Union and the American left in general can be observed by analysing the attitudes of James Weldon Johnson. Johnson, who was not a leftist, wrote this passage in 1934: Soviet Russia [is] a land in which there is absolutely no prejudice against Negroes.… I hold no brief against Communism as a theory of government. I hope that the Soviet experiment will be completely successful.… If America should turn truly Communistic, … if the capitalistic system should be abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat established, with the Negro aligned, as he naturally ought to be, with the proletariat, race discriminations would be officially banned and the reasons and feelings back of them would finally disappear. See Johnson , Negro Americans, What Now? (New York: Viking Press, 1962).
W. E. B. DuBois, ‘The Negro and Radical Thought’, Crisis, 22 (July 1921), 204.
W. E. B. DuBois, ‘My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom’, in Rayford Logan (ed.), What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), pp. 31–70.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 136. Once out of office, Truman was absolutely candid about his opposition to blacks’ civil rights. At a Cornell University lecture in 1960, Truman charged that ‘Communists’ were ‘engineering the student sit-downs at lunch counters in the South’. King and Wilkins deplored the former president’s statement, and demanded that he provide details. Truman replied that he had no proof: ‘But I know that usually when trouble hits the country the Kremlin is behind it’. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 35.
August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 35.
Jessie Parkhurst Guzman (ed.), Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life, 1941–1946 (Tuskegee Institute, Alabama: Tuskegee Institute, Department of Records and Research, 1947), pp. 270–1.
V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage, 1949), p. 649.
W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp. 353–5, 479–80.
Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics (New York: Longman, 1975), p. 94.
Mario T. Garcia, ‘On Mexican Immigration, the United States, and Chicano History’, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 7 (Spring 1979), 85.
Stan Steiner, La Raza: The Mexican-Americans (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 232–3.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, ‘Land and Nationhood: The American Indian Struggle for Self-Determination and Survival’, Socialist Review, 12 (May–August 1982), 109.
William Loren Katz, The Black West (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 201–14.
S. J. Makielski, Jr., Beleaguered Minorities: Cultural Politics in America (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), p. 56.
Richard A. Garcia, ‘The Chicano Movement and the Mexican-American Community, 1972–1978: An Interpretative Essay’, Socialist Review, 8 (July–October 1978), 123.
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© 1984 Manning Marable
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Marable, M. (1984). The Cold War in Black America, 1945–1954. In: Race, Reform and Rebellion. The Contemporary United States. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17657-1_2
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