In Cold War Civil Rights, Mary L. Dudziak situates the American civil rights movement within the broader geopolitical context of the Cold War. In doing so, Dudziak joins an emerging field that includes Brenda Gayle Plummer and Gerald Horne, whose respective works Dudziak models her own after.[1] Together, their research highlights and emphasizes the interrelationship between race, civil rights, and international relations during the World War II and Cold War eras. Dudziak, in particular, examines the civil rights movement through an international lens. She argues that “civil rights reform was in part a product of the Cold War.”[2] In other words, Dudziak contends that the geopolitical challenges of the nascent Cold War engendered the federal government’s interest and eventual involvement in the civil rights movement. For the federal government, civil rights reform was an extension of its foreign policy. Her work, therefore, “traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy” from 1946 to the mid-1960s.[3] In the process, Dudziak offers new insights and a fresh perspective on the history of the Cold War and the civil rights movement.
As the United States emerged from World War II as a world power, foreign nations not only became more observant of “the expansion of U.S. influence and power in the world,” but also more knowledgeable about race relations within American democracy.[4] According to Dudziak, international criticisms and perceptions of American race relations raised concerns among government officials and, in turn, eventually led to their involvement in civil rights reform. As the United States sought “to reshape the postwar world in its own image,” newspapers worldwide regularly published stories exposing America’s race problem.[5] For example, in November 1947, Haiti’s secretary of agriculture, Francois Georges, planned to attend a conference hosted by the National Association of Commissioners, Secretaries and Directors of Agriculture in Biloxi, Mississippi. However, upon his arrival, the hotel housing the conference’s attendees denied Georges their service “for ‘reasons of color.’”[6] Newspapers around the world quickly detailed the event. Soon after, editorials critical of Georges’ reception in America appeared in the Haitian newspapers La Nation and Le Nouvelliste as well as the Jamaican newspaper, the Kingston Daily Cleaner. In response, the United States embassy in Haiti felt compelled to issue a public apology. Foreign newspapers, however, did not limit their coverage to the experiences of visiting foreign officials. Local acts of racial violence appeared on the front pages of foreign newspapers. The lynching of African Americans was a source of continued discussion within their editorial sections. In response, United States diplomats expressed their concerns to the State Department, arguing that racial inequality at home affected the image of America abroad, thus, limiting the United States government’s persuasive power in the ideological war between democratic capitalism and communism.
International reactions not only challenged the pristine image of American freedom and democracy that government officials looked to project globally but also provided the Soviet Union with a useful propaganda theme. According to Dudziak, concurrent with this development, the geopolitical implications of the nascent Cold War now framed the international discussions among world leaders. However, it was not until the NAACP filed a petition with the United Nations in 1947, however, that President Truman and State Department officials began formally addressing civil rights as a foreign policy issue. Although, as Dudziak notes, federal officials only did so in response to the international reception of the NAACP petition. While the NAACP petition received praise from foreign newspapers, it was the concerns the petition elicited from foreign governments that proved even more troubling for United States officials. Following a private meeting with a Dutch official, Robert Coe of the American Embassy, The Hague, filed a report to the State Department detailing their conversation. According to the Dutch official, American racial attitudes and domestic race relations have proven to be an effective propaganda theme for the Soviet Union in Asian, African, and European nations. Furthermore, in light of the NAACP petition, the Dutch official described the difficulty in defending America’s mistreatment of its black citizens. However, as Dudziak points out, there was a solution. According to the Dutch official, the American government needed to “‘devote a major portion of its facilities and energies to a campaign aimed at counteracting the impression so many people have of American racial suppression.’”[7] The State Department followed this suggestion vigorously and did so as a foreign policy initiative.
Relying on archival source material from the State Department—primarily, correspondence between American and foreign diplomats and American and foreign elected officials; and publications from the United States Information Agency and the United States Information Services, most notably The Negro in American Life (c. 1950)—Dudziak illuminates the herculean efforts of the federal government to control the international conversation on American race relations. State Department officials sponsored world speaker tours of African Americans like Walter White, Jay Saunders, and Dr. Max Yergan, who promoted a more racially progressive image of American freedom and democracy. Simultaneously, the federal government actively silenced other African Americans like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and William Patterson by revoking their passports or limiting their access to a wider audience. The State Department believed their critiques of race, class, and colonialism would prove too damaging to American influence if heard on an international platform. In an ideological war against communism and the Soviet Union, the federal government actively promoted a “particular vision of racial justice” and “kept discussions of broad-based social change, or linking of race and class, off the agenda.”[8] For the United States, “class-based inequality…was a feature of capitalism, an economic system Americans were proud of.”[9] While the Cold War opened doors of opportunity for racial progress, Dudziak argues, it also closed the door on a host of other social and economic reforms.
As the State Department looked to reframe the race narrative, along with the Justice Department they also tried to influence the legal decisions of the Supreme Court via amici curiae laced with arguments about foreign policy concerns. For example, during Brown v. Board of Education State and Justice Department officials “stressed to Supreme Court the international implications of race discrimination and…the negative impact on U.S. foreign relations that a prosegregation decision might have.”[10] When the Supreme Court made its decision on Brown, the State Department issued an immediate radio broadcast through its station, Voice of America. Within hours of the decision, the world knew of America’s landmark case for civil rights reform.
According to Dudziak, international concern for American race relations peaked during the early 1960s. While the racial violence portrayed in the media coverage of Birmingham and the Freedom Rides proved problematic, the international reaction to these events seemed mild in comparison to the events of the 1950s, notably that of Little Rock. Dudziak attributes this to the effectiveness of the State Department as well as key Supreme Court civil rights decisions that included Brown v. Board of Education, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Henderson v. United States. Together, many worldwide began to accept the narrative of the racial progress that the State Department carefully crafted over the decade. For example, following the 1963 March on Washington, the Evening News in Ghana proclaimed the March on Washington as “one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of human history.”[11] Foreign newspapers worldwide, as Dudziak shows, shared this sentiment of the event. The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 further cemented this belief among the international audience.
Throughout Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak’s two key interventions stand out. Firstly, that “domestic racism and civil rights protest led to international criticism of the U.S. government. International criticism led the federal government to respond, through placating foreign critics by reframing the narrative on race in America” and by enacting or advocating for specific types of civil rights reform.[12] Secondly, without the strategic or geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, the federal government—primarily the State and Justice Department of the executive branch, would have little incentive to address civil rights nor would civil rights reform become a vital foreign policy goal. Once “Vietnam had eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue affecting U.S. prestige abroad,” that incentive vanished.[13]
By examining the civil rights movement through an international lens, Dudziak illuminates the connections between foreign and domestic affairs. As Dudziak argues, “foreign developments help drive domestic politics and policy.”[14] In this case, the combination of international criticisms of American racism and the geopolitical implications of the Cold War facilitated opportunities, albeit limited in scope, for civil rights reform. An international approach to the civil rights movement seems to diminish the agency of grassroots activists and African Americans. However, as Dudziak stresses, without their activism an international reaction does not occur nor the series of civil rights reforms between 1946 and 1965. With Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak offers a new vantage point from which to gain new perspectives of the civil rights movement.
In this historiographical essay, The Life of a Historian surveys the current scholarship of the history of black banking. In particular, this review primarily focuses on the following historians and their respective books:
Henderson, Alexa Benson. “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 117, mo. ½ (January 1993): 51-81.
Osthaus, Carl R. “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier.” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1 (January 1973): 39–60.
Re-Conceptualizing US Capitalism through the Histories and Experiences of Black Financiers and Institutions:
A Review of the Scholarship and Historiography of Black Banking in American History
Introduction to Black Banking Historiography:
Connecting the Histories of US Capitalism, African Americans, and Civil Rights
Although the historiography of black banking is underexplored, a few historians have pressed upon us its importance and value to American history. This essay considers a selection of published works from four of those historians—Carl R. Osthaus, Alexa Benson Henderson, Shennette Garrett-Scott, and Brandon Winford—to survey the field of black banking.[1] Moving in chronological order from the date of their respective publications, this review will focus on the methodological approaches, analytical frameworks, and arguments of each to address their commonalities, differences, and contributions to the field. Although limited in quantity, the current scholarship on black banking is not short on quality nor needs convincing of its significance. The history of black banking intersects with other historiographical conversations including those of capitalism and the civil rights movement. It also broadens our understandings of race, gender, politics, and economics. Significantly, the history of black banking suggests a need to reevaluate and redefine capitalism, and what black banking has meant for both white and black Americans.
The History of Black Banking through Biographical Narratives:
How Telling the Story of One Life Illuminates a Broader History
With “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga,” Osthaus investigates the history of black banking through the lens of Chicago banker and real estate mogul, Jesse Binga. Although his article is biographical in its approach—detailing Binga’s life, specifically his time in Chicago from 1900-1930—it suggests a particular relationship existed between Binga, black financial enterprise, and the black community. Relying primarily on articles and editorials from African American newspapers, Osthaus traces the success and failure of Binga to highlight his intimate relationship with Chicago’s black community. He argues that the meteoritic rise and fall of Binga symbolized and paralleled the economic growth of Chicago’s South Side black community. According to Osthaus, “Chicago in the 1920s was the Mecca of Negro business” and “no person did more than Jesse Binga…to develop Chicago’s South Side.”[2] With the construction and opening of Binga State Bank (BSB) in 1921, Chicago’s black press hailed it “as the first real bank ever constructed” by an African American, and that it “symbolized the commencement of a new era in Chicago businesses.”[3] However, as Osthaus shows, Binga’s business relationship with the South Side was one of contradiction. On the one hand, he genuinely cared about the economic progress of African Americans as shown through his philanthropy and belief that the BSB “could eliminate those ubiquitous financial parasites of the Black Belt” that preyed on the black working-class.[4] On the other hand, as a real estate developer Binga “raised rents excessively and reaped handsome profits from the black community’s critical housing shortage.”[5]
Even still, Binga “became a legendary hero” among the black residents of South Side and was known as a community institution himself.[6] As Osthaus argues, to the South Side Binga “had triumphed over all the handicaps that black capitalists reputedly faced.”[7] The reactions and responses of the black community to Binga’s dramatic fall from financial and social prominence following the closing of the BSB and his eventual arrest, conviction, and imprisonment for embezzlement further imply this sentiment. Osthaus writes that “the public reaction on the South Side was…generally sympathetic” with most associating “his imprisonment with the collapse of his bank and not embezzlement.”[8] Although sentenced to ten years, friends, religious, and “even former foes” rallied to bring about his release from prison three years later in 1938.[9] According to Osthaus, Robert Blackmon of the Defender, “voiced accurately the significance of the former financial king” to South Side and the black community.[10] For Blackmon, “Binga had prospered and had become the symbol of the Negro’s bid for power via respectability. To the South Side he was not a criminal but a victim of the white man’s system.”[11] In many ways, the idea of Binga, the story of his rise to wealth and social prominence, his philanthropy—not necessarily the actual person—underscores the importance of black business and economic success in 1920s Chicago.
Henderson adopts a similar methodological approach as Osthaus both in terms of source material and her decision to study black banking through the lens of one individual. However, she shifts the focus to Philadelphia’s Richard R. Wright to explore the history of the National Negro Bankers Association (NNBA) between 1924-1947. But like Osthaus, Henderson suggests a particular relationship existed between black financial leaders and institutions and the black communities they served. In “Richard R Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association,” Henderson argues that Wright believed in cooperation over competition among black financial institutions and businesses to achieve economic empowerment and independence for African American communities. Furthermore, as the co-founder of the reorganized NNBA, his “ideas provided fodder for its formation” and his “leadership was central to its development.”[12]
Following his retirement from education as Head of Georgia State Industrial College at the age of 65, Wright moved to Philadelphia to start a career as a banker. In Philadelphia, along with his son, Wright founded the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company.[13] According to Henderson, Wright “viewed the necessity of acquiring and maintaining the confidence of the black community as paramount to a successful banking operation.”[14] Initially, for Wright, this meant proving the legitimacy of Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company within his community of Philadelphia. Through sound business decisions and professional and personal relationships with prominent local black leaders and organizations, Wright earned the trust of the black community. By the end of the first year, “deposits in the bank aggregated over $100,000 with more than 4,000 depositors.”[15] With this success, Wright continued to advocate for cooperation over competition and set about re-establishing the NNBA during the mid-1920s. In 1926, the NNBA officially recognized and elected Wright as its president. Under Wright’s leadership, the NNBA worked towards realizing his vision of black financial “cooperation and racial progress.”[16]
Through their respective surveys of Jesse Binga and Richard R. Wright, Osthaus and Henderson identify and address significant connections between black banking and larger historical processes and themes. However, and in addition to the imposed page limitations of a journal article, their interpretive framework and biographical approaches prove too restrictive, and prohibit a prolonged analysis. Furthermore, as Henderson acknowledges in her work, most black-owned banks were in the South. When the NNBA formed under Wright’s leadership, “it was reported that there were in existence seventy black banks” throughout the United States with fifty-seven of them in the South.[17]
A More Expansive and Malleable Biographical Approach and Interpretive Framework:
Exploring the South, Gender, US Capitalism, and the Civil Rights Movement
With their respective works, Winford and Garrett-Scott build on the scholarship of Osthaus and Henderson by expanding their interpretive framework and biographical approach to include new regions, voices, and themes. In John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, Winford “explores the black freedom struggle through the lens of John Wheeler.”[18] Like Osthaus and Henderson, Winford employs a biographical approach. However, Winford freely and deftly wanders away from his central actor to investigate the world around Wheeler. This allows Winford to thoroughly elaborate on his argument “that if we are to fully understand how central economics was to the civil rights movement, we must consider black business.”[19]
This interpretive technique proves most effective in Winford’s earlier chapters when he examines the generation of black business leaders in Durham and at the Mechanics and Farmers Bank before Wheeler. From these observations, Winford makes a significant contribution to the field with what he calls “black business activism.”[20] During the ‘Golden Age of Black Business,’ from 1900 to 1930, Durham became known as the ‘Capital of the Black Middle Class.’[21] For Winford, “black Durham became a training ground” for black business activism.[22] “Schooled in the racial etiquette” of “progressive southern race relations” and “community leadership,” Wheeler and his generation felt empowered to use “their ‘economic independence’ as a ‘launching pad into civil rights.’”[23] Winford argues that Wheeler’s brand of activism “in many ways rejected racial uplift.”[24] Winford calls Wheeler’s economic vision “New South prosperity.”[25] Working within an integrationist framework, Wheeler called for an end to Jim Crow segregation and “institutional forms of racism” to “give African Americans complete ‘freedom of movement’ in every area of American life.”[26] With racial equality and full citizenship secured, black economic power would follow leading to “widespread prosperity in the New South.”[27]
Additionally, by following Wheeler throughout his life, Winford’s study “considers the framework of the long civil rights movement.”[28] This expansive timeframe helps Winford further illuminate the relationship between black financial leaders and institutions and the black community first expressed by Osthaus and Henderson. Winford highlights this relationship well through Wheeler’s involvement in each of the three phases of the civil rights movement: legal phase, direct-action phase, and implementation phase. Wheeler throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s wielded his influence as a black power broker and banker to ensure racial equality and black economic power. This included his legal battles for educational equality and his political interventions in “reform and policymaking at the local, state, and national levels.”[29] With a chapter on urban renewal, Winford also explores the more contentious aspect of this relationship. In doing so, he shows that “the goals of civil rights and black economic power did not always mesh with black capitalism.”[30] Wheeler, as a member of the Durham Redevelopment Commission and advocate for urban renewal, became a target of black Durham. For many displaced black residents, Wheeler sold “‘out the black community.’”[31]
Through his biographical approach and narrative of John Wheeler, Winford highlights important connections between black banking and business and the civil rights movement. Moreover, his work repositions the history of black banking in the South where it was most prevalent and influential. Before Winford’s intervention, John Wheeler eluded scholarly discussions on black banking and the civil rights movement. With John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, such omissions will no longer be possible as Winford clearly and persuasively illustrates the importance of Wheeler’s activism, one “grounded in economic black power,” to the civil rights movement.[32]
Even more than Winford, Garrett-Scott maximizes the utility of the interpretive framework and biographical approach set forth by Osthaus and Henderson. In Banking on Freedom, Garrett-Scott not only anchors her narrative to the life of Maggie Lena Walker but also focuses on the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL) and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond. By grounding herself primarily in the life of Walker and her contributions to the ISOL as Right Worthy Grand (RWG) Secretary and St. Luke Bank as founder and president, Garrett-Scott ably “considers the black women who created webs of formal and informal banking and savings institutions.”[33] In doing so, Garrett-Scott illustrates the significant financial roles of African American women not only within their households and families but also within their larger communities. Banking on Freedom, however, does more than simply “locating women” within the history of capitalism and US finance.[34] It demonstrates how “gender and race shaped and were shaped by finance capitalism.”[35] Black women formed and supported their own financial, political, and social networks and institutions within and in opposition to existing racial and gender power dynamics and norms. Thus, African American women “forged their own definitions of economic opportunities and citizenship.”[36]
With Banking on Freedom, Garrett-Scott intervenes and offers significant contributions to the field of black banking and the historiography of capitalism. By investigating the experiences of African American women well before Walker, the ISOL, and the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott reveals the myriad of ways black women overcame racial paternalism and gendered economics to exert their financial autonomy and participation within US capitalism of the postemancipation era. As Garrett-Scott shows, black women continued to redefine how race and gender norms and identities affected their financial opportunities and economic power into the twentieth century. As president of St. Luke Bank, Walker adopted non-industry strategies like a reliance on the politics of respectability to mitigate risks and financially serve black working-class women who, because of their gender and race, were marginalized by US capitalism and therefore, left financially vulnerable. Although, as Garrett-Scott notes, much has been written on US capitalism, historians have neglected the role of gender in the development and practice of capitalism. Banking on Freedom addresses that omission with Garrett-Scott effectively illustrating the need to include discussions of gender within all surveys of US capitalism. Furthermore, like Winford, Garrett-Scott highlights the value of investigating the impact of black financial institutions outside of economics. By recognizing St. Luke as “also a political institution for black communities,” Garrett-Scott shows how Walker and St. Luke helped mobilize black women as voters and political actors to challenge Jim Crow.[37]
Conclusion
Although the historiography of black banking is underdeveloped, these works underscore the value of black banking to broader fields of history and larger historiographical conversations. Black-owned banks not only represented financial opportunities and black economic power but also provided African Americans with a vehicle and means for political and social change. Furthermore, black banks illuminate the racial and gendered economic practices and values that characterized much of the history of US capitalism. Together, the scholarship on black banking suggests—and begins—a much-needed conversation on reevaluating and broadening our current historical definitions and conceptual frameworks for US capitalism and citizenship.
[1] Carl R. Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1 (January 1973): 39–60; Alexa Benson Henderson, “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 117, mo. ½ (January 1993): 51-81; Brandon Winford, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2020); and Shennette Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
[2] See Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier,” 46 and 39.
[12] Henderson, “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association,” 52.
[13] The bank, Citizens and Southern Bank, opened in 1920, and on January 19, 1926 “they formally organized the Citizens and Southern and Trust Company of Philadelphia. It became the first trust company organized by African Americans.” Henderson, 56.
The question of slavery pervaded all aspects of American society until its eventual dissolution with the ending of the Civil War. American slavery, arguably, affected religion more than most social institutions. Both pro- and antislavery religious leaders looked to the authority of the scriptures to develop arguments in defense of their views. The abolitionist movement and slavery debates during the decades preceding the war accentuated the conflicting biblical interpretations and the importance of scripture for public policy and social issues. The debates among religious leaders, particularly Protestants, over slavery and its moral standing according to the Bible, proved unable to engender a consensus. Ultimately, the Civil War ended a debate the Bible could not for religious leaders and theologians.
Historians Mark A. Noll and Molly Oshatz explore this history in their respective works, The Civil War as a Theological Crisisand Slavery and Sin. Both agree that the slavery debates created a theological crisis that ended not with a consensus biblical interpretation, but by the Civil War. However, each perceives the effect of this differently. For Noll, this crisis diminished the authority of religion on social issues; furthermore, “the religion with which theologians emerged from the war was essentially the same as that with which they entered the war.”[1] This left Protestant leaders unprepared against theological criticisms and diminished the importance of religion within the public sphere. Oshatz, on the other hand, argues that the slave debates prepared Protestants “to respond to postwar challenges to the faith,” and helped push forward the movement of American liberalism.[2]
In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll argues that before the Civil War “religion was…much more important than any other center of value at work in the country.”[3] Although the theological crisis centered on slavery and the Bible, as Noll illustrates, that was not the only issue at hand. Since the inception of the American republic, “theologians had been uniting historical Christian perspectives with specific aspects of American intellectual experience.”[4] By the time of the Civil War, “American churches promoting reasonably orthodox beliefs and reasonably traditional practices flourished precisely because they adapted so energetically to the republican freedoms won in the War of Independence, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and then expanded considerably with the opening of the new country.”[5] Christianity, namely Protestantism, was one of the strongest cultural forces in American society. As a result, and at the time of the theological crisis, religion wielded immense public influence and “had contributed so much to the construction of national culture.”[6] Without a consensus answer to the question of the Bible and slavery, Noll argues, religion’s importance within the public sphere diminished during the postwar years.
Noll comes to this conclusion through his examination of the debates on biblical authority and interpretation on slavery, and the conflicting understandings of providence and God’s participation in human history. Throughout his work, Noll shows how “evangelical Protestants, who believed that the Bible was true and who trusted their own interpretations of Scripture” led to a series of competing biblical interpretations.[7] Noll effectively demonstrates this by highlighting the oppositional interpretations of Henry Ward Beecher, James Henley Thornwell, Henry Van Dyke, and Rabbi Morris J. Raphall in chapter one and again with his analysis of the debate between Francis Wayland and Richard Fuller. Additionally, Noll adds another layer to the question of slavery and the theological crisis itself with chapters discussing biblical interpretations of race and providence.
The question of the Bible and slavery proved too dividing for the “intellectual vigor that evangelical Protestants had brought to bear on so many tasks between the Revolution and the Civil War.”[8] Noll argues that they did not have the theological resources to address postwar challenges.[9] Moreover, the Civil War “took the steam out of Protestants’ moral energy” as many remained divided along regional lines.[10] Consequently, any Americans moved away from scriptures as the defining authority on public policy. In short, the Civil War and a failure to develop a consensus on slavery left Protestants divided and intellectually unprepared to address postwar social issues and challenges to religion by way of biblical interpretations.
In Slavery and Sin, Oshatz disagrees with Noll’s approach and conclusion. According to Oshatz, Noll’s assertation amounts to “blaming the literal, flat-footed, and racist hermeneutics of the antebellum era for the Northern Protestant failure to arrive at an adequate biblical antislavery argument.”[11] As a result, he “obscures the depth of the challenges posed by the slavey debates.”[12] Rather than focusing on the competing biblical interpretations that separated pro- and anti-slavery advocates alike, Oshatz specifically examines moderate antislavery Protestants including Leonard Bacon, William Ellery Channing, E.P. Burrow, Horace Bushnell, and Samuel Harris. In doing so, she argues that they “came to rely on a new liberal understanding of Christian truth” that they believed reconciled the sin of slavery and the bible without the need to “surrender the scriptures or to declare every white Christian slaveholder an object sinner.”[13] For Oshatz, their challenge of slavery in the abstract laid the groundwork for the liberal Protestant theology of the late-nineteenth century.
This leads to another critique Oshatz has of Noll and other historians. Although Oshatz agrees that the Civil War marks an end of an era—namely the possibility “to base a national Protestant consensus on biblical literalism”—and that a new era of religious traditions begins, she contends the demarcation historians have created belies the strong connections between the two eras.[14] According to Oshatz, liberal Protestantism’s understanding that “God’s revelation unfolded progressively through human history, moral action had to be considered in its historical and social context and the ultimate source of Protestant truth was the shared experience of believers rather than the letter of the biblical text” derived from ideas and thoughts of moderate antislavery Protestants during the slave debates.
In sum, the biblical interpretations of the antislavery Protestants paved the way for the theology of liberal Protestantism during the late-nineteenth century. According to Oshatz, not only did moderate antislavery Protestants lay the foundation for liberal Protestantism but they also provided a template for liberal Protestants to address theological issues of the postwar era—specifically evolution and historical biblical criticisms. Although, as Oshatz notes, liberal Protestantism proved short-lived, it “served as a spiritual halfway house between orthodoxy and secular humanism.”[15] Thus, Oshatz effectively demonstrates how moderate antislavery Protestants shaped the American religious and intellectual life well after the conclusion of the slave debates.
Although Oshatz successfully challenges Noll’s argument and approach, both works offer value to the scholarship of nineteenth-century American religion. As Oshatz has shown, historians need to further examine the connections between pre- and post-war Protestant thought while possibly broadening this approach to include proslavery Protestant advocates. In defense of Noll, his argument develops not from the perspective of one particular group of Protestants but from the thoughts and words of a variety of opposing individuals. His examination of domestic—the North and the South—and foreign perspectives of biblical interpretations of American slavery deserves further exploration and comparison.
In White Collar Radicals, Purcell examines the political actions of fifteen individuals during their time with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and how their brief period together continued to affect their lives in the proceeding decades. The ‘Knoxville Fifteen,’ as Purcell labels them, were young, politically and socially like-minded entry-level employees who happened to work together at the TVA during its nascent years of the mid-1930s.[1] Their shared interests and societal views—as well as their close proximity as professional colleagues—led to their involvement with one another as activists, friends, roommates, and sometimes lovers. The Knoxville Fifteen’s flirtation, and eventual membership for most, with the local Communist Party and their encouragement of social movements attracted the attention of the federal government and law enforcement agencies. Together, they supported the anti-fascist forces of the Spanish Civil War, advocated civil rights for African Americans, and participated in local labor issues, strikes, and movements as leaders of the TVA’s white-collar union. Although the Knoxville Fifteen avoided national notoriety and legal prosecution during their employment with TVA, the political climate ushered in by World War II and the subsequent Cold War facilitated multiple federal inquiries into their past that adversely affected their lives decades later.
Purcell’s exploration into the lives and experiences of the Knoxville Fifteen illuminates the pervasiveness of anti-communism hysteria, and the extent of federal intrusion and policing of the lives of American citizens. Purcell argues that the story of Knoxville Fifteen provides a cautionary tale “into modern-day investigations of those suspected of un-American activities.”[2] According to Purcell, the Knoxville Fifteen was “a small group of largely harmless ‘New Dealers.’”[3] Except for a few of the fifteen, their political actions and rhetoric proved limited to the Knoxville area and their time with the TVA. In comparison, as Purcell illustrates, the federal response wildly exaggerated their influence and threat to America resulting in an asymmetrical and repeated assault on their civil liberties.
Purcell effectively employs a wide array of primary and secondary sources to weave his narrative together. His sources include FBI and government files and documents, transcripts of public hearings, Howard Bridgman’s diary, personal interviews with two of the Knoxville Fifteen—Henry Hart and Mabel Abercrombie, national and local newspapers, and political periodicals, newsletters, and pamphlets. Coupled with his vast secondary literature, his extensive source material adequately reinforces his approach of placing the story of the Knoxville Fifteen within the broader history and context of the political climate of the TVA and the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. Purcell’s ability to continuously shift the camera of focus from actor to actor and frequently oscillate between vantage points is the strength of his work. It is only possible because of his thorough research and use of the source material. This approach underscores the hysteria of anti-communism in American society and institutions. The Red Scare enabled gross government overreach and provided the justification for the development of a perpetual cycle of allegations—often based on dubious evidence and unfounded rumors—and hearings against the Knoxville Fifteen.
However, this approach also creates a weakness due to the presentation and formatting of the book, and the magnitude of its scope. Purcell structures his narrative chronologically in three parts, each touching on a specific period of their lives. Problems of formatting and presentation appear most prevalent and concerning in “Part One: Visions”. While Purcell excels at describing the early years of the TVA, the New Deal, and the political climate of the 1930s, he inserts the biographical information and actions of the Knoxville Fifteen as distinct and separately written sections. This style choice detaches their stories from one another and from the broader history. Although it should be noted, such a presentation of the Knoxville Fifteen works well in “Part Three: Aftermath” when Purcell traces their respective lives following the conviction and murder of one of their own, William Remington. In “Part Two: Realities”, Purcell avoids this problem by wonderfully weaving the narrative between the voices and actions of the Knoxville Fifteen with other actors and within multiple settings.
Purcell simply tackles too many themes and topics with his focus on fifteen individuals. From the TVA and New Deal to the FBI’s investigation into the Knoxville Fifteen’s affiliations with the local Communist Party during the 1930s to Dies Committee hearings to the Senate confirmation hearings of David Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp to Remington’s trial and conviction, Purcell illustrates the pervasiveness and vindictiveness of politicians and law enforcement agencies in their enforcement of anti-communist policies. In general, Purcell is successful in his broader aims of highlighting the causes and effects of anti-communism hysteria on the minor characters of history while situating the voices and lives of these folks within the context of the changing political culture and climate of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. However, Purcell’s work would have benefitted from a narrower cast of individuals. If Purcell chose to only focus only on Remington and Hart, much of the book would have remained the same sans the constant need to stress the roles of the others. Furthermore, Purcell’s specific use of Lilienthal to elaborate on the political and cultural environment of the TVA and as a catalyst for 1940s Dies Committee hearings on the Knoxville Fifteen belies the significance of his role to the aims of his book. Although the Knoxville Fifteen all have interesting and deserving stories, this work would have offered more with less.
Purcell’s White Collar Radicals opens new avenues of historical inquiry to explore. Knoxville Fifteen member Pat Todd offers historians of Cold War culture and the Red Scare a case study on the adverse psychological effects of allegations and accusations of un-American sympathies and communist ties. Purcell’s work also suggests that a historical comparison and analyses of USSR and American state intrusion and policing of their citizens during the Cold War could prove potentially rewarding. Moreover, his approach is an ideal template for historians interested in writing holistic narratives that fluidly knit the lives of minor actors together within the context of the broader social, cultural, and political environments at the local, national, and international levels to demonstrate how profoundly society is interwoven with a myriad of influences.
[1] Aaron Purcell coined the nomenclature the Knoxville Fifteen specifically for the purposes of this work. In his own words, “I titled this core group the ‘Knoxville Fifteen.’ I did not set out to create the Knoxville Fifteen or any numbered group; instead, countless official reports, testimony, and interview transcripts guided me to a collection of like-minded individuals with similar experiences. Their identity as the Knoxville Fifteen is driven by available evidence and is a reliable way to describe their collective experiences while with TVA and beyond.” The Fifteen include Mabel Abercrombie, Forrest Benson, Bernard ‘Buck’ Borah, Howard Bridgman, Katherine ‘Kit’ Buckles, Christine Eversole, John Frantz, Howard Frazier, Henry Hart, David Stone Martin, William Remington, Muriel Speare, Merwin ‘Pat’ Todd, Elizabeth Winston, and Burton Zien. See Purcell, White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2009), xxiii-xxiv.
Comments Off on Historiographical Essay: A Review of the Interrelationship between White Supremacy, Anticommunism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South
In this historiographical essay, The Life of a Historian surveys the scholarship of the Cold War civil rights historiography. In particular, this review primarily focuses on the following historians and their respective books:
A Historiographical Review of the Interrelationship between White Supremacy, Anticommunism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South
Introduction to Cold War Civil Rights Historiography:
Connecting the Histories of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
Over the past three decades, scholars of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, respectively, have made a concerted effort to converge the two historiographical conversations. What has developed is the recognition of a fascinating interrelationship between the Cold War and the civil rights movement. Although known by the contemporaries of the time, historians are now finally illuminating on the myriad of ways African Americans understood the Cold War climate and adapted their grassroots strategies accordingly to yield desired outcomes. In general, historians of this relatively new field of study and historiography—Cold War civil rights—have produced articles and monographs that more or less seek to internationalize American history by examining domestic affairs within the context of Cold War geopolitical climate. In short, histories that explore the impact of United States foreign policy on the civil rights movement and vice versa.[1]
Consequently, many scholars of the Cold War civil rights historiography employ a rather top-down approach that emphasizes the role of the federal government, specifically the executive branch, and almost exclusively the State and the Justice Departments. However, it should be noted, historian Mary L. Dudziak and others do claim that without the activism and grassroots movements of African Americans the more positive effects of the Cold War on domestic policies regarding civil rights may never have come to fruition. Furthermore, historians like Gerald Horne, Penny Von Eschen, and Brenda Gayle Plummer acknowledge the agency of African Americans as the driver of their narratives.[2] Even still, figuring prominently as main actors in these narratives are individuals like Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and Earl Warren. Executive Orders, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional hearings and legislations serve as both the focal point and fulcrum of the historical trajectory of the civil rights movement. In the background, the Cold War climate serves as the setting, similar to adverse weather conditions, guiding and influencing the decision-making of the actors.
An Example of a Narrative from the Cold War Civil Rights Historiography
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union witnessed two opposing ideological forces confront one another on the international stage. The implications not only affected foreign policies and political decisions at the federal and state levels but also reverberated throughout American society and culture. As the leader of the self-proclaimed free world, the United States came under international pressure to fulfill and reflect its democratic and egalitarian rhetoric. The pressure from foreign nations resulted from an emerging, and observant, international audience that became increasingly critical of America’s racial practices and policies. Furthermore, the Soviet Union found America’s treatment of its black citizens to be a convenient propaganda tool, and one they made use of with regularity. Cognizant of the emerging global audience, African American leaders and organizations sought avenues to internationalize the oppressive nature of American racism to coerce the federal government, specifically the executive branch, to exert its power and authority to end racially discriminatory practices.[3]
Within the nascent Cold War political climate, African Americans seemingly had leverage, and President Harry Truman was resigned to abide by their legitimate concerns and demands. In 1946, Truman appointed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to investigate the civil rights violations and propose resolutions. In consultation with the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the following year the committee released its report, To Secure These Rights, detailing its findings and recommendations. In “determining that racial segregation was ‘inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the American way of life,’ the committee listed a total of thirty-five recommendations for both congressional and administrative actions in its report…to protect the civil rights of black Americans and to begin eliminating racial segregation from American life.”[4] The proposals outlined in To Secure These Rights led Truman to issue Executive Order 9981, which abolished racial segregation in the military; and encouraged the Democratic National Convention of 1948 to adopt “its strongest and most forthright civil rights plank ever.”[5]
Inspired by these responses from the executive branch and the national Democratic Party, African Americans continued to harness the Cold War climate for the benefit of racial equality. As activism for civil rights mounted, and with coaxing from the executive branch, concern for international criticism suffused and seeped into our other facets of governance. Of particular significance, the judicial branch and court system proved an asset to the civil rights movement. For Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Justice Department filed an amicus curia—a friend of the court—brief in 1952. Loaded with references to foreign policy and concern for international reception of American racism, the brief seemed less focused on civil rights and more worried about the ruling’s effect on geopolitics.[6] Regardless of the Justice Department’s motive, the objective was the same. In 1954, the Supreme Court delivered its unanimous ruling that state laws of racial segregation in public schools violated the constitution. At the behest of African Americans, the Truman Administration began the process toward a national civil rights agenda and, in turn, empowering the grassroots civil rights movement that would characterize the 1950s and 1960s.
The implications of the Cold War climate entangled domestic affairs like civil rights with foreign policy concerns. As a result, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson all followed a similar path as Truman. African Americans understood that this peculiar and possibly finite political environment offered opportunities for gains in civil rights. They responded accordingly and seized the moment. Consequently, the civil rights movement amassed political and legal victories including Brown, armed federal support for desegregation in Little Rock, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In short, the Cold War ushered in a rare, albeit brief, political climate and opportunity for African Americans to aggressively pressure the federal government to address their grievances and calls for civil rights and racial equality.
Identifying and Addressing Gaps in the Scholarship:
How Historians Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri Broaden the Cold War Civil Rights Historiography
However, what this narrative, and the Cold War civil rights historiography in general, ignores is the agency of those who resisted the civil rights movement and fought to preserve segregation. Regretfully, this is not a mere omission due to ignorance or source material. In her 1988 article “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism,” Cold War historian Ellen W. Schrecker notes that this topic is deserving of analysis. She claims, “that an ‘important and largely unstudied aspect of McCarthyism is its impact’ in the South. ‘I know of no recent work specifically in this area, yet…there should be a major story here.’”[7] Additionally, “historians of anticommunism have tended to neglect the use of the weapon as a…southern phenomenon” as well.[8] Even when they do, however, they tend “to oversimplify the uses and abuses of anticommunism in particular, as practiced by southern segregationists.”[9] Fortunately, historians Jeff Woods, George Lewis, and Yasuhiro Katagiri follow Schrecker’s suggestion.
By exploring these topics in their respective works, Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri increase the range and purview of the Cold War civil rights historiography. Within the analytical framework of the Cold War, they survey southern white resistance to the civil rights movement. Relying on similar temporal and spatial boundaries—the South during the 1950s and the 1960s—all three examine how and why white segregationists used anticommunism and Cold War rhetoric to thwart desegregation and, more broadly, the civil rights movement. For white segregationists, anticommunism proved a valuable and effective weapon to confront integration and to discredit civil rights activists and organizations. Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri concur—albeit to varying degrees—that white segregationists held a distinct interpretation of anticommunism that was inseparable from southern heritage and traditions of antiradicalism and white supremacy. In contrary to the national perspective at the time, the South did not perceive communism as the primary threat to the preservation of its values and democracy. Rather, the fear of racial integration and the political agency of African Americans haunted the minds of many white southerners. Southern anticommunism, therefore, concerned itself more with race than Marx.
Changing the Actors, Changing the Perspective:
How Historians Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri Explore Familiar Ground Differently to Discover New Historical Truths
Treading a familiar timeline of the civil rights era, Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri all—loosely—bookend their narratives with major events that characterized the movement: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Oddly enough, and although the South, as Lewis suggests, had “a rich tradition of…antiradicalism and anticommunism,” the southern red scare began in earnest as “the rest of the nation was struggling to move away from the fanatical Red Scare,” or McCarthyism, of the 1940s and 1950s that culminated with its namesake and top promoter Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political downfall and censure in the Senate.[10] According to Woods, “while its defensive, regional, and ethnic brand of nationalism made the southern red scare unique….the South’s segregationist, anti-Communist reaction developed out of a set of preconditions that were common to red scares nationally.”[11] However, “the region lacked a final, crucial ingredient in those years—political and social turmoil.”[12]Brown provided that final, crucial ingredient. However, like Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri note, the “South’s segregationist, anti-Communist reaction” to that final ingredient was years in the making.[13]
Although Woods entitles his work Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968, the years 1948-1968 belie the timeframe of his work. For Woods, the 1948 Dixiecrat movement was essential to the development of the southern red scare. He argues, “the southern reaction to Truman’s racial policies was a clear indication that red and black fears had become a defining element of the region’s ideology; the southern red scare was underway.”[14] However, central to the framing of his argument and as an impetus to the southern red scare is Woods’s notion of southern nationalism. For Woods, “southern nationalism embodied a set of shared values and traditions: a concern for personal and national honor, a suspicion of centralized power and belief in states’ right, a fundamentalist faith in Protestant Christianity, and a view of history shaped by the region’s experiences of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.”[15] To explicate the southern red scare as a manifestation of southern nationalism, Woods spends a chapter highlighting certain aspects of southern history regarding slavery, white supremacy, and “fears of black conspiracies…and black.”[16]
Likewise, the years Lewis includes in the title of his work, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945-1965, misrepresent the temporal scope of his work. To elucidate on the southern ‘rich tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism,’ Lewis expounds on the South’s response to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Lewis, “because the party was well-known for its advocacy of black self-determination, and because it had placed so much emphasis on mobilizing blacks, southern segregationists realized that they could potentially dismiss any agitation for greater black civil rights as communist-inspired.”[17] Regarding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), “Georgia governor ascribed CIO efforts to court black workers to part of a wider effort to form an effective African American voting bloc, through which subversive forces could bring pressure to bear on national politics.”[18] Even during the 1920s and 1930s, race defined anticommunism of the South during this period, much like it would in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Unlike Woods and Lewis, Katagiri does not predicate his narrative or central arguments on the idea of a distinctively southern form of anticommunism. Instead, he simply acknowledges it as such; “In the South, McCarthyism most often took on a racial—and racist—form and southern segregationists perpetuated its legacy in their response to the civil rights movement.”[19] Although Katagiri does not need to re-trace the origins of southern anticommunism, like Woods, he does found the 1948 Dixiecrat movement of importance. He asserts that it “laid a solid foundation for the germination of a peculiar ideology in the Democratic ‘Solid South’—an ideology that combined segregationist and racist views, the proposition of states’ rights and state sovereignty, and anti-Communist consensus.”[20] Furthermore, Katagiri insists that “this popular ideology became the basis for white southerners’ organized and all-out massive resistance to the civil rights movement.”[21] So like Woods and Lewis, at least in acknowledgment, Katagiri places anticommunism within the context of the southern heritage and traditions, particularly those of antiradicalism, anticommunism, and white supremacy.
According to Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown embodied the fears and anxieties of the South. In turn, albeit in fits and starts, it sparked the southern red scare even as McCarthyism on the national level was beginning to fade. As Lewis notes, “the White South’s lingering fears of a second Reconstruction were brought sharply into focus on Monday, May 17, 1954. On ‘Black Monday,” as it became known, the U.S. Supreme Court pronounced…that school segregation was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.”[22] Furthermore, Lewis argues that “its seminal importance rested upon its dismantling of the separate-but-equal premise: the South was left with no constitutional basis from which to protect any form of social, political, or economic segregation.”[23] Initially, and as it was stated in the Southern Manifesto, southerners pledged “to resist segregation by ‘all lawful means.’”[24]
However, as both Lewis and Katagiri contend, after the Little Rock crisis in 1957, southerners realized they had no legal recourse to resist desegregation. With the ‘Southern way of life’ under threat, white segregationists turned to anticommunism with more regularity and frequency to oppose integration. “To be sure,” writes Katagiri, “the white South’s equating the region’s civil rights struggle with the worldwide ‘Communist conspiracy’ arose from a strong sense of powerlessness felt by ordinary white citizens. They perceived the federal government’s attempts to regulate time-honored race relations…represented a ‘dangerous slide toward communism.’”[25] Consequently, Woods suggests that “the southern red scare was…a byproduct of the region’s massive resistance to integration. Its proponents’ main goal was to discredit the civil rights movement by associating it with the nation’s greatest, enemy Communism.”[26] In short, southern reaction to Brown was a manifestation of traditional regional fears and anxieties of racial insecurity and desire for white supremacy. For white segregationists, anticommunism meant anti-black.
At the other end of their timelines, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 introduce the final acts. Although segregationists had some success in deploying anticommunism to discredit the push for both pieces of legislation, their decision to do so ultimately weakened the validity and effectiveness of anticommunism as a weapon against the civil rights movement. As Woods wryly states, “it was ironic that segregationist southerners labeled ‘Communist’ the premier symbol of democracy, voting….Few outside of the right-wing circles were convinced that Communist influence in the movement was the driving force behind the voting rights bill.”[27] With the use of an apt historical analogy, Katagiri suggests that with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “white South’s massive resisters met their waterloo.”[28] For Katagiri, the end of massive resistance and southern anticommunism, followed shortly afterward with the deaths of Katagiri’s “northern messiahs,” Joseph Brown ‘J.B.’ Matthews and Myers Lowman; two northern, professional anticommunists and consultants who, together, helped various southern states and individuals establish anti-communist committees and organizations to effective surveillance and harass individuals with suspected connections to communists or civil rights groups.[29] Between their respective deaths in 1966 and 1973, “virtually all of the standing commissions and committees established by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi to wage their officially sanctioned and publicly supported massive resistance to the civil rights movement either had become defunct or were on their deathbeds.”[30] Nevertheless, as Katagiri illustrates, much of that “peculiar ideology in the Democratic ‘Solid South’” lived on in the rhetoric and actions of southern Republicans like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms who opposed the bill to establish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday on the grounds of King’s alleged communist connections.
However, as Lewis argues, “Massive Resistance did not conveniently disappear after the federal intervention in Little Rock in 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead, Massive Resistance metamorphosed….Resistance methods had been transformed and now offered subtler, often masked forms of desegregation.”[31] Cold War rhetoric and anticommunism “were largely replaced by a new generation of refined, restrictive voting measures, gerrymandering, and economic intimidation” as the new weapons of choice for white segregationists.[32] Although, as Lewis acknowledges, red-baiting and anticommunism ultimately failed to stop racial integration, it did provide southerners with an effective weapon to discredit civil rights activists and organizations, and to impede the overall progress of the movement. Furthermore, Lewis argues that “many…southern conservatives who, like [George] Wallace, had striven so hard to resist racial change in the 1950s in direct conflict with successive presidential administrations, now found themselves recast in the late 1960s and 1970s as an integral part of a mainstream political movement with national, rather than regional, support.”[33] In effect, the ideology of the massive resistance did not fade away, rather it diffused across the nation.
According to Woods, the southern red scare begin to dissipate in 1968 as “America’s ‘silent majority’ no longer needed southerners to tell it that blacks and reds were taking advantage of the civil unrest in the United States.”[34] As a result, Richard Nixon won the presidency that year on a promise of law and order. Even George Wallace, running on an “opposition to black civil rights” as a third-party candidate, won 13 percent of the electorate in the general presidential election.[35] In concurrence with Lewis, Woods suggests that “by the fall of 1968, a ‘Southernization’ of American politics…had occurred.”[36] Additionally, “with many of its legal and legislative objectives won in the South, the movement turned northward,” thus, “red and black hunting became obsolete.”[37]However, in contrast to Lewis, Woods sees no small victories for white segregationists nor a transcending massive resistance. Bluntly, he states, “southern nationalists had failed in their primary purpose, the preservation of segregation as a fundamental part of the ‘southern way of life.’”[38] Furthermore, and despite the continuation of de facto segregation and the rise of southern conservatism in national politics, “the federal government remain committed to black civil rights…continued to grow with the institution of affirmative-action and busing programs design to integrate the nation’s schools and federal offices. As for the security side of the southern red scare, Congress abolished HUAC in 1975, while the states began the process of disbanding their “little HUACs” and “little FBI’s” during the 1960s and 1970s.[39]
Conclusion:
Strengths, Limitations, and Moving the Cold War Civil Rights Historiographical Conversation Forward
Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri succeed in addressing the more glaring gaps in the Cold War civil rights historiography. However, their works are not flawless. Although both Woods and Katagiri mention ‘black struggle’ and ‘black freedom,’ respectively, in their titles—Black Struggle, Red Scare and Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, neither one truly incorporates African Americans into their histories. Rather, both seemingly use African Americans as a foil to white segregationists. In fairness to Woods, he does offer insightful descriptions and analysis of a few black civil rights groups and leaders including the NAACP, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stockley Carmichael. Nonetheless, Woods does not necessarily portray African Americans as makers or actors of their own history. An in-depth analysis of how African Americans understood anticommunism concerning their own identity as southerners may have helped give context to their reactions and responses to white segregationists.
Both Woods and Lewis suffer from inadequate definitions and analysis of their key terms. Regarding Woods, he introduces the notion of southern nationalism and does give a concise definition. However, even though he suggests that the primacy of this history is southern nationalism Woods does not directly connect southerners to his definition. Specifically, the ideas of religion and personal honor rarely appear in the pages of the work. A fuller analysis of this term with anecdotal evidence would have strengthened his argument of a distinct southern interpretation of anticommunism characterized by the history and values of the region. Lewis offers a shallow analysis of anticommunism. Although he does sufficiently make the case for a distinct southern version of anticommunism, a deeper intellectual and philosophical conversation may have produced a more abstract as well as concrete understanding. Instead, and while it serves his argument well, Lewis serves us an almost undefinable anticommunism; other than southern traditions of antiradicalism and anticommunism, the term is untethered.
In a similar vein to A. James McAdams interpretive understanding of the communist party as an idea, all three historians, but Lewis and Woods especially, present anticommunism as an idea that is adaptable and flexible enough to apply to a myriad of social and political conditions.[40] Therefore, their interpretations of anticommunism, specifically Lewis’s use of it as a frame of analysis for The White South and the Red Menace, offers a template to explore the role of anticommunism in other areas and possibly inspire comparative histories. It would be interesting to apply Lewis’s methodological approach to southerners’ use of anticommunism during the 1920s and 1930s. Although he does comment on these decades in The White South and the Red Menace, he does so briefly and with a precise purpose. His quick observation delivers just enough historical evidence and analysis to support his claim of a tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism in the South. A more in-depth survey may offer new insights on labor and civil rights movements in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. Also, it would further explore and strengthen his notion of a southern tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism by illuminating potential new historical patterns and trends. Despite his continuous use of regional characteristics and traits, Lewis argues that it is “too simplistic to see the region as a single unified whole.”[41] His comparative analysis of North Carolina and Virginia highlighting the nuance and diversity of how southerners understood and why they employed anticommunism confirms this sentiment. Therefore, a temporally and spatially more expansive comparative analysis may facilitate a process of discerning distinct political subcultures within the broader regional South.
With his description and analysis of Matthews and Lowman, Katagiri teases the potential of a North and South comparative history. This would help discern the differences between earlier national red scares, McCarthyism, and the southern red scare as outlined in Black Struggle, Red Scare and The White South and the Red Menace. Furthermore, it would illuminate the development of regional differences and similarities over the twentieth century. Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri occasionally offer glimpses of individuals who contradict predictable historical stereotypes. In Lewis’s work, for example, he provides a brief analysis of a southern, African American reverend who favors the use of anticommunism as a necessary political weapon and who is also highly critical of the NAACP. Within the Cold War civil rights historiography, scholars have shown how both black civil rights activists and white segregationists have navigated the Cold War climate to achieve certain political and cultural aims. Introducing new actors with less defined or more permeable political, cultural, and socio-economic categories would add a new dynamic to a field of study that seems content with histories of simple dichotomies. To Lewis’s credit, more than the others, he does attempt this through his study on anticommunism and how and why certain southerners employ its services.
The works of Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri are a welcome addition to the Cold War civil rights historiography. Their examinations of white segregationists and the role of anticommunism expand the field and open new avenues for historical inquiry. Furthermore, their studies illustrate the complexity and diversity of the White South. Thus, they offer a more nuanced understanding of the actions and rhetoric of white segregationists than previous scholarship. The field is still relatively small and many interpretive questions still have yet to be asked. And more vantage points beg for our viewing. Expanding the temporal and spatial framework of their narratives seems to offer an easy and quick opportunity to illuminate more historical developments and patterns. It will be interesting to see how other historians build on their research. For now, though, their works serve well for students—undergraduate and graduate—and historians of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the South, and anticommunism and communism.
[4] Some of these recommendations included “the enactment of an anti-poll tax law, the prohibition of segregation in interstate transportation facilities, and the renewal of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC)” and to establish a Civil Rights Commission, Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, and a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice; See Yasuhiro Katagiri, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), location 471, Kindle.
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