3
PROTECTING “FERTILE FIELDS”
The NAACP and Africa during the Cold War
While we are not satisfied with conditions faced by our people in this country, the communist doctrine is not the way out. The right use of the ballot is the way out. This is our country, and the only country we know.
—Rep. Oscar De Priest (R-Ill.), speech in Cleveland, Ohio, January 8, 1932
If I were Stalin, I would advertise the statements of the Byrd’s and the Tuck’s as propaganda for Communism. Their disloyalty is dangerously close to treason.
—Walter White, speech in Richmond, Virginia, April 10, 1948
On June 6, 1946, an interracial crowd of more than 15,000 gathered in Madison Square Garden in New York City.1 The attendees congregated at the behest of the Council on African Affairs (CAA) to demonstrate to the Truman administration and the fledgling United Nations the depth of support within U.S. civil society for policies that would hasten decolonization in Africa. The rally, which Hollis Lynch reports was the “most successful mass public meeting” of the organization, gave the leaders of the CAA hope that their eight years of toiling to raise the consciousness of the U.S. public about the evils of colonialism were finally beginning to bear fruit.2
The Madison Square Garden meeting also emboldened the tiny organization to reinvigorate its long-standing lobbying efforts at the U.S. Department of State and United Nations Plaza. The CAA earned a major victory on this front when it convinced both the Truman administration and the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations to oppose the attempt of Jan Smuts, the head of the white-minority regime in South Africa, to annex Southwest Africa.3 In the wake of this triumph, the CAA executive committee decided to expand the membership of the organization from thirty-six to seventy-two.4
The CAA had much less success in and after 1947 than it did in its banner year of 1946. This was because the national security regime that the Truman administration put in place after 1945 to wage the Cold War began to calcify during this period.5 The first sign of this reality came when Secretary of Labor Lewis B. Schwellenbach told the press that he had urged President Truman to declare the American Communist Party (Communist Party–USA, CP-USA) an illegal organization.6 Five months after the article ran, Tom Clark, the attorney general of the United States, circulated a list of organizations that the Justice Department was placing under scrutiny for having “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive elements” within their ranks. Given the long CAA record of cooperation with the CP-USA, and the fact that Paul Robeson, chairperson of the CAA executive committee, was an avowed Marxist, it is not at all surprising that the organization ended up on this now-infamous list.7
The CAA quickly entered a downward spiral after Clark placed the organization on his watch list. The two principal figures in the CAA, Robeson and Max Yergan, who had founded the organization on his return from missionary work in South Africa in 1938, grew divided over strategy in this new era of repression. Having recently extolled the virtues of “Soviet Democracy,” Robeson, who was one of the two avowed Marxists in the organization at this point, refused to bend his principles to the increasingly repressive political climate.8 For Yergan, cooperation with communists or any other group was meaningful only as long as it advanced the broader goals of the CAA. Thus, he advocated distancing the organization from the CP-USA and falling in line with the domestic loyalty program of the Truman administration, which was the primary means for persecuted groups to barter their way off Clark’s list.9 After waging a dramatic legal battle for control of the CAA (and its property) throughout 1948, Yergan, and the six members of the group that joined his lawsuit, finally conceded defeat and withdrew from the organization.10
After the 1948 rupture, the CAA entered a phase of rapid decline. The membership of the organization declined almost as rapidly in 1949 as it had expanded two years earlier. Defiantly vowing to push the organization forward, Robeson embarked on a barnstorming campaign to raise the membership to its previous level. Despite his status as an international celebrity and his impossible promises that the CAA executive committee would keep the identities of new members confidential, Robeson could not boost the sagging membership.11 Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of mainstream black organizations fell in line with Truman’s loyalty program to curry favor with the administration on the home front only further compounded the problems of the CAA.
The CAA did win one notable new member in this period. W. E. B. Du Bois, a principal architect of both the Pan-African Congress Movement and the NAACP, joined the organization in 1948. On first glance, we might think that having such a venerable member of the black vanguard join the fold would have a positive impact on the CAA. By 1948, however, Du Bois, whom the NAACP board of directors voted to expel for criticizing the Truman doctrine in September 1948, was just as much a pariah in the black community as were the leaders of the CAA.12 Despite the courageous, or perhaps foolhardy, efforts of Robeson, Du Bois, and the eight others who tried to keep the organization afloat, the CAA could not sustain itself in the face of constant persecution from the federal government. Thus, on June 14, 1955, with only six members in attendance, the CAA voted itself out of existence.13
The historiography of black elite engagement with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the Cold War displays almost as many complexities as the period. There is broad agreement among historians that most mainstream civil rights groups distanced themselves from the CAA in the late 1940s because they were afraid that recalcitrance would damage their efforts on the home front.14 This view dovetails nicely with the strategic behavior model of black elite behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena that I have developed throughout this book.
Although there is consensus among historians about the nature of black elite behavior during the rise of the Cold War, there remains a robust debate about the ramifications of this shift to the right. Some historians believe that these strategic moves helped civil rights organizations remain viable through the Cold War period and ultimately ratcheted up the pressure on the Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy administrations to promote reforms in the domestic and external environments.15 Other scholars assert, building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s parting shots at the leaders of the NAACP, that the “provincialism” evinced by most civil rights groups during the Truman years undermined the struggle for black equality in the global context and on the home front.16
Indeed, scholars in this latter camp assert that during this period the black elite all but abandoned the commitment to anticolonialism that they had demonstrated throughout World War II. They also argue that the marked decline in NAACP membership that coincided with the embrace by the organization of the Truman doctrine stands as evidence that the black masses wanted their leaders to take a less provincial approach.17 In short, these scholars argue that there was an ideological rupture between black leaders and the masses over the elite pursuit of a strategic course in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.
I test these claims in this chapter using archival materials and newspaper accounts to reconstruct discourse about the NAACP approach to both issues in African affairs and the Truman doctrine between 1945 and 1957. My central finding is that the assessments of NAACP performance in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena that appear in black newspapers and the archival record are generally positive. Although not a perfect measure of black public opinion, this finding illustrates the potential for leaders of the NAACP (and the other civil rights organizations) to frame their actions as consistent with the demands of their constituents. That the same analysis shows that Truman was a very popular figure in the black community because of his stands on domestic civil rights issues further enriches our understanding of the political context in which the NAACP was operating during the Cold War.
My analysis also shows that the break of the NAACP with the CAA and its shift to an anticommunist stance during the rise of the Cold War shocked very few of their constituents. This is so because the leaders of the organization had charted a course that was both pragmatic about Pan-Africanism and vehemently anticommunist for most of the thirty years prior to World War II. The political discourse on these issues that took place in the black counterpublic during this period often shared these orientations. Finally, I show that the anticommunism of the NAACP actually advanced the struggle of the organization against colonialism during the early Cold War.
Toward a Pragmatic Pan-Africanism
Du Bois was by no means surprised when the NAACP board of directors voted to oust him for inflammatory remarks about the foreign policies of the Truman administration.18 After all, he had maintained tense relationships with the other central figures in the organization for two decades.19 Like the conflict that led Du Bois and the NAACP to divorce in 1948, disagreements over the role of the organization on the world stage had been the source of these tensions.
Du Bois had actually left the NAACP once before. In 1934, Du Bois resigned his post as editor of the Crisis to take a position at Atlanta University because he was frustrated that the NAACP would not commit any more of its financial resources to the Pan-African congresses.20 Two years later, Du Bois accused the NAACP leaders of a “race provincialism” that “objected to any mingling or attempt to mingle the problems of Africa with the problems of the Untied States.”21
As his early writings on the Garvey movement illustrate, Du Bois was typically a fair-minded commentator when writing about conflicts with other activists engaged in the struggle for black equality. In this instance, however, he clearly missed the mark. Indeed, as the historical record shows, the NAACP had a long history of engagement with Africa. And Du Bois certainly knew this to be the case; after all, he was the one who had first convinced the NAACP board of directors to take an interest in the continent.
In 1919, Du Bois sent a “Memorandum on the Future of Africa” to the NAACP board of directors.22 The document urged the NAACP to see a link between decolonization in Africa and black freedom in the United States.23 It also issued a call for the organization to take the lead in reviving the moribund Pan-African Congress movement that Du Bois and a handful of other intellectuals from the diaspora had initiated in 1900 with a conference in London (see chap. 2).24 The board of directors agreed with Du Bois that the organization should put “the freedom of Africa” at the “forefront of its program” and voted overwhelmingly to fund a second Pan-African Congress in 1918. They also authorized Du Bois to lead a delegation from the congress in Paris to lobby the delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference on behalf of Africa and the diaspora.25
Despite the fact that Du Bois had organized the conference hastily, fifty-seven delegates from fifteen countries and colonies attended the Second Pan-African Congress. The delegates passed a number of resolutions calling for the great powers to end racial discrimination and colonial rule.26 Although the delegates forwarded their resolutions to the representatives of the great powers convened at Versailles, there is no evidence that the delegates discussed them during the proceedings. Moreover, the mainstream press completely ignored the congress.27
Even though the Pan-African Congress yielded no tangible gains for the organization, the NAACP’s board of directors continued to support the movement. Indeed, the organization footed the bill for two more gatherings in 1921 and 1923.28 But as the postwar economy began to grind toward the Great Depression, the NAACP began to take a more conservative stance on foreign affairs activism. In 1925, for example, citing financial strains, the NAACP declined Du Bois’s request to fund the Fourth Pan-African Congress, which was to take place in New York.29 Surprisingly, there is no evidence that Du Bois took umbrage at the new pragmatic approach of the NAACP in 1925. Instead, it was a fight for control of the Crisis magazine that was the major flashpoint between Du Bois and the NAACP board of directors between 1926 and his first resignation from the organization.30
Du Bois began to lose faith in the NAACP approach to foreign affairs during the start of the second Italian-Ethiopian War in 1934. In his view, the slow-footed response of the organization had allowed new groups like the CAA to take the lead in channeling black Americans’ rage about the invasion by Italy toward constructive ends. In Du Bois’s view, the NAACP had missed this crucial opportunity because the directors’ race provincialism prevented them from seeing it. Years later, Du Bois wrote in his autobiography that his frustration with the NAACP during this period was a function of the fact that the organization “shrank back to its narrowest program: to make Negroes American citizens” in the aftermath of World War I.31
Recent scholarship in black studies and social history has largely vindicated Du Bois’s claims that the NAACP was slow to address the Italian-Ethiopian War and largely stayed aloof from the mass actions that characterized the first black responses in New York, Chicago, and other large urban areas.32 These same works have also provided something of a defense for the NAACP actions during the crisis. As several scholars have pointed out, for example, the NAACP board of directors, fearing that early action would run afoul of official U.S. policy, wanted to wait until they knew their range of options under the law.33 Moreover, the U.S. having recently come out of a war in which European ethnic groups were often accused of disloyalty when they carved out positions supporting their homelands before the government had a chance to set its own policies makes the trepidation of the NAACP about moving too quickly during the Italian-Ethiopian War is easy to understand.34
Once Roosevelt declared that the United States would remain neutral in the conflict, the NAACP did press the administration within the parameters of this framework. On March 20, 1935, for example, Walter White cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull to ask him to assert to the League of Nations that the NAACP and the people of the United States have “a real interest” in preserving Ethiopian independence.35 White also wrote to the Soviet ambassador at the League of Nations to urge him to make good on the claims of his government that it was interested in defending the rights of the powerless before the community of nations.36 When the NAACP’s board of directors saw that these communications were making no impact on the behavior of the U.S. government and the League of Nations, they instructed Walter White to organize a delegation of distinguished black Americans to engage in personal diplomacy with President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull.37 White even reached out to W. E. B. Du Bois to join this proposed delegation.38 Du Bois, who by this time had already decided to withdraw from the NAACP, refused to serve.39
White had no better luck recruiting any of the other notable members of the black elite that the NAACP believed would have the ability to sway the Roosevelt administration.40 Some of these leaders were already participating in other activities aimed at trying to shape the U.S. government response to the war. For the most part, however, the individuals that White targeted reported that they were either opposed to sending a delegation to the government or simply too busy with the work of their own groups to join a last-minute campaign organized by the NAACP.41
With no visible contributions to the burgeoning Pan-African social movement that was sweeping the black communities, the NAACP began to draw criticism from correspondents to the black press.42 Always deeply concerned about the relation of the organization with the black masses, the NAACP board of directors moved swiftly to bring the organization in line with the demands of its constituents. On October 19, 1935, the board instructed Walter White to announce that the NAACP would “take part wherever possible in demonstrations against the Italian war in Ethiopia.”43
The NAACP used a pragmatic strategy between 1919 and 1936 that sought to strengthen the position of the organization vis-à-vis both the government and its constituents to guide its engagements with the continent of Africa. During the Italian-Ethiopian War, the NAACP learned that balancing between these two forces was fraught with challenges. But, in the final analysis, the NAACP pursued a course that reflected the demands of their constituents.
For Du Bois, the fact that the NAACP had followed public opinion instead of attempting to mobilize it was a sign of the weakness of the organization. Du Bois and the NAACP mended fences later during World War II, only to part ways again at the beginning of the Red Scare in 1948. When Du Bois parted ways with the organization after World War II, he assumed that public opinion in the black community resembled the opinion it had held during the Italian-Ethiopian War. But this was not the case; on the contrary, by the time Du Bois parted ways with the NAACP for the second time, it was already clear that the NAACP was moving at precisely the pace on Africa and other issues in the global context that the black community wanted. We can see this by reconstructing black public opinion through analyses of media content and constituent mail sent to the NAACP’s national headquarters between 1945 and 1955.
The Black Counterpublic and the Truman Doctrine
According to some historians, the NAACP paid a heavy price in terms of both membership and black public opinion for supporting the muscular domestic loyalty program of the Truman administration during the Cold War.44 This conclusion grows in part from impressionistic analyses of black print media and correspondence directed toward the NAACP during the height of the Red Scare that questioned its support for the government. But my quantitative and qualitative analyses of these archival records provide a strong challenge to many of the findings presented in this literature. Indeed, the more systematic content analyses demonstrate that the NAACP did not fall out of favor with black editorialists or their constituents for supporting the Truman doctrine and framing their opposition to colonialism in terms of the broader U.S. Cold War aims. On the contrary, it is clear that the black community overwhelmingly supported President Truman’s efforts to contain communism and viewed the NAACP’s alliance with his administration as a boon to both the black community and to Africa.
According to most of the studies of the impact of the Cold War on black elite engagement with Africa, the break of the NAACP from communist-tinged organizations after the imposition of the Truman doctrine represented a departure from long-standing norms of openness and collaboration that had reigned in the black counterpublic in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is easy to understand the basis of this conclusion. The period between 1936 and 1946, the decade on which previous studies have drawn for their impressionistic analyses of black print culture, represented a high-water mark in cooperation between mainstream civil rights groups and communists in the black community. But an examination of both the historical record and the content of black newspapers in the decade before 1936 reveals that this period between the Italian-Ethiopian War and the close of World War II was actually an exceptional time in the black counterpublic.
Historians who have criticized the NAACP leadership for breaking off its working relationships with activists and organizations that maintained communist ties have largely portrayed these moves as a cynical response to the rise of the Truman doctrine. Although there is no doubt that the NAACP leaders worried a great deal about avoiding the kind of persecution that figures such as Paul Robeson experienced during the Red Scare period in U.S. history, this is only one part of the story. Indeed, most of the current scholarship that criticizes the anticommunist stance of the NAACP during the Cold War ignores the depth of anticommunism that had persisted in the organization from its inception in the first decade of the twentieth century. In this section, I review this history with an eye to providing greater context for the responses of the organization to the rise of Truman’s national security apparatus.
The NAACP was born in 1909 through the collaboration between black intellectuals and white philanthropists eager to move the nation beyond the conservative approach to racial advancement advocated by Booker T. Washington.45 The organization immediately set to work battling all forms of discrimination against black Americans through both legal and political means. Although the leaders of the NAACP charted a much more radical course toward black liberation than did their chief rivals in Washington’s Tuskegee machine, they agreed with the Bookerites that black freedom would come through liberal reforms and not revolutionary actions. “The NAACP,” Manfred Berg writes, “expected racial change to result from political reforms.”46
The NAACP had been working peacefully to achieve these reforms for almost a decade when the Bolsheviks demonstrated to the world how rapidly social and political change could come through revolution in October 1917. Not surprisingly, the success of the Bolsheviks raised the profile of communism and prompted a great deal of soul searching on the part of marginalized groups around the world. It was in this context that 128 dissident members of the American Socialist Party gathered in Chicago on September 27, 1919, to discuss the prospects of forming a party that espoused communist ideology. By the conclusion of their meetings, the delegates to the convention, who were mostly foreign-born immigrants from Europe, had established the Communist Party–USA (CP-USA). Like the Bolsheviks who had inspired their conversion to communism, the delegates hammered out a platform for their new party that espoused international revolution to place workers at the head of both the government and economy of the United States.47
News of the founding of the party did not make a big splash in the black community. Indeed, none of the four leading black newspapers (the Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh Courier) carried a story about the convention or the founding of the CP-USA. There were several reasons why the rise of the CP-USA did not garner much attention in the black counterpublic: (1) these papers had also reported only sparingly on the Bolshevik Revolution, (2) the central players in the rise of the CP-USA were a fringe element that the Associated Negro Press probably deemed unworthy of much attention, and (3) the one thing that most members of the black elite knew about communists was that they saw black oppression in America as epiphenomenal of capitalism and not as a color caste system.
For anyone with a basic knowledge of race relations in the United States, let alone firsthand experience living under the crushing oppression of Jim Crow, the communists’ frame of the black condition demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the conditions that most blacks faced on the ground. Moreover, the incredibly condescending tone that communists often took when speaking and writing about black inequality created an instant wedge between their movement and the black community.48 Consider, for example, the tone taken by the CP-USA magazine, Worker’s Council, when it editorialized against the horrific race riot that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Although, as Earl Ofari Hutchinson has noted, the editors of the magazine sympathized with the plight of the black victims of the riot, they completely undercut the force of their support by suggesting that the only resolution for such matters was for blacks to stop being “ignorant” of their rights and gain the “self-confidence” to organize as workers.49
But by 1922 several factors prompted the CP-USA to shift its position on the black struggle for equality in the United States. First, the onset of the Great Migration in 1916 resulted in the movement of 7 million blacks from the Deep South to the industrial centers in the North, Mid-West, and West. By 1920, the second year of the existence of the CP-USA, the first wave of these migrants had already begun to make their presence felt on the factory, shop, and plant floors that the communists saw as fertile fields for their recruitment efforts. Indeed, a Department of Labor study conducted in 1920 showed that the percentage of blacks working in industrial settings had increased by 150 percent over the previous decade.50 It did not take the CP-USA long to realize that it needed to demonstrate greater sensitivity to the special plight of black Americans if it was to successfully bring this burgeoning segment of the industrial workforce into its ranks.
Second, the CP-USA also came to believe that the racial strife that plagued many U.S. labor and trade unions provided it with a unique opportunity to make inroads with black workers.51 It is easy to see why they came to this conclusion. After all, mainstream labor had an appalling record in terms of integrating the skilled trades.52 Moreover, the newly industrialized black labor force had only begun to challenge these racist exclusions in earnest at the 1919 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention.
In that year, twenty-three black delegates attended the convention with a mandate from their fellow black workers to press the oldest U.S. federation of labor unions to enact five resolutions to address racism within the movement.53 The black delegates’ chief concern was the fact that the AFL allowed local affiliates to write clauses into their charters that barred blacks (and other people of color) from membership.54 Another paramount concern was that even locals that did not have these “lily white” clauses often refused to recruit black workers. Thus, the delegates asked the convention to pass resolutions opposing both these practices. At the same time, the black delegates—perhaps anticipating the opposition they would face from their white counterparts—asked the AFL to grant charters to all black unions and form an alliance with the International Union of Organized Colored Labor.55
The AFL Executive Council worked very hard behind the scenes to ensure that most of the black delegates’ demands would not come to the convention floor for a vote.56 Indeed, the council killed four of the five resolutions as soon as it had the opportunity to act on them. The council did recommend, however, that the AFL undertake special efforts to organize black workers all over the country. Although the convention ultimately passed this resolution, the fact that it had no teeth signaled to the locals that it was just a symbolic gesture.57 Thus, the majority of the locals that had exclusionary practices before the convention maintained them in its aftermath.58
The final factor compelling the CP-USA to modify its position on race was external pressure from the Soviet Union. As several scholars have pointed out, Lenin viewed incorporating people of color into the worldwide communist movement as an essential step in the process of overthrowing both imperialism and capitalism.59 After this announcement, the CP-USA came under enormous pressure to, in the words of Theodore Draper, labor historian, “break out of their narrow ethnic shell.”60 Moreover, the Soviets urged their American comrades to give special attention to recruiting black Americans, whom they deemed the most exploited segment of the proletariat in the United States.61
Within two years of Moscow’s issuing this directive, the CP-USA went on record at its 1922 convention with a resolution that acknowledged that blacks were “oppressed more ruthlessly” than their white counterparts in the U.S. proletariat.62 The delegates also passed a resolution that promised to help blacks fight for economic and political equality.63 These statements certainly generated a small buzz in the black community. Indeed, it was in the wake of these resolutions that black newspapers began to cover the activities of the CP-USA. Moreover, editorial opinions among the leading black newspapers generally welcomed the new perspective of the party on the black experience in the United States. The New York Amsterdam News, for example, commended the CP-USA for agreeing to “support the Negroes in their struggle for liberation.”64
Some notable black activists and intellectuals exhibited a greater interest in learning more about Marxism and the CP-USA after its shift to a more color-conscious position on reforming the United States. For example, Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) and a strident critic of Marcus Garvey, became an avowed Marxist and member of the CP-USA during this period.65 The most prominent member of the black establishment to shift his viewpoint on Marxism and the CP-USA in the 1920s, however, was Claude McKay.
McKay, who is widely remembered for his indelible contributions to the literary canon of the Harlem Renaissance, had been a strong critic of communism and the CP-USA between 1918 and 1924. In 1924, Mckay, who was also a prolific editorialist for several black newspapers between 1920 and 1940, accepted an invitation from the leaders of the Soviet Union to attend the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International on a fact-finding tour. Before he left for the Soviet Union, the skeptical McKay told a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American that Marxists had no framework for understanding the plight of black Americans.66
The Soviets had invited McKay with hopes that he would, if treated well, write a glowing account of the nation and the racial tolerance of its citizens. According to McKay’s account of the trip, which appeared in the Crisis magazine, the Soviet leaders gave him a first-class tour of the most important institutions modern Russia. He also recounted that Russians of all stations in life treated him as a “symbol of the great American Negro group.”67 Although the first-class treatment that he received from Soviet leaders made an impression on him, it was the statement on U.S. race relations that Gregori Zinoviev, the chairman of the Communist International, released to the Soviet press in honor of his visit that swayed him. Foreshadowing the strategy that the CP-USA would soon employ in its recruitment efforts, Zinoviev acknowledged the special hardships faced by blacks in the United States. McKay was so impressed with Soviet Russia that he declared it a land without racism when he returned to the United States.68
Even with ringing endorsements from figures such as Briggs and McKay, CP-USA recruitment efforts in the black community continued to lag well behind the expectations set by the Communist International in Moscow. In 1921, W. E. B. Du Bois had predicted that the CP-USA would never make gains among blacks because of the racism exuded by the “white proletariat” in the United States. “We are the victims of [the white proletariat’s] physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion and personal hatred,” Du Bois wrote in an editorial in the Crisis in 1921.69 Before it adopted the Moscow line on U.S. race relations, it is unlikely that the CP-USA would have taken Du Bois’s charge very seriously. After 1922, however, the party, determined to meet its recruitment goals in the black community, began to take a long look at the racial attitudes of its members.
Later that year, the leaders of the CP-USA announced that they were undertaking a campaign to eliminate “white chauvinism” from the consciousness of its rank-and-file.70 The party also announced that it intended to create a bloc within its ranks, the American Negro Labor Congress, for black workers to organize around their racial identity and help facilitate the eradication of white racism from the organization.71
Although there is no doubt that these symbolic gestures got the attention of the black community, they did not translate into large gains for the communists for several reasons. First, rank-and-file blacks had many other options for channeling their deep desires to achieve racial equality in the 1920s. Indeed, both the NAACP and the National Urban League had already been in existence for more than a decade when the CP-USA emerged on the U.S. political scene. Moreover, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA movement was generating unprecedented levels of mass mobilization in the black community during this same period. It is not surprising that most blacks found these organizations and movements, with their organic ties to the community, more appealing than the CP-USA.
It is also true that these more established organizations actively worked to undermine the communists in the eyes of rank-and-file blacks. According to the historical record, most of the leaders of these organizations viewed communism as a threat to the black community during the 1920s and 1930s. The proceedings of the Negro Sanhedrin conference, which took place in Chicago, Illinois, in 1924, and the interactions between the NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD), an affiliate of the CP-USA, over representation of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s provide prime illustrations of this dynamic.
In 1923, the NAACP and five other black organizations with national standing issued a call for the “leaders” of the black race to come together in an “All Race Assembly” and chart a path for the future of the black struggle for equality in the United States.72 The response to the call was incredibly positive; indeed, ten other black organizations immediately signed on to join the planning committee for the conference. When the committee met in July 1923, the representatives decided that the conference would take place in Chicago, Illinois, in February 1924.73 By evoking the Sanhedrin (the supreme court of ancient Israel), the planners intended to send the message that the delegates to the meeting would be interrogating the gravest questions related to their common goal of uplifting the race.
Thanks to the intervention of Cyril Briggs, who served as secretary of the call committee, black communists were included both on the planning committee and as delegates to the Sanhedrin conference.74 The participation of communists at the planning meeting was largely pedestrian; indeed, a statement entered into the record by Richard Moore, an ABB member and organizer for the CP-USA, urging the committee to see the black fight for civil rights in the United States as part of a global struggle that people of color were waging for self-determination, represented the only display of Marxist thought in the minutes.75
But, at the Sanhedrin conference itself, the communist delegates caused a great stir with the resolutions that they brought to the floor for debate. The root cause of the first conflict to emerge between the communists and the more than two hundred other delegates who gathered in the Wendell Phillips High School auditorium in Chicago for the proceedings was a symbolic issue. The only black leader who had been barred by the conference planning committee from attending the All Race Assembly was Marcus Garvey. When the delegates from the CP-USA got wind of this, they sent a resolution to the floor that called for wiring Garvey to ask him to join the proceedings.76 Because the vast majority of the delegates—including their patron Cyril Briggs—had just spent the past year working to rid the black community of Garveyism, they saw this resolution as an affront to their judgment. Moreover, the fact that the federal government had hauled Garvey off to prison on the mail fraud conviction that had brought down the UNIA months before the Sanhedrin made the resolution seem like nothing more than pointless grandstanding.
There was a method behind the communist delegates’ seemingly mad opening salvo at the Sanhedrin. The CP-USA had held out high hopes that the UNIA would be the bridge between them and the recruitment of black workers because Garvey had invited Rose Pastor Stokes, a leading member of the CP-USA, to address the delegates to the UNIA second annual convention in 1922. Thus, they probably meant to signal to Garvey and his supporters that they still hoped to form an alliance. After all, no one knew whether Garvey would be able to rebuild his movement at that point.
What the communist delegates did not realize, however, was that an abiding skepticism about communism is about the only thing that Garvey had in common with most of the other delegates to the Sanhedrin. Indeed, as the documentary record shows, following Stokes’s speech at the UNIA convention Garvey immediately had taken the floor and announced that the comments should not lead anyone to “misinterpret us [the UNIA] as Soviets.”77 Moreover, Garvey frequently had denounced communism in both his subsequent speeches and articles in the Negro World.78
The Garvey resolution did not win the communist delegates any friends among the other attendees to the Sanhedrin. Undaunted by the icy reaction of the delegates to their first resolution, the black communists introduced a barrage of foreign and domestic policy proposals aimed at pushing the Sanhedrin to adopt the positions favored by the Soviet Union and the CP-USA. On the foreign affairs side, the communist delegates called on the Sanhedrin to recognize the Soviet Union.79 This idea was a nonstarter for the convention for several reasons. Paramount among these was that not even the U.S. government under Woodrow Wilson had moved to recognize the Bolshevik government. Because one of the stated aims of the Sanhedrin was to advance the position of blacks by gaining more influence with the U.S. government, there was no way that the delegates were going to risk alienating the executive branch by moving first on this issue.
The resolutions that the CP-USA members submitted on domestic issues were a mixed bag. On the one hand, the black communists were far ahead of their time by proposing that the Sanhedrin press the federal and state governments to pass a constitutional amendment that would make interracial marriage legal throughout the United States. On the other hand, the communists undercut their own work at the Sanhedrin by pushing ideas that were either completely unrealistic or simply off the radar screen of most of the other attendees. The CP-USA delegates’ call for the Sanhedrin to press the U.S. government to nationalize the railroads stands as a prime example of a proposal that languished because it satisfied both of these conditions.80
Despite the communist delegates’ erratic behavior, the Sanhedrin did engage in serious debate about their main policy proposal—a resolution censuring the AFL for allowing its locals to maintain discriminatory practices against blacks.81 As we have seen, addressing racism within the AFL had long been a high priority for the NAACP and many of the other mainstream civil rights organizations that sent delegates to the Sanhedrin, and this was undoubtedly the reason that the delegates gave the proposal such a thorough airing at the convention.82
As the debate moved forward, however, many of the delegates, led by Dean Kelly Miller of Howard University, became convinced that what the communists really wanted out of the resolution was a full-blown condemnation of the mainstream labor movement and a repudiation of capitalism.83 The communist delegates’ introduction of a corollary measure that called for the Sanhedrin, which was officially a nonpartisan organization, to forge a formal alliance with the Farmer-Labor Party, the political arm of the CP-USA, only fueled this perception. Ultimately, the Sanhedrin rejected both of the communists’ proposals and passed a resolution that simply called for the AFL and other mainstream labor organizations to welcome blacks into their ranks “on the basis of equality.”84
When the Sanhedrin adjourned, it was clear that neither the communists nor the moderates were satisfied with their encounter in Chicago. “The Sanhedrin,” Robert Minor, head of the CP-USA, wrote in summary of the reports he received from the communist delegates, “flatly and cold bloodedly rejected the proposal to organize the millions of Negro industrial workers.”85 For most moderates, the clashes with the communists had prevented them from hammering out a plan to win more concessions from organized labor. For Kelly Miller and the other delegates that took a hard line against communism during the proceedings, what transpired at the Sanhedrin was a warning sign that the CP-USA was now planning to highjack the civil rights agenda. One year after his run-in with the communists at the Sanhedrin, Miller made these concerns public in a New York Times editorial in which he warned blacks that embracing communism would be “fatuous suicide.”86
One month before his editorial hit the newsstands, the communists hatched a plan that seemed to confirm Miller’s worst fears. In August 1925, the CP-USA decided that it would try to forge a working relationship with the NAACP. Instead of approaching the organization directly, which it knew would probably have led to its efforts’ being rebuffed, the CP-USA decided to infiltrate the NAACP through its conventions. In short, the party planned to have communists attend the conventions as delegates and “enlighten” the members of the organization about the nature of “class struggle” in the United States.87 This strategy, like the communists’ other efforts in the black community in the 1920s, failed miserably. Indeed, the only success that the CP-USA had with this strategy was when the NAACP allowed James Ford to address its 1926 convention as a delegate from the American Negro Labor Congress.88 After this speech, no avowed communist ever addressed the organization again.
After the 1926 convention, NAACP leaders, who were already skeptical of the CP-USA, became extremely sensitive about the threat of communist infiltration. Thus, instead of fomenting cooperation between the two organizations, the covert approach of the CP-USA poisoned the well and made cooperation virtually impossible. The conflicts that ensued between the two groups as they both tried to provide defense support for the Scottsboro Boys reverberated through the black counterpublic in the 1930s.
In 1931, two destitute white women falsely accused nine black males between the ages of nine and twenty of gang-raping them on a train car. Based on the accusations of the women, the local authorities, backed by a vigilante mob, removed the black men and boys from the train and took them to jail in the town of Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite the fact that one of the women recanted her testimony, admitting that she and her traveling companion had fabricated the story to gain attention, an all-white grand jury indicted the accused anyway. Two weeks later, another all-white jury found all nine of the Scottsboro Boys guilty and sentenced all but the youngest defendant, Roy Wright, to death.
The case, which generated national headlines, became a rallying point for black Americans to protest the injustices that they routinely faced in the criminal justice system. Not surprisingly, the NAACP dispatched a team of lawyers to Scottsboro to assist the defendants, who had virtually no representation during their first trial, with their appeal.89 When they arrived, the NAACP operatives found that the CP-USA–affiliated ILD had already beaten them to the punch.90
Initially, the NAACP and ILD worked in harmony together in defending the Scottsboro Boys. Indeed, William Pickens, the NAACP’s national field secretary, even sent a letter to the CP-USA’s Daily Worker newspaper praising the ILD for its early entry into the fray and urging blacks to send money to the defense fund established by the group.91 It did not take long, however, for this alliance to break apart over ideological and tactical differences.
Although the ILD lawyers were working extremely effectively through the courts to mount a defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the CP-USA consistently claimed in its propaganda that it would be impossible for the defendants to win justice from a system created by capitalists unless the proletariat mobilized for revolution.92 The leaders of the NAACP were mortified that the CP-USA was making such statements while the Scottsboro Boys were fighting for their lives before all-white juries and appeals courts.93 Moreover, in the eyes of the NAACP leaders, these statements further illustrated that the CP-USA was out of touch with the realities of the black experience in the South. After all, the lynch mobs that consistently formed outside the courtrooms where the Scottsboro Boys were trying to obtain justice were made up of the proletariat, not capitalists.
The relationship between the two groups deteriorated further when the CP-USA began to pepper its propaganda materials with hostile attacks against the NAACP. Both the Daily Worker and Southern Worker ran articles that accused the liberal reformers of the NAACP of being part of a “petty-bourgeois” bent on stifling the development of the black masses through “social fascism.”94 As the conflict between the two organizations wore on, the rhetoric in the communist papers grew even more hostile. One article in the Southern Worker, for example, even accused the NAACP’s “misleaders” of “joining the lynching mob” mentality that reigned in the environment of Scottsboro; in other words, the communists claimed that the NAACP’s refusal to help the black masses see that class struggle was the key to their liberation was tantamount to wanting the Scottsboro Boys convicted.95
Finally, the NAACP also began to worry that the CP-USA was fleecing the black masses in the name of the Scottsboro Boys. On May 1, 1934, Walter White announced that the organization was severing all ties with the ILD. One of the major grievances that White pointed to in his statement was the communists’ practice of sending black women to rallies to pose as the defendants’ mothers to grease the wheels of their fund-raising efforts. White also stated that he believed that more of this money went to further CP-USA propagandizing than to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys.96
Some historians have suggested that White’s statement was more a heated response to the unfair charges that the communists had leveled against the NAACP between 1931 and 1934 than a well-grounded accusation. But there is simply insufficient documentary evidence to adjudicate this matter. We do know, however, that the ILD legal team had the trust of many of the Scottsboro Boys and their families throughout the ordeal.97 We also know that by 1940 the separate efforts of the ILD and an NAACP-led coalition of black civil rights groups had won either the acquittal or pardon of all nine defendants. Even in the midst of these great triumphs, the chasm between the NAACP and the CP-USA remained wide and deep throughout the 1930s.98
From the standpoint of NAACP leaders, steering clear of the communists became increasingly important to preserve the civil rights movement between 1938 and 1941 (the attack on Pearl Harbor). This was largely because of the pressures that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) put on civil rights groups to demonstrate that they did not have ties to communist organizations. The House of Representatives formed the HUAC in 1934 to investigate the impact of Nazi and other fascist propaganda on U.S. citizens. Between 1934 and 1937, the HUAC, which was chaired in this period by Representative John H. McCormack (D-Ill.) and Representative Samuel Dickstein (D-N.Y.), remained narrowly focused on ascertaining how deeply fascists had penetrated the fabric of American life.
The HUAC shifted gears dramatically when Martin Dies (D-Tex.) replaced McCormack as co-leader of the committee. Whereas McCormack and Dickstein had focused primarily on the behavior of German immigrants living in ethnic enclaves within large cities, Dies pushed the committee to broaden its scope to examine the extent to which communists had captured the New Deal. Dies, who (like many southern Democrats) was already worried that the New Deal was expanding federal power in a way that would undermine southerners’ ability to keep blacks in their subordinate position, became concerned that agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board, Federal Theater, and the Writers’ Project were providing communists with staging grounds for their recruitment efforts.99
The HUAC (or Dies Committee, as both members of Congress and the press began to call the body in this period) held a series of hearings that targeted elected officials in the Democratic Party who had drawn the electoral support of communists in recent elections or had demonstrated a willingness to work with popular front organizations.100 Frank Murphy, the governor of Michigan and a close associate of President Roosevelt, was the most prominent politician to gain the scrutiny of the HUAC when he refused to use the weight of his office to crush a sit-down strike at a General Motors production plant.101 In the wake of the investigation, which did not turn up any evidence that he was cooperating with communists, Murphy lost his reelection bid handily to his Republican rival.
Although the decision of the Dies Committee to target such a powerful figure as Governor Murphy made national headlines, it did not seem to have much of a chilling effect on civil society.102 On the contrary, most of the stories that reported on the hearings in the leading U.S. newspapers saw the incident as merely a power struggle between President Roosevelt and Dies over the New Deal.103 Black newspapers generally agreed with this frame.104 At the same time, the editorial staff at the Chicago Defender did see the HUAC’s willingness to go after Murphy as an ominous sign for black Americans. In short, the editors feared that Dies, who was no friend to the black struggle for civil rights, would use his tactic against Murphy to undermine black institutions and organizations. 105
In this warning, the Defender editorial was not particularly prescient. After all, the Dies Committee was already targeting Howard University President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson for exposing Howard students to lectures about communism and other radical ideas.106 Moreover, Oscar De Priest (R-Ill.), the first black person to win election to Congress in the twentieth century, had warned the black community that southern Democrats were going to use this tactic to try to undermine the black advancements made since the beginning of the decade.107 There is some evidence that the NAACP and other black organizations paid considerable attention to De Priest’s warnings, so they were ready for the prospect of facing the Dies Committee. In the end, these challenges never manifested themselves before World War II. The infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 immediately made the CP-USA such a pariah in U.S. civil society that any trumped-up charges of collaboration made by the Dies Committee would not have stuck to most groups.
A content analysis of articles, editorials, and letters published in the four black newspapers with largest circulations between 1926 and 1936 (the same four as in 1919) reveals that these negative attitudes were widespread in the black counterpublic. These papers published 541 pieces that focused directly on the issue of the relationship between the black community and the communists or on views on communism during this period. Of this sample, 248 items (46 percent) contain negative tones about communism or communist activities in the black community. Only 103 items (19 percent) exhibit a positive tone about communism. The remaining 190 items (35 percent) are articles that report on the activities of the communists in neutral tones. These results make it clear that the opinions of black Americans who editorialized in and corresponded with the four major black newspapers during the interwar period were decidedly anticommunist.
The overwhelming majority of the 103 articles that contain positive appraisals of communism and communists (73 percent) frame the ideology as inherently antiracist. Consider, for example, R. J. Burgess’s letter to the editor of the Chicago Defender on July 1, 1933. Mr. Burgess urged his fellow readers of the paper to go to Russia because “the Negro element can more easily fit in there than in this land of sainted bigots and thinly veneered barbarians who appreciate us only when we are in our places, wherever that may be.”108 The remaining items that contain a positive tone frame communism as a system that is more likely to bring blacks and whites into economic parity.
The frame that 248 items with a negative tone use most frequently (32 percent) characterize communism as dictatorial. The second most widely used frame (28 percent) in this category describes communism as an inherently evil ideology. Twenty-three percent of the pieces in the negative category contain a frame that portrays communists as insincere about their ostensible commitment to racial equality, and 15 percent of the negative items find fault with communism because it is an atheistic or godless ideology.
Most of the items with a negative tone also urge the power structure in the United States to eliminate Jim Crow to prevent the communists from making inroads in black communities. On March 21, 1931, for example, the Pittsburgh Courier carried excerpts of a speech that Marian V. Cuthbert, the recently retired dean of women at Talladega College, delivered before the Missionary Society of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn and entitled “Treat Negro as Equal or Make Him a Radical.” Cuthbert’s argument was that blacks were being “forced into radicalism because [white America] was not Christian enough to permit them to earn the same living as the white man.”109 Similarly, Walter White wrote in a piece that was widely circulated in the black press that the “drastic revision of the almost chronic American indifference to the Negro’s plight” was the “one effective and intelligent way in which to counteract communist efforts proselytizing among American Negroes.”110 Thus, the argument that came to dominate the approach of the civil rights establishment to Africa in the wake of the Truman doctrine was really just an extension of the frame it had used in domestic politics in the interwar period.
Understanding the depth of anticommunist feeling in the black counterpublic in the period before Word War II gives us traction on the debate about the behavior of the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights groups during the Cold War. The consensus view in the literature holds that the NAACP was out of step with its constituents when it embraced the Truman doctrine. The problem with this perspective is that the content of black newspapers between 1944 and 1955 does not support it. On the contrary, quantitative analyses of editorials, letters, and articles published in the four largest black newspapers during this period reveal that both the Truman administration and its approach to managing the Cold War had broad support in the black community.
The four leading papers published 315 items that focused exclusively on the Truman doctrine and President Truman’s policies for managing the Cold War between 1944 and 1955. Of the items in this sample, 79 (25 percent) are news articles that report on the actions of the Truman administration with a neutral tone. The remaining 237 items contain either positive or negative tones about the administration or its policies—193 items (61 percent) positive and only 44 items (14 percent) negative. In light of these findings, it is easy to understand why the NAACP saw fit to stay in line with the Truman administration’s approach to fighting the Cold War.
A content analysis of these same sources also shows that the NAACP remained very popular with black editorialists and correspondents during this period. Between 1944 and 1955, the four major black newspapers published fifty-eight items that focused on the role of the NAACP in foreign affairs during the Cold War. Thirty-two of these items (55 percent) simply report on NAACP activities on the global stage without bias. The remaining twenty-six items (45 percent) evinced tones that reflect either positive or negative appraisals of the actions of the NAACP. The vast majority of these remaining items, twenty-four (44 percent of the total sample), evaluate the NAACP positively; only two items contain a negative tone. These findings provide a strong challenge to the view that public opinion in the black community turned against the NAACP after it endorsed the Truman doctrine.
A content analysis of items that reported on the activities of the CAA during 1944–1955 adds further credibility to my findings. During this period, the leading black newspapers published ninety items about CAA activities. Not surprisingly, most of these pieces (54 percent) are neutral reports about the efforts of the organization to shape U.S. foreign policy toward Africa and internal politics. What is surprising is that, despite the important role that the CAA played in organizing anticolonial protests in black communities during World War II, the black press published very few letters and editorials praising the organization in this period. Indeed, only thirteen items (14 percent of the total sample) contain a positive tone about the CAA. By contrast, twenty-seven items (31 percent) have a predominantly negative tone.
It is important to note that twenty-five (90 percent) of the items about the CAA that fall into the negative category appeared in the press after 1947, the year that Attorney General Tom Clark announced the Truman administration policy on subversive groups. Moreover, 80 percent items published after 1947 adopted a negative tone toward the CAA because of the links of the organization to communists.
In light of these findings, it is very hard to believe that the NAACP lost any support among rank-and-file blacks because it refused to stand with the CAA after the organization came under the intense scrutiny of the Truman administration’s repressive national security regime.
Keeping Africa Safe from the Reds
As we have seen, civil rights groups and rank-and-file black Americans attempted to pin their claims for greater equality on the home front to the burgeoning confrontation of the federal government with communism in the 1930s. In other words, black Americans tried to sell Uncle Sam on the idea that ending Jim Crow policies against blacks would, as the Chicago Defender’s editorial board opined in 1930, “make America impregnable against foreign propaganda and anti-American invaders.”111 Of course, as several recent studies have documented, the U.S. government did not begin to weigh the value of this argument until the closing days of World War II.112
As tensions mounted between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, the Truman administration came to view promoting black equality as a fundamental component of checking the spread of communism on the home front. Indeed, President Truman frequently articulated this position when he came under fire from racial conservatives for using the weight of his office to upgrade the status of black Americans. On June 30, 1947, for example, Truman delivered a speech before the NAACP—becoming the first sitting president to address the group—in which he stated that the nation “could no longer afford the luxury of a leisurely attack upon prejudice and discrimination.”113 Similarly, when Truman delivered a special message to Congress that outlined his plans for promoting black civil rights, he stated that the United States “must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy” to “inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy.”114 Truman backed up his pro–civil rights rhetoric when he issued Executive Order 9981, desegregating the U.S. armed forces, on July 26, 1948.115
Unfortunately for the black community, President Truman lacked the power to end Jim Crow in other aspects of U.S. life through unilateral action. On the contrary, the fact that separation of powers and federalism are fundamental components of the U.S. Constitution meant that other choke points in the federal government had to loosen before there could be real progress in ending Jim Crow. In the wake of Executive Order 9981, it became clear that Congress was not yet committed to the view that containing the spread of communism required equality for black Americans. Indeed, the powerful southern Democrats who controlled the reins of power in both houses of Congress slowed the pace of reform between 1949 and 1954.116 Moreover, many of the most committed segregationists in the Congress tried to use McCarthyism to undermine the civil rights movement.117 Of course, the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights organizations had already done such an excellent job inoculating themselves against charges of having communist ties that this tactic never bore much fruit for the radical segregationists.118
In 1954, the Warren Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas announced to the world that the highest U.S. court was now committed to overturning Jim Crow (at least in public education).119 Although the unanimous opinion does not cite anticommunism as a factor in the decision of the Court to strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine, recent work by historians has demonstrated that the Cold War context was an important backdrop in the justices’ internal deliberations in Brown v. Board of Education.120 Mary Dudziak, a historian who pioneered the study of the Cold War dimensions of Brown v. Board of Education, has demonstrated that many of the justices had already talked publicly and written about how antiblack racism damaged U.S. credibility in the emerging nations of the Third World.121 Three years later, President Eisenhower bowed to this same logic when he enforced the desegregation order of the Warren Court at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.122
In light of how successful the civil rights establishment had been in using anticommunism as a rhetorical cudgel to advance their position on the home front between 1947 and 1954, it is not at all surprising that this became their dominant mode of talking about U.S. foreign policy in Africa during this period. Several studies have chronicled how the NAACP toned down its criticisms of U.S. allies that held colonial possessions in Africa and began to talk more about keeping the continent safe from the Reds during the Cold War.123 Moreover, in the view of many of these scholars, this pragmatic shift ceded ground in the struggle for decolonization.124
But an examination of archival materials of the period challenges this interpretation. On the contrary, the NAACP remained deeply committed to pushing the U.S. government to adopt anticolonial policies during the Cold War; indeed, the NAACP actually engaged in more anticolonial activism during the Cold War than it had during the interwar period or during World War II. In other words, embracing the Truman doctrine seems to have provided the NAACP with more opportunities to speak out against colonialism.
According to the historical record, the NAACP initiated contacts with the U.S. government on the issue of colonialism in Africa only ten times between 1926 and 1936. Between 1936 and 1946, which most scholars regard as a golden age of anticolonial activism in the black community, the NAACP made only four overtures to press the government to pursue policies that would lead to the decolonization of Africa. But between 1947 and 1955, the height of the Cold War, the NAACP contacted the federal government twenty-one times to press for anticolonialist policies. Moreover, twelve of these twenty-one contacts (more than 57 percent) framed the demands of the NAACP in terms of the U.S. struggle to contain the spread of communism. In other words, the NAACP argument was that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations should press their European allies to decolonize the African continent because failing to do so aided the Reds in their quest for global domination.
Nevertheless, despite the robustness of their alliance with the Truman administration during the early Cold War, there is no evidence that the NAACP efforts on behalf of Africa made an impact on U.S. foreign policy toward the colonial powers. Indeed, as the historical record makes clear, the U.S. government remained averse to confronting its allies to push the pace of decolonization on the continent well into the 1960s.125
As we have noted, there is a consensus in the historical literature that the NAACP support for the Truman administration loyalty program ceded ground in the struggle for decolonization in Africa. Penny Von Eschen argues that anticolonial voices in the black press in general were also a “casualty” of this period. She builds her case for this interpretation on the fact that there was a “sharp drop in the circulation” of these papers in the early years of the Cold War.126 In Von Eschen’s view, this decline in circulation was a result of the newspapers’ having lost credibility with their readers, who remained committed to an anticolonialist view of the world, by reducing the amount of content that focused on colonial issues.127
Although there is no disputing that the circulation of these papers declined in the postwar period, a quantitative analysis of the content of the four black newspapers with the largest circulation between 1936 and 1955 suggests that a reduction in content related to colonialism was not the source of this decline. The black press published 314 articles about colonialism in Africa between 1936 and 1946. The efforts of the NAACP to push the U.S. government to pursue anticolonial policies featured in 104 (33 percent) of these news items. From 1946 to 1955, the black press published 556 articles focusing on decolonization in Africa. NAACP anticolonial activism took center stage in 288 (52 percent) of these items. The press content on anticolonism clearly did not decrease.
Positive Externalities
For most critics of the NAACP within the literature, the inability of the organization to bring about shifts in U.S. policy stands as evidence that its conservative approach was flawed. To the contrary, further analysis demonstrates that the NAACP strategy generated positive externalities that kept anticolonialism a vibrant force in the black counterpublic and paved the way for new gains in the domestic environment.
The anticommunist stance taken by the NAACP (and other mainstream civil rights groups) during the Cold War also facilitated the formation of ties with anticolonial elements within the U.S. government. The critics of the NAACP’s approach in the literature tend to write about the executive branch during the Cold War using the theoretical assumptions of the classic principal-agent model of bureaucratic control, which suggests that bureaucratic agents in the Department of State and other agencies were passive implementers of their principal’s strategic initiatives in the Cold War.128 The upshot of this model is that, if a president takes a soft stand on colonialism in Africa, then his or her subordinates will follow this course in areas where they have bureaucratic discretion.
The problem with this assumption is that a number of important works in the social sciences began to chip away at the principal-agent model of the bureaucracy in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, the more recent conventional wisdom within political science holds that bureaucrats have their own preferences and attempt to act on them.129 Moreover, Daniel P. Carpenter, a political scientist, has shown that bureaucrats often behave in very entrepreneurial ways to mobilize allies within other branches of government and within civil society to gain a degree of “bureaucratic autonomy” from the directives issued by their superiors in the executive branch.130
We find an example of this in the interaction of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations and the Kennedy administration. The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), which sought to forge the NAACP and the five other Big Six civil rights organizations into a common voice on U.S. foreign policy toward Africa, grew up in large part in response to the efforts of G. Mennen Williams, a subcabinet official, to push beyond the Kennedy administration’s conservative policies in Africa. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Williams to the post of assistant secretary of state for African affairs. On first glance, this appointment was highly unusual for two reasons. First, Williams, who made his way to Foggy Bottom in the wake of twelve years in the governor’s mansion in Michigan, was a man with a national reputation, who had even been a contender for the 1960 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.131 Second, unlike his predecessor, William Roundtree, who had quietly made his way to the top of the Bureau of African Affairs through the diplomatic corps, Williams had no experience in foreign affairs.132 Nevertheless, these were precisely the traits that Kennedy was looking for in the person to implement his New Frontier foreign policies in Africa.
Throughout his campaign for the White House in 1960, Kennedy had roundly criticized the Eisenhower administration for not doing more to reach out to the leaders of the emerging nations in Africa. In his view, the United States had lost crucial ground to the Soviets, who were actively courting these new regimes, by not pushing their European allies to accelerate the pace of decolonization.133 Because his opponent in the 1960 campaign, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, shared this position, Kennedy assumed that the Eisenhower administration approach to Africa was rooted in the conservatism of the Europeanists who dominated the ranks of the Department of State. By appointing Williams, a man who could speak with credibility directly to the American people about his agenda in Africa, Kennedy hoped to bring a new balance of power to the Department of State.134
Williams wasted little time in rising to the challenge that Kennedy placed before him. Indeed, within months of his appointment, Williams had already won his first internal skirmish with the Europeanists over the administration approach to the issues of decolonization and communist containment in Africa.135 By fall 1961, Williams was so confident about the transformations he was helping to initiate at the Department of State that he felt comfortable telling an audience in Boston, Massachusetts, that U.S. aid “should not be given [to the African nations] solely with the idea that it will stop African countries from dealing with the Communists.”136
Williams’s efforts were then undermined by President Kennedy’s decision to run U.S. foreign policy directly from the White House in the wake of what he saw as the botched handling of the Berlin Crisis by the Department of State.137 The leaders of the National Security Council and the Executive Committee, the institutions that became prominent after Kennedy lost confidence in the Department of State, saw alliances with Europe as the most valuable strategic asset of the United States.138 Indeed, almost immediately this new power bloc sent signals to the Africa Bureau that the administration was abandoning the New Frontier approach in Africa.139 After this shift, Williams fought to regain Kennedy’s ear through more aggressive modes of entrepreneurial behavior.
Williams worked diligently to build allies in civil society that could help him achieve his goals throughout 1962. The Public Advisory Council on Africa (PACA) was the first significant product of this new strategy. The group was made up of the tiny but vibrant constituency of left-leaning academics, trade unionists, and clergy that Williams had inherited when he took over the Bureau of African Affairs.140 Its central task was to help the Bureau of African Affairs devise new ways to push the administration to revitalize the New Frontier in Africa.141
One member of the PACA, George Houser, founder and executive director of the advocacy group the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), argued that the group should try to mobilize an electoral threat to push the administration to adopt progressive policies in Africa.142 Houser, who had come to work in African affairs through his experiences in the integrated movements for racial justice that took root in U.S. seminaries in the 1940s, had been working with the heads of most black organizations through the ACOA structure since 1956.143 In the aftermath of the PACA meetings, Houser used statements that Williams and his staff had made in the off-the-record meetings to bolster his ongoing efforts to convince the Big Six civil rights groups that they should “organize and vocalize the position of the Negro community on the question of American policy toward Africa.”144
On July 26, 1962, the executive officers of five of the Big Six demonstrated exactly how enthusiastic they were by announcing their intention to convene the ANLCA before the close of the year.145 The conference took place at the Columbia University Arden House in Harriman, New York, November 24–26, 1962. Dorothy Height, who was one of the five conveners of the conference, has revealed that the Bureau of African Affairs helped to get the ANLCA off the ground.146
Perhaps this is why the proceedings unfolded as if Williams had scripted the entire event to provide him with rhetorical ammunition for his campaign for bureaucratic autonomy. The delegates, who came from more than one hundred black organizations, passed resolutions that called for the ANLCA to join international efforts to convince the Kennedy administration to impose sanctions on the white-minority regime in South Africa.147 At the same time, the delegates paved the way for an effective lobbying effort by ensuring that the resolutions did not contain language that directly attacked Kennedy or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. “All phraseology that might have involved the United States government in any unpleasantness with its European allies,” the New York Times observed, “was rejected [by the delegates] as politically unsound and of no practical value to the purposes of the conference.”148 The delegates also pledged to seek a meeting with President Kennedy to “make [their] views available to the government.”149
Williams moved quickly to collaborate with the ANLCA and to use its Arden House resolutions to strengthen his position within the administration. On December 1, 1962, he wrote to the ANLCA Call Committee members to “wish them increasing success” in their attempt to shape “America’s role in foreign affairs.”150 Two days later, Williams forwarded a copy of the Arden House resolutions to Dean Rusk along with a memorandum that urged him to encourage Kennedy to hold a meeting with the ANLCA Executive Committee.151
In March 1963, the executive directors of the Big Six organizations met with Kennedy in the Oval Office to press their case that the administration should push harder against colonialism to combat communism in Africa.152 One month later, Williams worked to help the ANLCA substantiate the claims that they had laid before Kennedy about the burgeoning interest of the black community in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa by commissioning a survey research project on the subject.153 Unfortunately, the alliance between the ANLCA and Williams did not result in a shift in U.S. foreign policy. It did pave the way, however, for subsequent lobbying efforts on the part of the black community; in June 1963, Dean Rusk, at the behest of Williams and his staff, went on record with comments that suggested that he supported the ANLCA’s efforts to shape U.S. foreign policy toward Africa.154
• • •
The literature analyzing black elite engagement with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa focuses primarily on the activities of mainstream civil rights groups between 1935 and 1957. According to most of these studies, these organizations entered the foreign policymaking arena on behalf of Africa during the interwar period as part of a strategy to build a global movement against racism and colonialism. The literature also maintains that the rise of the Cold War forced these organizations to set aside their political commitments derived from transnationalism to avoid persecution from the national security state of the Truman administration. My findings challenge both these assumptions. Indeed, the case study of the NAACP demonstrates that the leaders of the organization (along with most other mainstream civil rights groups) had always seen their anticolonial agitation as an extension of their politics in the domestic arena. As a result, the shift of the organization to an anticommunist anticolonialism after 1947 was well in line with its behavior before World War II. Most important, the NAACP was able to use this frame as a cudgel to push the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations on the issue of colonialism in Africa.
Finally, there is evidence that government bureaucrats within the Kennedy administration invited the NAACP and the other Big Six organizations into the policy formulation process to gain a greater degree of autonomy within the executive branch. This finding provides a strong challenge to the view that all bureaucrats within the national security state viewed black elite activism on behalf of Africa with antipathy. It also demonstrates the importance of the NAACP’s remaining a viable organization during the Red Scare period. In other words, although it is certainly regrettable that groups such as the CAA were persecuted out of existence between 1947 and 1952, there would have been no black community organizations for government bureaucrats to partner with had the NAACP failed to reframe its anticolonialism as anticommunism.