Cold War Anticommunism and the Long Civil Rights Movement in America by Kierstin Stewart a Thesis Submitted To

The Black Scare: Cold War Anticommunism and the Long Civil Rights Movement in America By Kierstin Stewart A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in History University of Ottawa © Kierstin Stewart, Ottawa, Canada, 2016 ii Table of Contents Introduction………………............................................................................................................v Chapter One: The “Exaggerated” American: Strategy Split and Subversion................................1 Chapter Two: Black Culture and Subversion...............................................................................48 Chapter Three: The Death of the “Exaggerated” American.........................................................96 Epilogue......................................................................................................................................134 Bibliography...............................................................................................................................148 iii Abstract This thesis discusses the impact of the Cold War on the Long African American Civil Rights Movement in the US from 1945 into the early 1970s. I seek to address the historiography that argues that the Cold War was an animating or galvanizing force behind the Civil Rights movement. I argue that black strategies of activism and black thought during the long civil rights era were directly or indirectly influenced by Cold War politics. Strategies towards freedom and equality were manipulated, altered, and transformed due to anticommunism in America. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my Thesis Supervisor Dr. Heather Murray for her insight, drive, and guidance throughout this experience. I would also like to thank Matt and Nica for the meals, stress relieving laughs, and for their words of encouragement. Additional thanks to my family for their support and relative enthusiasm. And to my mother, thank you, thank you, thank you. v Introduction In Ralph Ellison's 1952 classic novel Invisible Man the Cold War and black America collide in a dramatic tale of personal identity. Critics have long considered Invisible Man to be an anticommunist and anti-black nationalist commentary because of the main character’s battle against both ideologies; however Ellison’s novel addresses a deeper issue about the image and interpretation of blackness.1 In numerous points throughout the book, blackness becomes a symbol of divergence as Ellison is interpreting America’s image of African Americans as well as the main character’s realization that he cannot escape that image. In his Prologue, Ellison dreams of a black congregation preaching a sermon on the “Blackness of Blackness”, exclaiming that “Black will make you […] or black will un-make you.”2 In the quotation, Ellison is making a comment on the struggles of black racial identity in a society that will “un-make you” because of the colour of your skin. The main character works in a paint factory whose signature paint is “Optic White” and its slogan states “Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints”.3 The colour of American ideals of freedom and liberty is therefore white, and blackness becomes excluded from those essential principles of United States democracy. Later on the protagonist of Invisible Man discovers the tragedy of erasing his blackness in order to finally be accepted as an American, and in doing so racializes an already far-reaching discourse on the social value of conformity: Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity 1 The following books note that Invisible Man was a commentary on the limits of radical ideology and can be categorized as a Cold War novel. Orville Prescott, “Book of the Times” New York Times (April 16th 1953) no page number; Richard Purcell, Race, Ralph Ellison, and American Cold War Intellectual Culture, (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16; William J. Maxwell, F.B Eyes: How J. Edgar's Ghost Writers Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 224. 2 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 7. 3 Ellison, 152 and 149. vi business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one.4 Released at the height of the Cold War, Ellison’s novel here demonstrates his frustration with pressures to conform to the American social mores and the pressure on blacks to assimilate to the racial status quo. Why would Ellison highlight the complications of black identity during an era when Cold War tensions between the West and the Soviet Union were rapidly becoming a reality of American life, and when many Americans seemingly accepted a culture of Cold War consensus? Arguably, Ellison demonstrates the association between blackness and otherness, the un-American, or the “invisible”. In the Cold War American context this is significant because race was deepening as a controversial symbol of subversive imagery and intention. Ellison’s work is an arresting introduction to this thesis as it engages in an array of themes explored in this work such as anticommunism, black thought and ideology, and race as subversion. This thesis addresses the impact that the Cold War had on the “long Civil Rights Movement”, circa 1945 into the early 1970s. This study seeks to explore how the Cold War circumscribed, complicated, and reshaped, the fight for black freedoms, given the ubiquitous claim of anticommunists that the Civil Rights movement was being influenced by subversive communists. Much as this claim seems distinctive to the Cold War era, the social and cultural construction of blackness as “subversive” dates back to the justification of slavery in the American South. American slaveholders were convinced, like many in the Western World, that black Africans were subhuman and uncivilized, thus using “people” as a means of labor became 4 Ellison, Invisible Man, 435. vii justifiable.5 Through a process of dehumanization and “othering”, slave holders would justify the institution of slavery by proving that African slaves and American born slaves were dissimilar from them. For example, Damian Pargas illustrates how white populations marginalized “enslaved migrants” in order to distinguish itself from blacks: Chained, roped, humiliating marches through crowded town squares, and preyed upon by the appraising glares of potential purchasers, slave migrants were quite visibly marked as inferior beings.6 During the period of emancipation, the perceived ‘otherness’ of slaves was emphasized to defend the further existence of the economic institution. In an 1868 segregationist text entitled Negroes in Negroland, the author illustrates a villainous depiction of blacks stating, “we behold the crime-stained blackness of the negro”.7 Here we see the criminalization of blackness, which long after slavery carried on as a racial trait and stereotype surrounding black subversion. In Black Is A Country, Nikhil Pal Singh addresses the subject of citizenship and how emancipation and Reconstruction created a dilemma of where to include blacks in the spectrum of American nationality, which had long been exclusive to whites: Whiteness became the privileged grounding and metaphor for the empty abstraction of U.S citizenship, blackness presented an apparent contradiction and a fixed limit against which it was enacted and staged.8 Singh’s analysis shows how blacks in America in many senses represented an alien presence or the Un-American. Later the politics of Jim Crow separatism solidified the alien position of blacks within the South, as whites were afforded the opportunity to position 5 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 11-44; J. William Harris, The Making of the American South: A Short History 1500-1877, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 110. 6 Damian Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 97. 7 Hinton Rowan Helper, Negroes in Negroland: The Negroes in America and Negroes Generally (New York: G.W Carlton, 1868), xi. 8 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. viii themselves apart from black Southerners. In practice, separate but equal laws created deeper racial divides as African Americans lived removed lives that were almost always unequal to the great majority of Americans.9 This complicated American history that placed minorities on the fringe of American citizenry, coupled with stereotypes that othered black Americans, formed the basis for assumptions that racial equality was a perverse idea well into the 20th century. Unfortunately for African Americans fighting for their civil rights and freedoms, the Cold War, as it expressed itself both in domestic and in foreign policy, rivalled their growing movement in domestic and international interests. The Cold War and anticommunist sentiments that followed its commencement became a challenge for black Americans, especially those involved in the growing Civil Rights movement for racial equality and justice. First, the Cold War began near the end of World War Two in 1945 when rivalling superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union disagreed on the ideological path the

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