Host Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio – March on Washington 1963 Cronkite: They called it the March on Washington for jobs and freedom they came from all over America negroes and whites housewives and Hollywood stars senators and a few beatniks clergyman and probably a few communists. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to a historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights. This evening we tell the story of America’s biggest civil rights demonstration how it began how it went what it accomplished the Marchers gathered this morning on the broad Lawns around the Washington Monument the weather was perfect 77 balmy degrees there was a picnicky holiday spirit as the crowd grew people waved people they didn’t even know and they made the V for victory signs to the television cameras the crowd grew slowly but still under a hundred thousand at this point but on the outlying streets the buses were moving in bumper to bumper…
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On February 17, 1966, Democratic Congressman Joe Waggoner of Louisiana introduced House Resolution 738, which called for the House Un-American Activities Committee to ramp up its investigations into alleged “subversive” and “communistic” infiltration of multiple Civil Rights organizations, targeting many of whom organized the successful March on Washington in 1963. The resolution was the culmination of a more than decade-long campaign led by a number of Southern politicians to quash campaigns in support of civil rights for Black Americans.
“Red-baiting” – a term used to define the deliberate discrediting of a person or organization by accusing them of communist ties – was around long before Waggoner’s crusade of the 1960s, and was frequently used to discredit a number of activist organizations in the decades prior.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: American Subversives. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Welcome to the red-baiting of The Activists. Our story begins at a school in south Louisiana.
Archival Audio- School Integration Protest 1966:
News anchor: Down at St. Bernard Parish today, breaking down a century old color barrier. White parents standing by watching to see if negro students would be accepted, immediately moved in to have their children taken out of the building.
Admin: “Anyone else want-?”
Parent: “I wanna get mine out.
Admin: “Give me the name, please”
Parent: “Arthur Stone”
Admin: “What?”
Parent: “Arthur Stone”
(yelling)
News anchor: Later when negro children tried to leave the building some 200 angry whites began pelting them with rocks, bottles, and placards. Some of the negros who managed to get to their car were met with violence.
(Yelling, screaming, and honking)
News anchor: No one was seriously injured in today’s violence, both negros and whites say they will return tomorrow.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and scholar of the Cold War.
Dean Jelani Cobb: For this generation of politicians and many of the kind of—the whole kind of ecosystem of anti-communism, their definition of communism was race mixing. So integration. If you were to ask them, what is communism, they would say integration. They would say Black children and white children going to school together. This is why it’s fundamentally un-American. And the objective of the Soviet Union was simply to impose race mixing on the United States.
And so, in that context, it’s not shocking that you see an array of prominent African Americans called before the HUAC Committee, particularly African Americans who have strong civil rights sympathies in various contexts. That’s the point at which you see people like Paul Robeson and people like Langston Hughes and Eslanda Robeson, and the NAACP, which comes up for scrutiny, and a whole array of subsidiary organizations and lesser-known organizations that find themselves in the glare of political scrutiny on the basis of their supposed communistic sympathies.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Civil rights was a core cause in even the earliest days of the American Communist party, and this scrutiny began long before the days of Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade.
Dean Jelani Cobb: They advocate for dispossessed sharecroppers. They bring lawsuits in instances of discrimination. When people are evicted during the course of the Great Depression, communists will cut the locks and move people back into their apartments. They do this in Harlem during the Great Depression. And in an array of ways, they take the kinds of stances that other people will not. Certainly, other white people will not at that time frame. They defend African Americans who have been unjustly brought up on charges, on criminal or other kinds of legal concerns. And so, at the same time, being associated with communists, especially for a Black person in the South, ironically makes your fate worse. So, the people who are trying to help you overcome the obstacles of racial discrimination are people who, just the mere association with, increases, doubles, or triples the level of jeopardy. You see this in Scottsboro.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On March 25th, 1931, nine Black teenagers riding a freight train in Alabama were falsely accused of raping two white women. Known as the Scottsboro boys – Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Willie Roberson, Andy Wright, Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charley Weems and Roy Wright – the trial captured national attention and played directly into Southern politicians’ fears of race-mixing and the mythology of Black violence. Before an indictment was even handed down, the Scottsboro boys were subjected to lynch mobs calling for their deaths, and demanding that authorities hand the teenagers over to them.
The Scottsboro boys were represented by the American Communist Party through their legal arm, the International Labor Defense, or ILD.
Dean Jelani Cobb: And possibly, the only thing worse than being a Black man accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in 1931 would be a Black man who has those accusations and is being defended by a communist lawyer.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The NAACP was initially absent from the case, reportedly due to financial issues and the fear of taking a rape case. But after public outcry, the organization made an attempt at offering representation but was unsuccessful in winning the boys parents over. The NAACP was intensely critical of the ILD, and charged the group with using the Scottsboro case as propaganda for the Communist cause.
One of the many lawyers who helped to prepare briefs for the accused was a young Jewish attorney by the name of Isadore “Shad” Polier.
A South Carolina native, Shad grew up keenly aware of the violent lynchings happening in this home state. This motivated him to devote his career to fighting civil rights abuses though legal battles. He studied under future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter while attending Harvard Law School, where he earned his law degree in 1929, and his Masters of Law in 1931.
Shad’s work on the Scottsboro case propelled him to join the NAACP, where he served on the Executive Committee of its legal and educational defense fund. Always one to stay busy, throughout the 1930’s Shad also served on the National Labor Relations Board – or NLRB – and became the executive director of the International Juridical Association’s United States chapter. The American lawyers of the IJA were primarily focused on defending civil liberties and labor unions. It was there that he met his future wife, Justine Wise, the daughter of social worker Louise Waterman Wise and reform rabbi and American Jewish Congress co-founder Stephen Wise. Justine was an accomplished attorney and legal scholar in her own right, and at age 32, became the first woman judge in New York State. They married in 1937.
In 1945, in the last gasps of World War II, Shad founded the Commission on Law and Social Action of the AJ Congress, modeling the subgroup after his time working with the NAACP. All four of these organizations – the NAACP, IJA, NLRB and AJ Congress – would be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI for suspected communist infiltration.
Dean Jelani Cobb: Wars change things. And world wars change very many things. Among many other social changes, this era of civil rights activism emerges directly from the war. Now, what the impact of HUAC does is that it’s kind of a retardant. And when people begin to get subpoenaed, there’s a chilling effect. And this is doubly or triply for people of color who are already dealing with issues of social marginalization at this time frame, anything from losing your job, losing your social kinds of associations up to and including being arrested.
As HUAC investigations escalated and Civil Rights leaders and organizers were called in for questioning, some groups began to weigh the cost of allowing Communist members in their ranks.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1947, the Jewish Daily Forward published an article claiming that a faction of AJ Congress had formed in order to rid the organization of Communists and Fellow Travelers – and that Shad should be, quote, “eliminated.” Ultimately, the paper issued a retraction, but not before making additional accusations toward several of AJ Congress’s affiliate organizations.
In 1949, AJ Congress, then chaired by Shad, expelled the Communist groups and chapters associated with the organization. Justine, who served as AJ Congress’s Women’s Division leader – and who was suspected by the FBI of being a communist – advocated for the decision.
In spite of their work to purge the organization of subversives, Shad and Justine were repeatedly accused of communist ties, and in 1954, they were forced to surrender their passports to the State Department. Justine bore the brunt of these accusations, including a HUAC claim that she was a member of nine subversive organizations.
Shad and Justine were undeterred, and weathered all of the investigations against them. In the decades that followed, they remained active in fighting against racial and religious discrimination.
Justine spoke of the motivations behind her work.
Archival Audio – This I Believe, Justine Wise Polier: Freedom means many things to many people. From my earliest childhood I saw it through the eyes of my parents as both opportunity and challenge to do battle for those in bondage. To achieve freedom of the spirit and mind for oneself, and one’s fellow men. Blessed by parents whose deepest joy was through service to their fellow men, who were deeply moral without ever being self-righteous, who were profoundly religious and therefore not sanctimonious, I learned that love of mankind became meaningful only as it reflected understanding of, and love of human beings.
As an American Jew, I have found that the great spiritual and moral traditions given to the world by the Hebrew prophets, have strengthened me in my quest for personal dignity, and therefore in the struggle for the dignity of man, and freedom of mankind. The beauty and great traditions of my people as of my home, have been sources of strength and inspiration in confronting the difficult problems faced by our generation in these troubled times.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In addition to the inquiries into AJ Congress, organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and other large, established Jewish and Black advocacy groups fell under scrutiny from HUAC and other anticommunist legislative bodies during the second Red Scare.
Several states passed laws that required those in public employment to list their memberships and affiliations to any organizations or groups. As a result, members of the NAACP and other Black organizations were denied employment, blacklisted, and harassed.
Dean Jelani Cobb: A number of the more liberal Black organizations thought that no matter what kinds of stances or what kinds of rhetoric the Communist Party uttered around racial equality, they had to be kept at arm’s length, that people had to keep all kinds of distance from them to whatever extent possible. And even on the other side of it, this becomes an avenue through which people think they can make civil rights more palatable even. And so, if you’re talking about someone like Walter White, who was an African American, who was president and eventually becomes executive secretary of the NAACP, he had correspondence with entire people in the kind of political spectrum, you know, presidents on down, where he essentially says, We, like any other red-blooded Americans, hate the communists, but as long as there is lynching and racial discrimination, the communists may have a fertile ground to organize.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many African American leaders like White believed that in order to get rid of the quote “communist menace,” the country needed to address and remedy racial discrimination.
Dean Jelani Cobb: That kind of highly, almost reverse psychology, highly calibrated approach to handling this issue was born of very particular calculation. So, you had those kinds of anti-communists in the Black community. You had other people who had had bitter experiences with the Communist Party itself, Thurgood Marshall being one of them, who had steadfastly been denounced. The efforts of organizations like the National Urban League and the NAACP and even Black nationalist organizations like Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, they had all been denounced in very strident, very harsh terms by the Communist Party in the Daily Worker or people on soapboxes, and that kind of thing.
And so there was a genuine hostility often, and that factored into how people responded to their willingness to name names or to speak before committees. Some people also thought that this was in the big picture, in the best interests of the Black community. And then, there were people who were just—as in any community, some people are more conservative than others.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1949, ex-Communist leader Manning Johnson testified before HUAC on the “Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups.” Johnson, who left the American Communist Party in 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin pact of non-aggression, became a staple at anticommunist hearings, naming names and castigating establishment organizations like the NAACP.
Archival Audio – Manning Johnson Farewell Address: “The NAACP collects millions of dollars for racial incitement. They go out of their way to create race issues, because the more race issues they create the more they’ve got an appeal for begging for funds?”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many activists and civil rights leaders connected to the NAACP would be accused of being a Communist and acting as an agent for a foreign state, including W.E.B DuBois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin.
Rustin, a Black gay activist, was instrumental in several significant social movements including the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, trade union labor movement of the 1970’s, and later, the gay rights movement of the 1980s, and staunch supporter of the movement to free Soviet Jews.
Dean Jelani Cobb: Bayard Rustin is really interesting for a few reasons. One is that he is everywhere, in a particular swath of twentieth century history, and his youthful dalliance with the Communist Party. Rustin’s politics were predominantly socialist. And there’s confusion, especially early on, there’s confusion among socialists about how they should react to the communist revolution—what happens in Russia and becomes the Soviet Union.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Born in West Chester, PA in 1912, Rustin attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheney State Teachers College. As a young man, he worked with Quaker pacifist groups and joined the Young Communist League due to its focus on racial justice. He reportedly broke from the communist organization in 1941 due to the party’s stance on non-intervention in the war in Europe, and began to work for labor activist A. Philip Randolph on civil rights causes, including convincing Truman to desegregate the Armed Forces.
During World War II, he refused to report for a physical examination for the draft board and was arrested, serving 23 months in federal prison. Upon his release, Rustin spent 6 months in India studying pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent protest movement.
By 1955, Rustin was working closely with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He also took on a leading role planning the 1963 March on Washington.
Dean Jelani Cobb: And Rustin, over the course of his life becomes one of the textbook socialist anti-communists. That’s a genre of anti-communism that people tend to overlook. They tend to think more about the Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy variety of this sort of thing. But there are these people on the left who think that the communist experiment in the USSR is a complete abomination. And Rustin is one of them. And so, he disagrees. Rustin’s politics are driven by a kind of fundamental—the denominator of all of them is a fundamental humanitarianism. He can’t reconcile that with the Soviet Union. Not to mention the fact that he becomes increasingly aware of—over the course of his career, increasingly aware of the ways in which particularly Southern Democrats will utilize the Communist Party or utilize any—the taint of communism as a way of thwarting the civil rights movement.
Archival Audio – Bayard Rustin: Well, the enemies of the movement were largely the southern senators. And they were organized by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond went so far as just before the March on Washington to go before the Senate and viciously attack me as a Communist, viciously attack me as a draft dodger, et cetera, et cetera. And their objective was to block, at every point, children going into the schools, civil rights bill being passed. And there had to be a break there.
Strom Thurmond, who was now taking a very different point of view, takes that point of view for a very fundamental reason. He cannot get elected in his state without Blacks voting for him. So just as he couldn’t get elected before unless he was a bigot, he can’t get elected now if he is a bigot. So his objective is to get elected.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat turned Republican Senator from South Carolina, was an ardent segregationist who firmly believed that civil rights were a gateway to communism. In response to Thurmond’s accusations against Rustin, A. Philip Randolph read a statement to the press:
“We have absolute confidence in Bayard Rustin’s ability and character, and he will continue to organize the march, which we know will be a great success.”
Reporters bombarded him with follow-up questions, but in a soft voice, he calmly repeated his statement until reporters unexpectedly burst into applause. Six weeks later, on August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington. It remains one of the largest protests in American history.
Dean Jelani Cobb: One of the things that was really fascinating to me was why the United States absorbed so much anti-communism. Like, when presented with a novel idea, this question that had not been considered in any kind of way, why did it take the allergic reaction that it ultimately did? The conclusion that I came to was that from the outset, this idea of socialism first and then communism had been stigmatized by the association, this word association with things that Americans already found anathema. And I think that race was a pivotal element to that. I don’t think it’s the only element, but I think it’s one of the foundational parts of it.
Like these kinds of ideologies are most pernicious because they’re so malleable. And, of course, if you’re talking about antisemitism, the classic example of it is that capitalists accuse Jews of being communist, and communists in the USSR persecute Jews for being capitalistic. The idea is that we’re not talking about a kind of objective viewpoint. We’re talking about the utility of these ideas.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Rustin was a firm believer in the unity and cooperation of Black and Jewish communities across the United States, and further believed that the oppression that Black citizens faced in America was very similar to the experience of Jews in the Soviet Union.
Archival Audio – Bayard Rustin: Now, quite frankly, there are differences between blacks and Jews, on questions sometimes of affirmative action, quotas, et cetera. But we ought not to let that create the kind of problems where we are separating ourselves from the Jewish community which is absolutely as essential now as it was in helping Dr. King. Two of whose lawyers were Jews. When I was collecting money from Dr. King, at least, a third of it came from Jewish people. Two Jewish boys were murdered in Mississippi along with a black. Rabbis were brutalized and beaten. And we must do nothing at all that will separate us from our Jewish brothers. And that to me is vitally important.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1966, he chaired the ad hoc Commission on Rights of Soviet Jews organized by the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews. The commission collected testimonies from Refuseniks – Russian Jews who were denied the permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union- and compiled them into a report that was delivered to the secretary general of the United Nations. The report urged the international community to demand that the Soviet authorities allow Jews to practice their religion, preserve their culture and to emigrate from the USSR at their will.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin wrote many articles on the plight of Jews living in the Soviet Union and appeared at many rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and conferences, in the United States and abroad. In 1978, he received the American Jewish Congress’ annual Stephen Wise Award for “illustrious leadership in the cause of racial justice, world peace and human understanding.” He passed away in 1987, at the age of 75.
Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, and well into the 1960s, activists continued to be called to testify before HUAC and other anticommunist bodies, and were encouraged to name names. Many activists were also subjected to harassment, death threats, and violence. In a number of high profile events, civil rights workers were the victims of lynchings and assassinations, and the era became marred by political violence.
Dean Jelani Cobb: People were persecuted. We saw wildly irresponsible and unconstitutional abuses of political authority. We didn’t talk about J. Edgar Hoover, but we saw a law enforcement apparatus that was completely untethered, certainly untethered to the idea of there being civilian authority over it. We did all of those things in the name of being kept safe. I think that the moral of that story is that we should be highly suspicious of people who tell us that “I know that this is technically against the rules, but I need to do this in order to keep you safe.” Perhaps there are instances where that’s actually true. We should just be highly, highly skeptical anytime someone says that they’ll use the authority, the awesome, incredible authority of the federal government to such ends.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the CBS News Archive, eFootage, KeyRecords, RadioEchos, Washington University in St. Louis University Libraries.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
