IN BATTLE FOR PEACE DURING ‘SCOUNDREL TIME’

Abstract

Using the praxis and persecution of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as a case study, this article analyzes the ways in which anticommunism became a tool of investigating, policing, discrediting, and ultimately curtailing what I call “Radical Black Peace Activism.” During the Cold War, the U.S. state apparatus treated this form of activism as an anti-American, foreign-inspired threat to national security attributable to the Communist “peace offensive.” Radical Black Peace Activists linked the end of global conflict, disarmament, and non-proliferation with antiracism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. They argued that progress and justice could only be realized through international cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In other words, they demanded a new world order that would displace the United States, and its relentless militarism, as the world’s police. The investigation, indictment, and defamation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which coincided with the intensification of the Korean War, is illustrative of how Radical Black Peace Activism was treated as a form of Soviet-backed subversion. Through anticommunism, the U.S. state apparatus deemed the use of anti-Black and antiradical repression imperative to its security, stability, and status as the global defender of freedom and democracy.

INTRODUCTION

Much has been written¹ about the use of anticommunism by the Cold War state apparatus to repress leftist peace activism and anti-war organizing in the United States after World War II (WWII). Radical playwright Lillian Florence Hellman referred to this moment as “Scoundrel Time.”² I contribute to this body of scholarship by theorizing anticommunism as a Cold War technology deployed to discredit, repress, and criminalize what I call “Radical Black Peace Activism.” Using the peace activism and subsequent persecution of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as a representative example, I argue that during the Cold War—the longest, most expansive, and most comprehensive period of political repression since the founding of the country (Biondi 2003)—United States government agencies, including the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Subversive Activities Control Board, considered the conjoining of internationalism, Black radicalism, and peace activism to be anti-American, Communist-inspired, and a form of subversion backed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Insofar as Radical Black Peace Activism offered a damning critique of the racialized, exploitative, imperial, and neocolonial nature of U.S. foreign policy—an analysis that dovetailed with U.S.S.R. castigations of the United States—it was treated as a threat to national security. While it is true that Radical Black Peace Activists like Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and Louise Thompson Patterson defended the existence and empowerment of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the United States, their peace advocacy was ultimately about creating better social and material conditions for workers and laborers in the United States and worldwide. Their support for the Soviet Union and socialism, therefore, amounted to neither subversion nor sedition (Lieberman 2000).

Radical Black Peace Activism, a fundamental but often-forgotten feature of the modern Black Liberation Movement,³ enunciated the inexorable interconnection between the cessation of global conflict, disarmament, non-proliferation, racial equality, international cooperation, economic progress, the end of imperialism and colonialism, and the eradication of capitalist exploitation.⁴ It constituted a vision of a new world order in which the United States was displaced as the world’s police, and militarization was no longer a viable mode of global interaction. Such envisioning proved anathema to the Cold War state apparatus, which responded by weaponizing anticommunism to curb internationalism, promote militarism, undermine economic justice, justify the expansion of neocolonialism and corporate imperialism, and rationalize racialized inequality. Radical Black Peace Activism was thus antagonistic to U.S. domestic and international interests for several reasons.

First, in the United States, Blackness has historically inhabited the space between discursive exclusion, abjection, and material dispossession on the one hand, and legitimate historical claims against the state, including enslavement, Jim Crow, lynching, debt peonage, disenfranchisement, and ghettoization on the other hand.

Second, when radicalized, Blackness exposed the rootedness of racial discourse in political economy and the capitalist world-economy. Such revelation, when appended to anticapitalist organizing for redistribution and antiracist demands for equality, posed a quintessentially “anti-American” threat to internal stability. Stated differently, radicalized Blackness was the specter that menaced the structuring racial and class hierarchies of U.S. society. This explains the U.S. state’s efforts to misconstrue diverse—and sometimes contradictory—forms of radical Black praxis as communism, in order to constitute them as subversive, seditious, foreign-inspired, and un-American.⁵

Third, following WWII, Black internationalism⁶ connected struggles against white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, European colonialism, the superexploitation of the Global South, and the oppression of racialized peoples within the United States. Such transnational mobilization against the pillage and devastation of the Black world disclosed the relationship of dependency between the developed/white and underdeveloped/racialized worlds upon which social democracy as a project of welfare capitalism in the Global North was based (Hintzen 1995). In other words, Black internationalism politicized W. E. B. Du Bois’s contention that the color line traversed the globe through the conjuncture of Jim Crow and “the white man’s burden,” and “transferred the reign of commercial privilege and extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of Europe” (Du Bois 1915a, p. 141). Thus, after WWII, Black internationalism challenged the legitimacy of U.S.-centered capitalism exported through the Bretton-Woods agreement and the Marshall Plan, and posed a formidable anti-systemic counternarrative to the conflation of liberal democracy, progress, and capitalist development. It also implicated the United States in the continuation of imperialism and coloniality.⁷

Finally, U.S. Cold War politics narrated counter-hegemonic peace activism that was congruent with the Soviet Union’s conceptualization of peace and international cooperation as a particularly egregious form of anti-Americanism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), for example, argued that “the Communist ‘peace’ drive [was]… calculate[d] to develop a feeling of false security among [Americans] so that the Red military machine c[ould] strike whenever and wherever it please[d]”; as well, “Communist declarations of peace and friendship… [aimed] to sap American morale and secure converts to treason” (HUAC 1951, pp. 2–3). This conjuncture of radicalized Blackness, Black internationalism, and peace activism was understood by the Cold War state apparatus to be the ultimate destabilizing threat.

Because Radical Black Peace Activism strove not only to topple exploitative racial and economic relations domestically and globally, but also to secure harmonious relations between the United States and the Soviet Union—the two global superpowers that, during the early Cold War, had a duopoly on nuclear capability—it was treated as an archetypal form of subversion. It ostensibly posed a grave danger to national security and to the ability of the United States to defend itself against communist manipulation, infiltration, and belligerence. Consequently, anticommunism became a tool of policing, surveilling, and repressing the nexus of anti-systemic struggle that included peace activism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, economic redistribution, Black liberation, and international solidarity.

RADICAL BLACK PEACE ACTIVISM AS NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

For the United States, Internationalist peace efforts not only portended the spread communism, but also directly contravened its drive to amass nuclear weapons, police the international system, and neutralize hostility and opposition. The achievement of radical conceptualizations of peace and progress, the new global hegemon believed, would undoubtedly endanger the U.S.-led postwar order, especially since the “military-industrial complex” and defense industries had become essential to the functioning of its economy (Clayton 1995; Markusen 1992). Peace would make it exceedingly difficult for the United States to control dissent directed against its capitalist-imperialist ambitions. Given this reality, HUAC regarded advocates of disarmament as supporters of communism and the Soviet Union, using as an example the “terrible strikes that delayed U.S. rearmament” during the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939-1941 (HUAC 1949, p. 89). For the Cold War state apparatus, to be against war, aggression, and imperialism was to be against the United States, and therefore a threat to national security.

The 1945 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) constitution elucidates why, after WWII, anticommunism was used to construe Radical Black Peace Activism as an imminent source of destabilization that threatened U.S. authority. The CPUSA constitution drew the linkage between antiracism, peace activism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and socialism that was interpreted by the U.S. Cold War state apparatus as evidence of communist subversion. Exacerbating such “subversion” was the CPUSA’s increasing interracial leadership and explicit position on racial justice. In 1945 it elected the Afro-Trinidadian Claudia Jones to the National Committee and the African-American Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. to the National Board. Indeed, by 1947 there were four African descendants on the National Committee—Davis, Jones, Ferdinand Smith, and Abner Berry. Likewise, in 1948, Pettis Perry was made executive secretary of the National Negro Commission (HUAC 1954, p. 121; HUAC 1949, p. 22). The 1945 Communist Party preamble stated:

The Communist Party… uncompromisingly fights against imperialism and colonial oppression, against racial, national, and religious discrimination, against Jim Crowism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of chauvinism… struggles for the complete destruction of fascism and for a durable peace… [and] recognizes further that the true national interests of our country and the cause of peace and progress require the solidarity of all freedom-loving peoples and the continued and ever closer cooperation of the United Nations. The Communist Party recognizes that the final abolition of exploitation and oppression, of economic crises and unemployment, of reaction and war, will be achieved only by the socialist organization of society… (Committee on Un-American Activities 1954, p. 122, emphasis mine).

Here, peace is understood as inextricable from international solidarity and the end of all forms of racialized exploitation. The association of a durable peace with solidarity among progressive peoples and the socialist reorganization of society challenged the hegemony of the United States as the pre-eminent global political and economic authority. Additionally, the promotion of the United Nations as the leader of international cooperation threatened to hold the United States accountable, on the world stage, for its racist, anti-democratic, and repressive practices against Black Americans. It also had the potential to expose the United States’ deep ambivalence toward independence in the Caribbean and Africa, an equivocation constituted by its antipathy toward and suspicion of Black anticolonialism and anti-imperialism and the promotion of Pan-African unity within its borders (Fraser 1994).

A host of Radical Black Peace Activists presented arguments that were consonant with the 1945 CPUSA platform. In a June 2, 1949 article entitled, “Negroes in the Ranks of the World Front Fighting for Peace and Progress,” published in the Polish newspaper Trybunu Ludu, Paul Robeson, the prolific and world-renowned leftist artist-activist wrote:

One of the problems that is confronting America today is the so-called Negro problem. Even this problem is connected with the fight for peace and progress, not only in America but throughout the world. I would like to stress that the Negro problem is only one phase of the labor problem… The emancipation fight of the Negroes is closely connected with the fight of the labor class, because discrimination against Negroes is a desire to insure cheap labor. That is why the majority of the Negroes… [are] in the camp for peace and progress (Robeson 1949).

This and similar writings and speeches, along with his participation in the World Peace Conference in Paris that same year, brought the U.S. state’s anti-Black, antiradical, and anticommunist hysteria to new heights.⁸ Robeson was subjected to a program of continuous FBI surveillance, discipline, and harassment that lasted for over a decade (Horne 2016; Perucci 2009). He was blacklisted and attacked from all sides, with the white press calling him a traitor, the Black press denying that he spoke for Black people, and the Cold War state apparatus discussing whether such statements were grounds for the forfeiture of his citizenship (Merriweather 2002). Given this backlash, liberal peace and civil rights organizations began to expel and exclude communists and “fellow travelers” like Robeson, to omit policies and platforms that might be construed as communist, and to mute any criticism of U.S. foreign policy that contravened Cold War statist pedagogy (Lieberman 2011). The fact that liberal Black leaders and organizations felt compelled to disassociate themselves from Robeson—who had never admitted membership in the CPUSA—and those like him, and to enshrine their programs in patriotic nationalism, underscores that the conjuncture of Blackness, radicalism, internationalism, and peace activism was anathema to the U.S. Cold War state apparatus. It also demonstrates how anticommunism was used to transmute seemingly universal values like peace and progress, when enunciated by radical Black activists, into targets of state-sponsored discrimination and discipline.

In 1950, Claudia Jones, communist union leader Ferdinand Smith, and four of their working-class comrades wrote to the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee of the United Nations to challenge their detainment at Ellis Island. Their continual surveillance, harassment, and arrest were a result of the escalation of the Korean War, concern about Black loyalty and the presence of leftist “aliens,” and the passing of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (Horne 2005). The letter clearly conveys Radical Black Peace Activism:

Our devotion to the life, liberty and happiness of the American people is attested by our participation in the struggles for the labour movement, in the fight for Negro rights, against discrimination and lynching, in the fight for democracy, on behalf of peace and security of the people. And that is our great crime. That is why we are threatened with concentration camps. That is why our human right are abrogated, our freedom of conscience violated and our right to think outlawed.

We charge the United States with crass and cynical violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… If we can be denied all rights and incarcerated in concentration camps… all progressives who love peace and cherish freedom will face the bestiality and torment of fascism. Our fate is the fate of the American democracy. Our fight is the fight… of all who abhor war and desire peace (Johnson 1985, pp. 28–29, emphasis mine).

This earnest message enjoined that progressives who understood the interdependence between racial hatred, working-class exploitation, and global war—and who had the courage to oppose it—were often the first victims of “reactionary movements” (Horne 2005, pp. 214–215).

Jones was first arrested and sent to Ellis Island on January 19, 1948, not least because she applied her Radical Black Peace Activism to the liberation of Black women. She argued that this group in particular was essential to the peace movement because imperialism was played out through the bodies of their husbands and sons; because their men were subjected to violence in the armed forces that matched lynch mob violence against Black civilians and veterans alike; and because war threatened to permanently militarize and conscript their youth. Moreover, the economic hardships produced by the conjoining of warmongering, capitalist exploitation, racism, and profit-driven imperialism fell disproportionately on Black women’s shoulder. Such conjuncture threatened to drive them off the land in rural areas and subjected them to deteriorating labor conditions and declining wages in industry. Jones’s upbraiding of war was accompanied by the demand to organize and unionize women, to equalize pay, to take special action to protect “triply exploited” Black women, and to increase leadership of the latter in the peace movement through the creation of peace committees among them. She also proffered that a broad antiwar and anti-imperialist coalition of labor, women, youth, and the general working class was necessary to combat Black bourgeois promotion of the Korean War (Davies 2011). Like Robeson, Jones saw peace as the antidote to anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and perpetual war.

Jones’s deportation hearings were set to begin shortly after her initial arrest, but they were postponed because few were willing to testify against her. However, at a hearing on February 16, 1950, the Immigration and Naturalization Service found her guilty of being an alien that joined the Communist Party. Her “crimes” included teaching and promoting the violent and forceful overthrow of the U.S. government, helping to organize the Communist Party whose aim was the same, and issuing directives to topple the U.S. government in Public Affairs, the theoretical journal of the CPUSA (Davies 2011; Johnson 1985). It was during the latter period of incarceration that she and her comrades beseeched the U.N. to intervene on their behalf. That year Jones also wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Worker attributing her political imprisonment to the nexus of anticommunism, the suppression of Radical Black Peace Activism, and the U.S. drive for nuclear war:

All 17 here are examples of devotion to the struggles of the labor movement, in the fight for Negro rights, against discrimination and lynching, in the fight for democracy, in our efforts on behalf of the peace and security of people. And some hold beliefs that only under a Socialist society can these rights be finally secured… [For these political activities and beliefs] we are threatened by the government with becoming the first inmates of America’s concentration camps, the direct victims of the mad drive of the ruling circles to fascism at home and atomic war abroad (Jones 1950).⁹

On June 29, 1951, the FBI arrested Jones for a third time, in this instance under the McCarran Act, for violating the 1940 Alien Registration Act, commonly known as the Smith Act. Her specific offense was that she had given a speech and written an article on the role of women in the struggle for peace, which violated the conditions of her bail (Johnson 1985; Sherwood 2000). In “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” Jones reiterated that progress and equality could only be achieved if the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to coexist peacefully, atomic weapons were outlawed, and the Cold War ended. She exhorted that international peace activism was the anecdote to the threat of the atomic bomb, global armament, the Marshall Plan-funded Atlantic war pact, and “the monstrous Truman-Acheson doctrine that war [was] inevitable.” Further, Jones argued that international solidarity was necessary to challenge “big capital’s” reactionary ideological campaign that violently opposed women’s struggles for peace, economic redress, and social welfare (Davies 2011, pp. 90–93). In addition to giving speeches and organizing mass peace rallies throughout the United States, Jones served on the National Peace Commission at the end of the Korean War from 1952 to 1953. On January 21, 1953 she was convicted under the Smith Act, and after the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeals, Jones was imprisoned in 1955—despite deteriorating health related to hypertensive cardiovascular disease—and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom on December 9 of that year (Davies 2011).

An important but often forgotten organization committed to Radical Black Peace Activism was the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ), founded in September 1951 by a national cadre of militant Black women. Taking a political position similar to that of Claudia Jones, the group sought to rally Black women to defend Black male leaders who were being systematically victimized by the state. As well, they sought to organize wives and mothers of those who were being “legally lynched,” imprisoned, and hounded by U.S. authorities; and those who had been widowed as a result of police terrorism and who had lost their sons in foreign wars.¹⁰ Their program made the indelible connection between the insults, humiliations, and indignities of Jim Crow, the antiradical repression and violence meted out by the domestic police state, and the U.S. war machine that sent Black men to kill other racialized persons on behalf of a country that systematically devalued and disregarded Black life. In response, they organized a sojourn to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington D.C. from September 29 to October 1, 1951, during which they protested the lynching, beating, shooting, and unemployment of Black men who, to add insult to injury, were “forced to become part of a Jim Crow army and go thousands of miles [to] Korea to carry out war to other colored peoples” (McDuffie 2011, p. 160).

In 1952, STJ organized a conference for members on the Eastern seaboard to mobilize against a government that sent their husbands, brothers, and sons to fight oppressed people in the Global South, that appropriated astronomical sums “for the destruction and enslavement of other peoples,” but that provided “no protection to the homes and persons of Negro citizens… [and] refuse[d] passports to Americans who speak the truth” (Cleveland FBI 1952a). Members urged that as long as the United States continued to wage war, racialized people throughout the world would continue to be targeted, dominated, and oppressed. Anticommunism would also continue to be a means of silencing and subjugating those who rejected the capitalist, imperialist, and racist warmongering of the U.S. Cold War state apparatus. STJ held that, when considering the destruction and devaluation of Black life, one could not separate racialized terrorism, like the bombing murder of Harry and Harriet Moore on Christmas Day 1951; state terrorism, like the wrongful conviction of the Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee; and imperial terrorism, like the draft of Black men into an unjust and unnecessary war (Cleveland FBI 1952b). In addition to organizing protests, rallies, and boycotts, STJ worked closely with a number of leftist entities, including the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Labor Council, and the Progressive Party to challenge military buildup, aggression against other nations, and the Korean War (Cleveland FBI 1952c; New York FBI 1958). Given their Radical Black Peace Activism, the FBI insisted that all of the organization’s officers were either in the CPUSA or “front organizations;” that STJ was “Communist Party sponsored;” and that it followed the Communist Party line. This misrecognition rationalized persistent surveillance, which included the infiltration of at least one “stool pigeon,” Julia Clarice Brown, who provided extensive information (Wilson 2012). In the final analysis, the backlash against Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and others with identical commitments to peace, internationalism, and Black liberation, highlights that, for the Cold War state apparatus, Radical Black Peace Activism augured subversion and treachery.

For the United States government, peace was only possible through a combination of military strength, capitalist prosperity, and the defense of “freedom” through armament, nuclear build-up, and anti-Soviet aggression. Stated differently, the U.S. notion of peace hinged on the eradication of the purported totalitarianism and expansionism of the Soviet Union and containment of the “communist-inspired” radicalization of racialized and colonized populations. Thus, peace became conflated with “anti-communist stability” that was contingent upon a strong military and long-term heightened tensions among the public (Lieberman 2009, pp. 201–203). By this logic, peace would be achieved through willingness and readiness for war. It was in this hostile environment that W. E. B. Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism was violently contested by the Cold War state apparatus. His passport was revoked for circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, which ostensibly made him an agent of a foreign nation because, according to HUAC, it was a “smoke screen” for communist aggression against South Korea (HUAC 1954, p. 95). Because the Stockholm Peace Petition had the support of the Soviet Union, HUAC conceived of it as an instrument of communist subversion instead of as a genuine demand for the restoration of peaceful cooperation in the world-system. As such, the U.S. government all but criminalized any peace activism that dovetailed with the U.S.S.R. line, listing a number of organizations dedicated to worldwide peace solidarity—including the Du Bois-led Peace Information Center (PIC)—as subversive, communist, and/or communist fronts.¹¹

THE RADICAL BLACK PEACE ACTIVISM OF W. E. B. DU BOIS

In the interwar period, W. E. B. Du Bois had developed a body of scholarship that was decidedly antiwar, and that analyzed the conditions under which world peace was possible (Morris 2015). While his critique of war simultaneously castigated racism, colonialism, and imperialism, socialism was not yet an essential element of his plan for durable peace. For example, when Du Bois returned from the Soviet Union in 1926, he rejected the latter’s form of socialism for American Negroes. He nonetheless criticized capitalist exploitation, and advocated conscious consumption, production for use and not for profit, and a slow and orderly redistribution of wealth under the tutelage of an intelligent and unselfish leadership class (Du Bois 1968). By the early 1930s, during which he wrote “Marxism and the Negro Problem” (1933), taught “Karl Marx and the Negro Problem” at Atlanta University (1933), and published Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935), Du Bois had begun to systematically study and employ Marxist analysis. However, his promotion of a separate Black cooperative economy at the Amenia Conference, held from August 18–21, 1933, revealed that he was not quite convinced of the efficacy of interracial proletarian struggle. Thus, Du Bois’s denunciation of war did not fully develop into Radical Black Peace Activism until the next decade.

Even in Du Bois’s early politics, the elimination of war was not merely the absence of military conflict; it was the historical fulfillment of equality, justice, and the end of colonial and racial exploitation (Morris 2015). In critiquing the white peace movement’s vitriolic white supremacy in 1915, he argued for the necessity of antiracism and anti-imperialism alongside antiwar activism. His 1923 declaration that “it pays to kill niggers” linked warmongering, corporate profit, and anti-Blackness. He extended this perspective in 1931, associating war with the economic exploitation and material dispossession of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Moreover, in two articles, “The African Roots of War” (1915b) and “The Realities in Africa: European Profit or Negro Development” (1943), he highlighted that, while fighting Germany in each of the World Wars, the imperial powers continued to undermine the self-determination of Africans through their colonial-capitalist plunder. In this way, war, colonialism, and racialized oppression were mutually constitutive.¹² In effect, Du Bois’s antiwar politics enframed the material and political realities of dispossessed persons (Marable 1983/1984).

In “Social Planning for the Negro, Past and Present,” (1936) Du Bois inveighed against both radical and liberal programs that promoted war and violence:

The most baffling paradox today is the attitude of men toward war. On the one hand, we have the advocates of radical reform… insisting that the only path to this era of peace and justice is through violent revolution. On the other hand, we have the advocates of the present system insisting that they can only insure [sic] peace by worldwide preparation for the same kind of war which recently took the lives of ten million men (p. 124).

Each scenario, he maintained, was catastrophic for Black Americans living under racial subjection because they would “stand between the two armies as buffer and victim, pawn and peon.” Black people, then, could “only abhor violence and bloodshed” and eschew violent confrontation “except as the last defense against aggression.” Wanton promotion of war not only inhered in anti-Blackness, he insisted, but also served to reify capitalism; consequently, “The first study of the workers is not to fight but to convince themselves that union of workers, class solidarity, is better than force and a substitute for it” (1936, p. 124–125). By 1947, when Du Bois proclaimed that the emancipation of Black workers would help to establish the foundation of world peace, he had already convincingly conceptualized the rootedness of peace in a larger program of human emancipation (Marable 1983/1984; Du Bois 1913). Over the next quarter century, this militant promotion of the permanent demise of war and interstate violence developed into a radical vision constituted by “the integral themes of peace, African liberation, and socialism” (Marable 1983/1984, p. 404). His Radical Black Peace Activism came to advance that war would foreclose the possibility of African self-determination, a comfortable standard of living for the working class, and a socialist future for the whole world.

Given his aversion to war and its integral racism, as early as 1918 Du Bois was the target of surveillance for possible subversive activities. The government began to question his Americanness given his criticism of U.S. treatment of Black soldiers during WWI—a deep skepticism that would follow him until he left the United States for good, after joining the CPUSA, in 1961. Wartime policy required truly loyal citizens to withhold their criticism of American society until after the Germans had been defeated. As the editor of The Crisis magazine, which was identified as a radical publication during WWI, Du Bois had written several articles that criticized the war department and pilloried discrimination against Black soldiers. This incurred the displeasure of officials in the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation because it threatened to undermine Black loyalty to the war effort. Such concern was particularly ironic given that Black loyalty was considered suspect at best (Ellis 1984). Likewise, Du Bois’s public demands for Black equality were a source of ire for the U.S. Justice Department, and this early suspicion of his loyalty to the United States would become more acute as his activism became more radical and supportive of the Soviet Union. Even his conciliatory “Close Ranks” editorial, in which he encouraged Negroes—much to the consternation of many Black leaders, like Hubert Harrison—to “forget [their] special grievances and close [their] ranks shoulder to shoulder with [their] own white fellow citizens and allied nations that are fighting for democracy… gladly and willingly with [their] eyes lifted to the hills,” (Du Bois 1918, p. 111) failed to mitigate his previous writings that chastised U.S. race relations.

Du Bois’s antiwar position, however, was considered to be even more antagonistic than his racial agitation—bordering on subversion. Protesting the war, like agitation for civil rights, was thought to be inspired by foreign propaganda (especially German propaganda), antithetical to the American war effort, and therefore seditious. Many promoters of peace became objects of government surveillance, were jailed, or were exiled. Activists who were Black, radical, and advocates of peace were considered particularly prone to subversion, and therefore especially targeted, because historically, the injustice, racism, and oppression inherent in war tended to inspire Black opposition. Additionally, when Black people did support U.S. war efforts, their stance was contingent upon an assessment of whether their lived conditions would be improved (Pittman 1952). As Robbie Lieberman (2009) points out, Black radicals that promoted peace and freedom were considered disloyal given their critique of U.S. foreign policy that used the discourse of democracy to dominate racialized folks the world over.

In 1951, Du Bois, whose antiwar militancy had exploded into full-blown Radical Black Peace Activism, was arrested for these very politics not least because he had made a decided move to the left. His acceptance of the Vice-Chairmanship of the Council on African Affairs (at the request of fellow radical Paul Robeson); his push for cooperation with the Soviet Union instead of the increasing polarization of the world; and his support for the 1948 presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace (the Progressive Party candidate) attest to this move (Marable 1983/1984). He began to consistently argue that war undermined rationality, good will, and collaboration; that violence and aggression would not resolve differences in ideology; and that war and respect for civil rights were irreconcilable (Du Bois 1995a; Horne 1986). Furthermore, he rejected the U.S. position on peace because it was entangled with anticommunist repression, the violation of civil liberties, and the continued abuse of and violence against racialized peoples and nations (Lieberman 2009).

Hostility toward Radical Black Peace Activism reached a fever pitch during the Cold War for two reasons: first, because peace was an essential component of U.S.S.R. propaganda, and second because international peace activism linked United States militarism and warmongering to the reification of racialization, imperialism, and colonialism. As such, it challenged the hegemony of the United States as the arbiter of freedom and justice. One example of the conjoining of red-baiting and anti-internationalism is anticommunist sociologist Wilson Record’s (1964) mischaracterization of Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism. He claimed that communists had exploited Du Bois’s international popularity by persuading him to support peace. Record’s position, which dovetailed with official U.S. discourse, was twofold: one, that in crusading for peace and progress, Du Bois was actually supporting a communist plot to undermine the United States; and two, that communists were using the language of peace to hoodwink, exploit, and confuse (Black) Americans to support their nefarious causes. Radical Black Peace Activism, according to this logic, was not only dangerous and subversive, but was also another example of Black peoples’ susceptibility to exogenous forms of manipulation and trickery that called into question their suitability for citizenship and belonging.

In reality, Du Bois’s struggle for peace was neither new nor a result of communist manipulation, notwithstanding its intensification as the Korean War became “hot,” and his support for and admiration of the Soviet Union increased. Not an insignificant number of Black leaders succumbed to anticommunist pressures; they stopped criticism of the Korean War, ceased promotion of harmonious international cooperation, and delinked domestic struggle for civil rights from foreign policy concerns. Du Bois and other Radical Black Peace Activists took the opposite approach. They equated nuclear proliferation with the emergence of the security state, racial and economic injustice, and the ascent of neocolonialism in the Global South. They never strayed from their position that war was antithetical to freedom and justice in the United States and throughout the world more broadly (Lieberman 2009; Meriwether 2002; Mullen 1999; Roark 1971).

The Cold War state apparatus maligned peace advocacy as communist manipulation, as foreign-inspired, and as inimical to U.S. security and stability. To the latter, Du Bois lamented, “[it is] a shameful proclamation to the world that our Government considers peace alien, and its advocacy criminal” (Aptheker 1978, p. 306). The Cold War state apparatus treated Radical Black Peace Activism as a form of anti-American subversion precisely because it inhered in anticapitalist analysis and anticolonial linkage and fomented international coalition building. Insofar as peace and international cooperation were the conditions under which white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and the immiseration of the international working class could be vanquished, the United States was necessarily hostile to any form of politics that strove to achieve these ends.

In response to the conflation of peace activism with subversion, Du Bois wrote in 1949, “We know and the saner nations know that we are not traitors nor conspirators; and far from plotting force and violence, it is precisely force and violence that we bitterly oppose… [W]e do not defend Communism nor Socialism, nor the American way of life... [we] promote peace!” (Du Bois 1995a, p. 751). Nonetheless, it was the very act of promoting peace over “the American way of life” that effectively equated Radical Black Peace Activism with anti-Americanism. The DOJ filed charges against Du Bois to determine whether the Peace Information Center, and by extension he, as its chair, used peace advocacy to act as an agent of a foreign political organization or power, specifically the World Committee of the Defenders of Peace (later renamed the World Peace Council). According to the Attorney General’s List, the latter was a communist front (Du Bois 1995b). Du Bois became especially susceptible to U.S. retribution because, despite the hostile environment, he was extremely effective in his antiwar organizing (Horne 1986). He, along with his second wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, influenced Americans “from California to Massachusetts” to join the peace cause (Moos 1951). He and Paul Robeson, through the Council on African Affairs, were also able to garner support internationally, especially in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. Moreover, Du Bois provided a critical link between Black and white antiwar activists by helping to cultivate Black opposition to the Korean War (Moos 1951).

The PIC was especially targeted for its circulation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, also known as the “ban the bomb petition”; the February 8, 1951 indictment stated in part that, “at the request of its said foreign principal, [PIC] published and disseminated in the United States the ‘Stockholm Peace Appeal’ and related information pertaining primarily to prohibition of the use of atomic weapons and instruments of war…” (quoted in Hunter and Robinson, 2018, p. 164). The Petition emerged out of an international mass movement that called for the outlawing of atomic weapons, international controls to enforce the measures, and the treatment of any countries that use atomic bombs as war criminals that had committed crimes against humanity (Horne 1986; Hunter and Robinson, 2018; Lieberman 2009). On July 13, 1950, the Peace Information Center indicated that the Petition had received over 1.5 million signatures from forty states (Lewis 2000). The goal of two million signatures was ultimately surpassed, with more than 2.5 million Americans signing it, notwithstanding the fact that many who signed the petition were criticized, arrested, physically attacked, and fired from their jobs. Du Bois was not immune from such repression; his civil liberties were severely curtailed, and his civil rights were violated in a number of ways, including the denial of a permit by the mayor of New York to hold a peace rally—the first time this had occurred in 150 years (Horne 1986). Despite the slanderous campaign against it, the Stockholm Peace Petition may have been signed by more people than any other appeal in the history of the United States (Horne 1986; Lieberman 1992). The U.S. government saw it as a threat precisely because of the overwhelming international response to it: there were ten million signatories in France, sixty million in China, 115 million in the Soviet Union, and 3.75 million in Brazil (Horne 1986). This international coalition posed an enormous challenge to the U.S. administration that had come to understand its prosperity, defense, and security as tied to sustained militarism.

In The New York Times, Secretary of State Dean Acheson called the Stockholm Peace Petition a “propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union” (Biondi 2003, p. 161). HUAC accused it of condemning the United States to national suicide, and of attempting to confuse and divide Americans (HUAC 1951; Horne 1986; Lieberman 1992). It was maligned as a ploy to undermine resistance to communist aggression; the first step of U.S.S.R. infiltration and invasion; and a fraudulent hoax meant to manipulate those who desired peace. Thus, by circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, Du Bois was accused of committing what amounted to treason on behalf of the Soviet Union (Lieberman 1992). By labeling it as communist-inspired, the United States attempted to discredit it in order to legitimate the use of nuclear weapons and aggression, to prevent dissent, and to suppress the international movement for peace. Du Bois replied to the gross misrepresentation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, and of Radical Black Peace Activism more broadly, thus:

The main burden of your opposition to this Appeal and to our efforts lies in the charge that we are part of a ‘spurious peace offensive of the Soviet Union’… Today in this country it is becoming standard reaction to call anything ‘communist’ and therefore subversive and unpatriotic… We feel strongly that this tactic has already gone too far; that it is not sufficient today to trace a proposal to a communist source in order to dismiss it with contempt (Du Bois 1968, pp. 358-359).

He maintained that the actual threat to stability, tranquility, and prosperity was the United States’ disingenuous insistence “that the existence of Socialist and Communist states are in themselves reasons for fear and aggression” (Marble 1983/1984, p. 402). Years later at an event commemorating Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. echoed the latter sentiment, enjoining that, “our irrational, obsessive anti-Communism has led us to too many quagmires” (Lewis 1970, p. 376). Du Bois held that U.S. aversion to the Stockholm Peace Petition conveyed that the purported protector of freedom and democracy in reality lacked commitment to peace, real understanding of the horrors and ravages of war, and empathy for those who were impoverished and devastated by such dehumanizing aggression (Lewis 2000). It was therefore the United States, not communism, socialism, internationalism, or even the Soviet Union, that undermined peace and cooperation.

Shortly after his campaign for the U.S. Senate,¹³ Du Bois was indicted under the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 for operating as an “unregistered foreign agent” and for failing to register the PIC (Amsterdam News 1951; New York Daily Mirror 1951). The DOJ also filed charges against PIC members Kyrle Elkin, Elizabeth Moos, Abbott Simon, and Sylvia Soloff. Soloff was let go on the last day of the trial, as the judge declared that she was wrongfully indicted because she was never a PIC officer (Moos 1951). The DOJ sought to determine “whether or not this organization acted as an agent or in a capacity similar to that of a foreign organization or a foreign political power” (Du Bois 1968, p. 389). On multiple occasions, the FBI interrogated members that had attended even one meeting, and many were subpoenaed for the trial. The organization was only in existence from April 3 to October 12, 1950 due to unrelenting anticommunist pressure, but the trial proceeded even though the Center was disbanded before the indictment came down (Horne 1986). U.S. v. Peace Information Center, et al. proceeded in November 1951. The prosecution used anticommunist rhetoric, the Korean War, and demonization of the Soviet Union to discredit Radical Black Peace Activism. It called as its star witness Oetje John Rogge, a former Assistant Attorney General and founding member of the PIC. Interestingly, it was Rogge who had invited Du Bois to a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace that aimed to better U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations (Hunter and Robinson, 2018) and it was Rogge’s home at which the PIC was formed. In his testimony, he claimed that the objective of the PIC was not peace, but rather to enact U.S.S.R. foreign policy. He also argued that the purpose of the World Committee of the Defenders of Peace, for which the PIC was ostensibly an agent, was to focus international attention on the United States’ use of the atomic bomb to distract the world from Soviet aggression in Korea. This was notwithstanding the fact that in August 1950, Rogge had signed a petition in Prague pledging his support to the World Committee and its peace program, and that he was one of the first signers of the Stockholm Peace Petition (Moos 1951). The government intended to use this testimony to subject the PIC to the “Russian and Communist controversy” so that “current popular hysteria could be aroused against [Du Bois and the PIC]” (National Guardian 1951).

The attempt to redbait Du Bois and the other defendants was evidenced in the insignificant witnesses called to testify against them, all of whom were either FBI informants or were well known for their anti-U.S.S.R. position, such as “Mr. Lissner,” a reporter from The New York Times (Moos 1951). The prosecution also tried to use “parallelism” to convict the defendants. According to Bernard Jaffe, one of the defense lawyers:

Somebody would be declared to be a Communist because the policies that he carried out were similar to those that were being advocated by Communists, and once you established that one became a ‘follower,’ a ‘fellow traveler,’ or whatever it was and just as guilty as a Communist himself. So you established the evil of Communism; once you established that evil of Communism anyone who parallels the principles which are espoused by that evil spirit are themselves guilty. At the time the Du Bois prosecution took place, it was not an outlandish theory, and it had never before been rejected by a court during that period (Levering Lewis Papers 1986).

Parallelism was one of the primary techniques used in McCarran hearings, and its use was rejected for perhaps the first time in the PIC trial. Thus, “Deprived of the use of parallelism, unable to confuse the issues with redbaiting, the case proved… ‘as thin as the broth made from the shadow of a homeopathic pigeon that had starved to death’,” and the PIC was acquitted of all charges on November 20, 1951 (Moos 1951). The judge announced that the government had failed to support the allegations of the indictment, and that the only way to move forward would be through conjecture as opposed to the conception of law. Despite the acquittal, Elizabeth Moos pointed out that the defendants lost nine months of their lives, peace of mind, and over $35,000. Regarding the cost of justice, Du Bois lamented, “It had not occurred to us how costly justice in the United States is. It is not enough to be innocent in order to escape punishment. You must have money and a lot of it” (Du Bois 1968, p. 375). Moreover, the defendants had been subjected to indignities, harassments, slanderous publicity, and the cloud of criminality, which severely impeded their ability to continue the fight for social justice (National Guardian 1951; Moos 1951).¹⁴

Much to the surprise of his detractors, Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism garnered overwhelming support worldwide, and his arrest and indictment elicited trenchant condemnation. Alice Citron, the “creative and indefatigable” secretary of the National Committee to Defend Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, aimed to internationalize the case to elicit global sympathy and support for Du Bois and the PIC. She noted that government authorities did not in fact realize how influential Du Bois was until heads of state from all corners of the globe began sending letters outlining his importance and insisting upon his innocence (Du Bois Papers 1951a, b, c; Levering Lewis Papers 1987; Moos 1951). When he was arrested, “protest from white and [B]lack arose, and from Europe and Asia as well as Africa…” (Du Bois 1995c, p. 779). An international defense committee was established and headquartered in Brussels; international unions like the World Federation of Trade Unions sent resolutions of protest; women’s conferences throughout Europe discussed the case and passed resolutions; and Du Bois received letters of support from students, activists, leaders, and state officials from Global South countries including China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Iran (Moos 1951). The International Union of Students wrote that his work on behalf of peace honored—not threatened—the best of U.S. traditions, and that his prosecution was “an attack upon peace supporters, upon Negro people, and upon the rights of professors and students to act for peace” (Du Bois 1968, p. 374). Fellow Pan-Africanist George Padmore shared their position, writing in a letter that such violent censure by the Cold War state apparatus was meant to undermine Du Bois’s “heroic fight for peace” and to “blackmail” him into silence, which was an egregious insult to democracy and to African people throughout the world (Padmore 1951, p. 311). The court was especially sensitive to the opinion of formerly colonized countries that would assuredly have a negative reaction to the imprisonment of a staunch anticolonialist like Du Bois. This preoccupation both confirmed the state’s anxiety about international pressure undermining their authority and cajoled them into resolving the case in Du Bois’s favor.

CONCLUSION

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the legacy of Radical Black Peace Activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice lived on through organizations like the Black Panther Party, the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union, and the Third World Women’s Alliance (Farmer 2018; Higgins 2013; Patton 2010). Like their predecessors, Black progressives in these organizations mobilized against the conjuncture of war, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, U.S. imperialism, and neocolonialism. The Revolutionary Action Movement, for example, wrote a letter to the Vietnam’s National Liberation Front on July 4, 1964 congratulating them on their “victories against U.S. imperialism,” expressing their commitment to creating “a new world free from exploitation of man by man,” and explaining their rejection of U.S. counterrevolutionary measures against their Third World brothers struggling for liberation (Revolutionary Action Movement 1964).

Likewise, on January 6, 1966 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a statement opposing the Vietnam War days after member Samuel Younge, Jr.—a war veteran—was slain in Tuskegee, Alabama for attempting to use a whites-only restroom. SNCC equated Younge’s murder to that of Vietnamese peasants insofar as both were seeking rights guaranteed to them by law, and in both cases the U.S. government bore responsibility for their deaths. The statement also exposed that the United States hid behind discourses of democracy and freedom to undermine the sovereignty and self-determination of racialized people throughout the Global South and in the United States. Given this deception and hypocrisy, SNCC offered its support to those who refused to be drafted into the service of U.S. imperial aggression and encouraged U.S. citizens to put their energy toward the struggle for civil and human rights, instead of toward the propagation of war and suffering.

Radical Black Peace Activism is also being taken up contemporarily by organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). Through political education, organization, and movement support, members of BAP work to resist militarized state repression, the use of destabilizing and subversive policies and practices globally, and the U.S. program of permanent war. BAP contends that trans-Atlantic enslavement, genocide, colonialism, dispossession, and racism are the foundations of the continued reproduction of war. It also understands itself as part of the tradition of radical Blackness that has unceasingly opposed the denigration and domination of racialized and oppressed people through colonial and imperial aggression, ranging from the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 to the interventions in Korea and Vietnam following World War II, to contemporary incursions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. BAP futher connects U.S. warmongering to the militarization of U.S. police forces that punish, victimize, and murder racialized populations and to the legal system that warehouses racialized populations in jails and prisons as an alternative to providing basic welfare and social services. Additionally, like Claudia Jones and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, BAP opposes the targeting of Black and Brown youth for military service, which conscripts them into the very system of violence that operates against them daily. Thus, “by comprehensively linking the issue of state violence and militarism, BAP will concentrate its effort on not only opposing the U.S. war agenda globally but the war and repression being waged on Black and Brown communities domestically” (BAP 2018).

Given their mobilization against war, police brutality, economic exploitation, imperialism, and anti-Blackness, Radical Black Peace Activists who belong to organizations like BAP are susceptible to new technologies of antiradical repression that construct them as “Black Identity Extremists.” An August 3, 2018 FBI report defined the latter as, “individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society… in furtherance of establishing a separate Black homeland or autonomous Black social institutions, communities, or governing organization within the United States” (p. 1). The report situated post-Ferguson (2014) uprisings and isolated attacks on police officers in a longer history of “extremist” violence, particularly represented by 1960s and 1970s radical Black organizations like the Black Liberation Army. Such positioning creates an unbroken lineage of Black subversion and insurrection that rationalizes and legitimates the use of extraordinary repression and subjection. In this way, the counterterrorism division of the FBI has transformed those who oppose racist police violence, consider the U.S. criminal justice system to be patently unjust, support Black self-determination, and defend Black life into a threat to law enforcement, and by extension, the authority of the U.S. state apparatus. If history is any indication, these Radical Black Peace Activists who reject the dehumanizing violence endemic in capitalism, war, racism, and militarism will be subjected to the very force and brutality that they are struggling to eradicate. And yet, we continue.