BLACK AND RED: BLACK LIBERATION, THE COLD WAR, AND THE HORNE THESIS

Abstract

This essay examines the groundbreaking scholarship of historian Gerald Horne, focusing particularly on what I term the thesis: the argument that white supremacy and anticommunism were the major forces shaping post-World II life and politics in the United States, with significant implications for African-descended and colonized people globally. Locked in a Manichean struggle with the Soviet Union for global supremacy, U.S. cold warriors, he argues, realized that legal or Jim Crow segregation was the Achilles heel for Washington's propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of people throughout the emerging As a result, U.S. government officials brutally suppressed W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, William L. Patterson, Ferdinand Smith, and other African American leftists who pursued an antiracist, anti-imperialist, proletarian internationalist agenda. Simultaneously, the U.S. ruling class acquiesced to civil rights reforms for African Americans and other people of color out of fear that legal racial segregation would invalidate the U.S. claim to being the leader of the democratic free world. The postwar suppression of the left created an ideological vacuum in African American communities. Various forms of narrow nationalism, embraced by black nationalists and anticommunist liberals, filled this gap, with the latter achieving political hegemony within African American communities in the 1950s. Anticommunism and white supremacy, Horne concludes, profoundly shaped the trajectory of freedom movements across the African Diaspora. The Cold War, then, represented a rupture in African American life and political advancement. This argument runs through many of Horne's works. (1) Certainly, Home was not the first person to advance this argument. African American leftists during the McCarthy period were keenly aware of the connections between anticommunism and opposition to legal racial segregation. (2) Brenda Gayle Plummer, Carol Anderson, Nikhal Pal Singh, Penny Von Eschen, Kevin Gaines, Mary Dudziak and other scholars have offered perspectives that brilliantly explicate this relationship. (3) However, none have looked at the Cold War's impact on black life in the United States and across the African Diaspora as closely as Gerald Home. Indeed, it is hardly an overstatement to argue that his voluminous scholarship represents the most insightful work on the Black-Red encounter during the Cold and the transnational links between postwar African American freedom struggles and those in the Third World. (4) His work speaks directly to the continuing debates on the black-red encounter, as well the Red Scare's impact on postwar black freedom movements. (5) Above all, his scholarship has important implications for appreciating the impact of the Global Cold War on the African Diaspora worldwide. (6) Without question, his work will profoundly shape future interpretations of African American history and African Diaspora Studies, and many of the senior and junior researchers in these fields have acknowledged the debt they owe to Horne? (7) Given space limitations, I have decided to discuss five works: Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (1986); Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000); Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995); Cold in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies (2007); and The End of Empires: African Americans and India (2008). These were chosen because 1 believe they effectively capture the thrust and key interventions of the Horne thesis in several historiographical trends. THE RED SCARE AND THE POSTWAR BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT In Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War; Horne posits what would become a major argument in this and several other works. …