Black Liberation / Red Scare

Black Liberation / Red Scare PDF

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-12

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780717808625

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Black Liberation/Red Scare is a study of an African American Communist leader, Ben Davis, Jr. (1904-64). Though it examines the numerous grassroots campaigns that he was involved in, it is first and foremost a study of the man and secondarily a study of the Communist party from the 1930s to the 1960s. By examining the public life of an important party leader, Gerald Horne uniquely approaches the story of how and why the party rose and fell. Ben Davis, Jr., was the son of a prominent Atlanta publisher and businessman who was also the top African American leader of the Republican party until the onset of the Great Depression. Davis was trained for the black elite at Morehouse, Amherst, and Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Communist party, where he remained as one of its most visible leaders for thirty years. In 1943, after being endorsed by his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., he was elected to the New York City Council from Harlem and subsequently reelected by a larger margin in 1945. Davis received support from such community figures as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, boxer Joe Louis, and musician Duke Ellington. While on the council Davis fought for rent control and progressive taxation and struggled against transit fare hikes and police brutality. With the onset of the Red Scare and the Cold War, Davis-like the Communist party itself was marginalized. The Cold War made it difficult for the U.S. to compete with Moscow for the hearts and minds of African Americans while they were subjected to third-class citizenship at home. Yet in return for civil rights concessions, African American organizations such as the NAACP were forced to distance themselves from figures such as Ben Davis. In 1949 he was ousted unceremoniously (and perhaps illegally from the City Council. He was put on trial, jailed in 1951, and not released until 1956, when the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. His friendship with the King family, based upon family ties in Atlanta, was the ostensible cause for the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. COINTEL-PRO, the counterintelligence program of the FBI, which was aimed initially at the CPUSA, made sure to keep a close eye on Davis as well. But when the civil rights movement reached full strength in the 1960s Davis's controversial appearances at college campuses helped to set the stage for a new era of activism at universities. Davis died in 1964. According to Horne, the time has now come when he, along with his good friend Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, should be regarded as a premier leader of African- Americans and the U.S. Left during the twentieth century.

Black Liberation/red Scare

Black Liberation/red Scare PDF

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780874134728

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Black Liberation/Red Scare is a study of an African-American Communist leader, Ben Davis, Jr. (1904-64). Though it examines the numerous grassroots campaigns that he was involved in, it is first and foremost a study of the man and secondarily a study of the Communist party from the 1930s to the 1960s. By examining the public life of an important party leader, Gerald Horne uniquely approaches the story of how and why the party rose - and fell." "Ben Davis, Jr., was the son of a prominent Atlanta publisher and businessman who was also the top African-American leader of the Republican party until the onset of the Great Depression. Davis was trained for the black elite at Morehouse, Amherst, and Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Communist party, where he remained as one of its most visible leaders for thirty years. In 1943, after being endorsed by his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., he was elected to the New York City Council from Harlem and subsequently reelected by a larger margin in 1945. Davis received support from such community figures as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, boxer Joe Louis, and musician Duke Ellington. While on the council Davis fought for rent control and progressive taxation and struggled against transit fare hikes and police brutality." "With the onset of the Red Scare and the Cold War, Davis - like the Communist party itself - was marginalized. The Cold War made it difficult for the U.S. to compete with Moscow for the hearts and minds of African-Americans while they were subjected to third-class citizenship at home. Yet in return for civil rights concessions, African-American organizations such as the NAACP were forced to distance themselves from figures such as Ben Davis. In 1949 he was ousted unceremoniously (and perhaps illegally) from the City Council. He was put on trial, jailed in 1951, and not released until 1956, when the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. His friendship with the King family, based upon family ties in Atlanta, was the ostensible cause for the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the FBI, which was aimed initially at the CP-USA, made sure to keep a close eye on Davis as well. But when the civil rights movement reached full strength in the 1960s Davis's controversial appearances at college campuses helped to set the stage for a new era of activism at universities." "Davis died in 1964. According to Horne, the time has now come when he, along with his good friend Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, should be regarded as a premier leader of African-Americans and the U.S. Left during the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Black Scare / Red Scare

Black Scare / Red Scare PDF

Author: Charisse Burden-Stelly

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0226830152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government's anti-communist repression. In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans' fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa. Beginning her account in 1917--the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act--Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government's fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state's actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats. Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

Black Struggle, Red Scare

Black Struggle, Red Scare PDF

Author: Jeff R Woods

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2003-10-31

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780807129265

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At the height of the cold war, southern segregationists exploited the reigning mood of anxiety by linking the civil rights movement to an international Communist conspiracy. Jeff Woods tells a gripping story of fervent crusaders for racial equality swept into the maelstrom of the South's siege mentality, of crafty political opportunists who played upon white southerners' very real fear of Communists, and of a people who saw lurking enemies and detected red propaganda everywhere. In their strange double identity as both defiant Confederate flag-wavers fiercely protecting regional sovereignty and as American superpatriots, many southerners stood ready to defend against subversives be they red or black. Concentrating on the phenomenon at its most intense period, Woods makes vivid the fearful synergy that developed between racist forces and the anti-Communist cause, reveals the often illegal means used to wash the movement red, and documents the gross waste of public funds in pursuing an almost nonexistent threat. Though ultimately unsuccessful in convincing Americans outside of Dixie that the civil rights protests were controlled by Moscow, the southern red scare forced movement activists to distance themselves from the Marxist elements in their midst -- thereby gaining the sympathy of the American people while losing the support of some of their most passionate antiracist campaigners. A product of vast archival research and the latest literature on this increasingly popular subject, this is the first book to consider the southern red scare as a unique regional phenomenon rather than an offshoot of McCarthyism or massive resistance. Addressing the fundamental struggle of Americans to balance liberty and security in an atmosphere of racial prejudice and ideological conflict, it will be equally compelling for students of civil rights, southern history, the cold war, and American anti-Communism.

Black Revolutionary

Black Revolutionary PDF

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0252095189

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

Fire this Time

Fire this Time PDF

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780813916262

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In August 1965 the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in flames and violence following an incident of police brutality. This is the first comprehensive treatment of that uprising. Property losses reached hundreds of millions of dollars and the official death toll was thirty-four, but the political results were even more profound. The civil rights movement was placed on the defensive as the image of meek and angelic protestors in the South was replaced by the image of "rioting" blacks in the West. A "white backlash" ensued that led directly to Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966. In Fire This Time Horne delineates the central roles played by Ronald Reagan, Tom Bradley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Edmund G. Brown, and organizations such as the NAACP, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, and gangs. He documents the role of the Cold War in the dismantling of legalized segregation, and he looks at the impact of race, region, class, gender, and age on postwar Los Angeles. All this he considers in light of world developments, particularly in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and Africa.

Black Liberation

Black Liberation PDF

Author: George M. Fredrickson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1996-10-31

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0198022352

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When George M. Fredrickson published White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, he met universal acclaim. David Brion Davis, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it "one of the most brilliant and successful studies in comparative history ever written." The book was honored with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and a jury nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Now comes the sequel to that acclaimed work. In Black Liberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks in the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. He reveals a rich history--not merely of parallel developments, but of an intricate, transatlantic web of influences and cross-fertilization. He begins with early moments of hope in both countries--Reconstruction in the United States, and the liberal colonialism of British Cape Colony--when the promise of suffrage led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality. A rising tide of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century, however, blunted their hopes and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. Fredrickson teases out the connections between movements and nations, examining the transatlantic appeal of black religious nationalism (known as Ethiopianism), and the pan-Africanism of Du Bois and Garvey. He brings to vivid life the decades of struggle, organizing, and debate, as blacks in the United States looked to Africa for identity and South Africans looked to America for new ideas and hope. The book traces the rise of Communist influence in black movements in the two nations in the 1920s and '30s, and the adoption of Gandhian nonviolent protest after World War II. The story of India's struggle, however, was not to be repeated in either America or South Africa: in one nation, nonviolence revealed its limitations, encouraging splits in the civil rights movement; in the other, it failed, fostering an armed struggle against white supremacy. Fredrickson brings the story up through the present, exploring the divergence between African-American identity politics and the nonracialism that has triumphed in South Africa. In a career spanning thirty years, George Fredrickson has won recognition as the leading scholar of the struggle over racial domination in the United States and South Africa. In Black Liberation, he provides the essential companion volume to his award-winning White Supremacy, telling the story of how blacks fought back on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes