Manfred Berg

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Manfred Berg | Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The naacp in the Early Cold War | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War

In recent years historians have produced an impressive body of scholarship on the linkage between international relations and the African American freedom struggle. Not surprisingly, much of this work has focused on the Cold War, especially on its early years. That crucial period was shaped by an obvious paradox. On the one hand, the global ideological confrontation between Communism and liberal democracy and the claim by the United States to leadership of the "free world" made domestic racial discrimination an international embarrassment, providing the civil rights movement with a potent discursive weapon. Indeed, beginning in the late 1940s, the federal government filed amicus curiae briefs to support the lawsuits others were bringing against educational segregation. The federal briefs pointed to the immense damage racism did to America's international prestige, particularly in the emerging Third World. Cold War liberals embraced racial reform as a national security imperative.¹ On the other hand, the anticommunist hysteria of the early Cold War—customarily, if inappropriately, labeled McCarthyism after its most salient protagonist, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin—infested all corners of public life in America and grotesquely blurred the distinction between dissent and treason. Southern racists were among the most ardent anticommunists and tried their best to discredit the civil rights struggle as a Communist conspiracy.²	1
The anticommunist hysteria of the early Cold War put tremendous pressure on the civil rights movement. As a consequence, unity was destroyed and its radical left wing fell victim to the witch-hunts of the red scare, while most black leaders and organizations of the civil rights mainstream joined the camp of Cold War liberalism. In these momentous developments, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), America's oldest and largest black civil rights organization, played a key role. The association followed a pattern of accommodation to the anticommunist Zeitgeist that was typical for the American public at large. It fervently denied all charges that it was dominated by Communists and distanced itself from all groups and individuals suspected of Communist affiliations. At the same time, it defended racial reform as an integral part of the liberal agenda. The NAACP's embrace of liberal anticommunism provoked criticism at the time and has continued to do so among historians of the black civil rights struggle. Indeed, the controversy over the attitude of the NAACP in the early Cold War mirrors the debate over the historical legitimacy of liberal anticommunism and its consequences for American society.	2
In the aftermath of the McCarthy era, leaders of the NAACP and authors with close ties to the association justified their anticommunism by emphasizing both the sharp ideological antagonism between civil rights liberalism and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the latter's alleged attempts to infiltrate the NAACP.³ Recent historiography, however, has been predominantly critical of the association's embrace of anticommunism. Some historians have viewed the NAACP's anticommunism as timid and opportunistic but conceded that it preserved the organization and its program throughout the McCarthy years. But the price for survival, they argued, was the detachment of black civil rights from more radical concepts of domestic social reform and anticolonialist internationalism in favor of the narrow goals of desegregation and voting rights. The anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War, Carol Anderson wrote, "compelled the NAACP leadership to retreat to the haven of civil rights, wrap itself in the flag, and distance the Association from the now-tainted struggle for human rights." Penny Von Eschen referred to a "stark and ultimately tragic choice."⁴	. . .

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