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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 2004)

BLACK STRUGGLE, Red Scare is a useful addition to the growing scholarship on the southern Red Scare. The monograph's main argument is that white segregationists rallied against the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement because they believed that it was part of a foreign, Communist-inspired conspiracy that threatened the (white) "southern way of life." (2) Southern anti-Communism was a key component of what Woods calls "southern nationalism," a "defensive regional ideology" and "set of values and traditions" rooted in the historical memories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, suspicion of centralized government power and modernity, fundamentalist Protestantism, and, above all, white supremacy. (2) It was this ideology that made the southern Red Scare distinct from anti-Communist hysteria nation-wide. Indeed, as McCarthyism lost traction nationally, anti-Communism, Woods asserts, gained ground in the South, especially at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s.

The book is arranged chronologically. The opening chapter argues that post-war, anti-black, Communist hysteria "had deep roots in the region's past." (12) Immediately before and after World War II, Southern nationalists took the lead in institutionalizing anti-Communism at the national level. Convinced that post-war black militancy was a Soviet plot to destroy the southern way of life, Senator James Eastland and other Dixiecrats virulently opposed civil rights reforms and became some of Joseph McCarthy's staunchest allies during the peak of the Cold War.

The southern Red Scare grew in tandem with massive resistance against the Civil Rights Movement immediately after the Brown v. Board decision (1954). White southerners not only held the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] responsible for the Supreme Court's decision but believed the organization was part of a Soviet-directed conspiracy. The Eisenhower administration's decision to send federal troops to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock coupled with the Soviets' launching of Sputnik in the fall of 1957 galvanized white mass popular opposition to desegregation and convinced them that the South was under siege by subversive outsiders.

Woods's discussion of the "little HUACs" and "little FBIs" established across the South in the late 1950s is the most interesting, original part of the monograph. Like works by John Dittmer, James Dickerson, and Yasuhiro Katagiri, Woods concludes that Mississippi's State Sovereignty Commission [SSC], an investigative body formed in 1957 in response to growing black militancy, became the state's "secret police, wiretapping, bugging, and infiltrating civil rights organizations." (69) But he breaks new ground in showing how southern investigative agencies such as the SSC, Louisiana's Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities, the Georgia Commission on Education, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee, and the General Investigative Committee (Texas) helped to fuel the southern Red Scare and emboldened segregationists. Drawing heavily from these investigative commissions' papers, Woods paints a chilling picture of how southern "little HUACs" targeted, harassed, and kept extensive files on civil rights groups and alleged subversives. These agencies also frequently exchanged information about civil rights activists with FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover. Like House Unamerican Activities Committee [HUAC], southern "little FBIs" held investigative hearings into the alleged Communist infiltration of civil rights groups. These hearings did not lead to convictions of individuals, but they did force civil rights organizations to divert valuable resources and attention from campaigns against segregation to legal defence. Finally, southern "little HUACs" and "little FBIs" provided Hoover with an "institutional example" for local investigative campaigns at the very moment the FBI launched the infamous Counterintelligence Program [COIN-TELPRO].

The monograph's final chapters illustrate how red- and black-baiters found some success in putting the Civil Rights Movement on the defensive during the early 1960s. Citizens' Councils effectively built mass support against the Civil Rights Movement by linking it to Communism. In the end, though, segregationists failed in using the specter of Communism to prevent the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the conclusion, Woods asserts that by the early 1970s, southern nationalists' efforts to maintain segregation had failed. Congress abolished HUAC in 1975. And racial equality had been become accepted by the political mainstream. Curiously, Woods does not discuss how the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 marked the coming of age of the "silent majority." By the 1980s, most former segregationists and southern conservatives became Republicans, and they spearheaded efforts to roll back civil rights legislation, dismantle welfare programs, abolish affirmative action, and promote "law and order" by expanding the prison-industrial complex. Recently, some critics have charged that the Patriot Act has rekindled McCarthyism. In light of these developments, Woods's sanguine conclusions may be somewhat premature — and perhaps even naïve.

It is impossible to discuss Black Struggle, Red Scare without placing it within the larger context of the contentious historiography of American Communism. Woods's view of the American Communist Party closely resembles the neo-Cold War interpretations of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, who view the Party as a conspiratorial, Soviet-controlled organization. Sweeping statements charging that the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the National Negro Congress promoted the "undisguised civil rights wing of the Communist Party" suggest that these two Popular Front-era organizations were little more than Communist fronts. (32) These conclusions contrast starkly from those of Robin Kelley, Gerald Horne, Mark Solomon, and Mark Naison, who stress black agency and recognize that the Communist Party represented a complex, dynamic, interracial social movement with unique connections to the global political stage. Moreover, Woods's assertions that one former Party member became a government informant because he "became disenchanted with Communist plotting" and that the right-wing John Birch Society often "adopted some of Communism's own clandestine and ruthless tactics" beg for clarification. (116, 112)

While Woods provides fresh, probing insight into white southerners' reactions to the Cold War, in many respects his argument that southern segregationists were the most ardent Red-baiters reiterates conclusions drawn by scholars such as Gerald Horne and Manning Marable. Moreover, black Americans, especially those on the Left, wrote and spoke out frequently about the connections between white supremacy and anti-Communism during the Cold War. In addition, most of the discussion on black responses to the southern Red Scare focuses on Martin Luther King's and Stokely Charmichael's relationship to the Left. Woods's monolithic view of the Black Freedom Movement does not sufficiently differentiate between the politics of national civil rights leadership and the grassroots membership and local leadership. As historian Barbara Ransby has pointed out, local leaders and grassroots participants were often less fearful of charges of "Communism" than national civil rights leaders who had to answer to the media and to white lawmakers. Curiously, Ransby and several recent, groundbreaking works on the Black Freedom Movement by Charles Payne and Diane McWhorter are neither cited nor included in the bibliography. Nor does Woods use African American newspapers or draw heavily from oral histories of civil rights activists. These primary and secondary sources would have provided valuable insight into how everyday black people experienced and responded to the southern Red Scare.

The text lacks a gender analysis of southern nationalism. How did anxieties of interracial sex between black men and white women that Communism allegedly promoted fuel red- and black-baiters' anxieties about the Civil Rights Movement? To what degree did anti-Communism help deflect gender and class tensions within the white South? Catherine Fosl's recent biography on Anne Braden, which is not cited, highlights the intersections of racism, sexism, and anti-Communism in the South. Similarly, utilizing scholarship on "whiteness" would have provided useful insight into the making of white supremacist, southern nationalist subjectivities.

While those interested in how African Americans responded to the southern Red Scare will be left hanging, scholars interested in how anti-Communist, racist politics played out among white southerners will find Black Struggle, Red Scare useful.


Erik S. McDuffie University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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