1944–1949
THE BLACK LEFT
Russell Rickford
Though African Americans joined in the jubilant celebrations of peace when the Second World War came to an end in 1945, many among them remained skeptical about the U.S. war effort, seeing it as nothing more than a white man’s fight.
The more radical thrust of African American demands—which included meaningful global peace, decolonization, and thoroughgoing human rights in their own country—sought not merely greater inclusion of “minorities” in the capitalist apparatus but a basic reorganization of political and economic arrangements. It was the Black left that embodied this expansive agenda. From activist-intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1946 An Appeal to the World (a report on U.S. racial oppression submitted to the fledgling United Nations), to socialist crusader Claudia Jones’s 1949 essay, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” the Black American manifestos of the day imagined liberation as the wholesale redistribution of power and wealth.
But society was moving in a different direction. The early postwar years produced great waves of political and social reaction, delivering a stunning rebuke to just conceptions of peacetime reconversion. The intensification of national hostilities with the Soviet Union reinforced efforts to crush bold prescriptions for reform within the United States. Black activists of all political inclinations were among the targets of the retrograde forces that combined to stymie progressive change. The organs of hyperpatriotism—from the congressional body known as the House Un-American Activities Committee to local segregationist, antilabor, and anti-Communist groups—harbored special enmity for leftists, whom they attempted to discredit by labeling them “subversives.”
It was in Peekskill, New York, however, that the savagery of racist reaction surfaced most dramatically in 1949. The occasion was a Paul Robeson concert. A star of stage and screen, the fifty-one-year-old Robeson was one of the world’s foremost entertainers. He was also a stalwart activist who fought tirelessly for the causes of decolonization, labor, and human rights. Robeson was an antifascist and an internationalist who lent his prodigious talents to trade union struggles across the globe. He had battled lynching and segregation while promoting Black militancy and cultural pride. He was an ally of the Communist Party; an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union (which he cherished for its anticolonial and antiracist policies); and an opponent of the Cold War who called for peaceful coexistence of the superpowers.
In short, Robeson was everything the far right despised. When he was named headliner of a civil rights benefit concert set to take place in Peekskill in late August 1949, some of his most committed foes resolved to block the performance.
Earlier that spring, news outlets had quoted Robeson (somewhat inaccurately) as proclaiming, at the Paris Peace Conference, that African Americans would refuse to participate in a war against the Soviet Union. The gist of the statement Robeson had actually made was that Black America’s true fight lay at home, in the land of Jim Crow.
This overwhelmingly defined the African American worldview after the smoke cleared from World War II. Black people had nurtured their own visions of the war, recasting a struggle against fascism as a crusade against white supremacy. Now they were determined to translate that ideal into a quest for full democracy at home.
On the one hand, that meant preserving the gains—including increased access to industrial jobs and unions—that mass Black mobilization and the exigencies of wartime production had enabled. On the other hand, African Americans believed that the cataclysm of global war heralded a new racial order that they could help construct. Having helped defeat Adolf Hitler and his ideology of racial hierarchy, Black people increasingly resented Jim Crow and other domestic regimes of second-class citizenship. Indignation became migration as thousands (and eventually millions) of Black Southerners journeyed to northern, western, and eastern cities, expanding an African American exodus that had accelerated during the war, laying the groundwork for the burgeoning and restive Black communities of the postwar years.
War had weakened the colonial empires of Europe; everywhere, it seemed, subject peoples were pressing for self-rule. Black Americans watched this upsurge with a sense of expectation, seeing India’s 1947 independence and the nascent freedom campaigns of other “colored” populations as closely aligned with their own efforts to restructure U.S. society.
There were signs that some African American aspirations might be realized. In 1944 and 1948, respectively, the Supreme Court struck down the whites-only primary election system and ruled that racially restrictive housing covenants could not be enforced. By 1948, President Truman had been pressured into desegregating the military and the federal bureaucracy. He had already impaneled a Committee on Civil Rights whose 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, offered a stark assessment of structural racism nationwide. In 1947 as well, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, and the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights outfit, organized the Journey of Reconciliation, a campaign to test compliance with a new law banning segregation on interstate buses.
But any departure from the tenets of militarism and Negro acquiescence enraged ultranationalists and bigots. In 1946 a South Carolina policeman beat veteran Isaac Woodard so badly it ruptured his eyes and left him blind. In 1947 Georgia sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram was sentenced to death, along with her two sons, after all three family members repelled the vicious assault of a white man. And in the same year, the Trenton Six were wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in New Jersey.
And then there was Robeson. Amid the outcry about his alleged Paris declaration, several of his concerts were canceled. In the Westchester County town of Peekskill, as the date of his performance approached, some residents felt justified in engineering a campaign of aggression against the singer. The American Legion and the Chamber of Commerce denounced the upcoming recital as “un-American” and called for it to be vigorously contested. “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” an area newspaper asserted.
These provocations had the desired effect. When the day of the concert arrived, such a menacing swarm of anti-Robeson demonstrators appeared at the outdoor performance site that the event was called off. That evening roving bands of self-styled patriots attacked concertgoers trapped on the show ground. A cross was burned. Anti-Black and anti-Semitic epithets were hurled. “Lynch Robeson!” the mob chanted. As Robeson supporters attempted to exit the grounds, they were brutally stoned or beaten, and many of their vehicles were overturned. Police stood by amid the mayhem, sneering at victims or hoisting their billy clubs and joining in the ambush.
Robeson was defiant. Buoyed by a massive rally in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, where well-wishers marched in his defense, the singer vowed to return to the Peekskill area. The concert was rescheduled for the following weekend. This time Robeson was able to perform, his rich baritone echoing in the hills. To ensure his safety and that of the concertgoers, a large contingent of Black and white trade unionists formed a perimeter around the grounds. There they stood, shoulder to shoulder, throughout the concert. But when it ended and attendees began to leave, throngs of right-wing protesters, including supporters of veterans groups, again unleashed a torrent of violence. Assailants bludgeoned audience members or fanned out along a roadside to shower departing cars with rocks, shattering windshields and bloodying the asphalt.