Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968

by Jeff Woods

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: History, African American

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2003

Reviews

[Rebecca Dobrinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeff Woods provides his readers with a breath of fresh air in Black Struggle Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968. Rather than rehashing a number of points that have been drilled into the heads of history students over the years, Woods coherently brings together two intersecting paths and tells the story of how segregation and anti-Communism came together in the effort of the South’s Old Guard to maintain an antiquated way of life. He tells the story in a compelling way and brings his story from its beginnings after World War II to its culmination in the Civil Rights legislation and to its eventual demise with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the election of Richard Nixon.

The stories of Southern segregationists are well known, but the relationship between the anti-Communist movement and segregation are much less so. Woods is able to demonstrate how integrated they were. Segregationists were able to use the heightened paranoia of McCarthyism to advocate for the status quo. By accusing the leaders of local and national Civil Rights organizations of Communist ties, segregationists fed into the unease and patriotism of white Southerners. This, in turn, helped to incite a wide variety of legal, legislative, police, and ultimately violent reactions to those fighting for Civil Rights.

Interestingly, the segregationists fought decisions like Brown v Board of Education and Eisenhower’s Civil Rights legislation by proclaiming that the federal government was trying to infringe on the sovereignty of states’ rights while enforcing Jim Crow laws that infringed on the rights of a large population within their own states. By controlling what African-Americans could and could not do, Southern states were acting like a Communist, totalitarian government instead of the democratic defenders of freedom they proclaimed to be.

Woods shows his readers how, long after the McCarthy-ites and other red baiters gave up on the Communist hunt, segregationists carried the torch well beyond what is considered the end of the McCarthy era. This grasping at the out-of-style ideologies of the anti-Communist era is similar to the South continuing to grasp at the fictitious ideologies that the antebellum era was one of civility and the “good old days.”

This reader agrees with the excerpt written by Anthony Badger on the back cover of the book, “Woods has produced an extremely valuable addition to our understanding of segregationist strategy and ideology.” One can only imagine the powerhouse the South could have become had they invested this energy in something positive rather than in trying to keep the ghosts of their antebellum ancestors alive.