“Race mixing is communism”

My friend E pointed me towards a photograph that has been widely shared on the Web — a black and white photograph dating from 1959, showing a group of people outside the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, protesting integration of the public schools. The protesters are holding signs that read “Race Mixing is Communism,” and “Stop the Race Mixing / March of the Anti-Christ.” Coincidentally, I’ve recently been looking through the Atlas of 20th Century History by Richard Overy (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), in which I happened to read the following sentence: “Many of those who hated communists hated Blacks as well” (p. 108). This reminded me that Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for presidency emphasized not only the fight against communism (the “Evil Empire” as his campaign called it), but also “state’s rights,” which in those days was a kind of political code word for opposing federal desegregation efforts.

While accepting the historical reality that anti-communism and segregationism were linked in the minds of at least some Americans, I remain unable to explain how the two are linked. Of course, liberal Web pundits offer plenty of explanation of how anti-communism and segregationism are linked, but such explanations are merely ad hominem attacks larded with such terms as “Retardlicans.” Notwithstanding such idiocy, somewhere there must be a considered and serious historical explanation of this link.

10 thoughts on ““Race mixing is communism”

  1. kim

    I don’t think it’s historically linked, I think it’s linked through the authoritarian world view. Much like “Pro-Life” and pro death penalty are linked even though the obvious logic would put them on opposite sides.
    The authoritarian worldview is hierarchical and fear-based, dividing the world into in groups and out groups. Both racism and anti-communism could be said to tap into the in-group-out-group paradigm and also hierarchies: blacks and communists are “not us” — that’s why so many Communist-haters couldn’t really define Communism other than the opposite of what “we” like. These whites like to think they are superior to blacks (hierarchy) and the same for any foreigners, especially Communists. The reaction, in a fear-based view, is fear, and thus hate. One other aspect to the anti-Communism, is that Communism (in theory if not in practice) is anti-hierarchical.
    I hope that’s clear.

  2. Jean

    Read this review of the fasinating biography of W.E.B. Dubois: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_enduring_du_bois

    In the review linked here, there is a mention of DuBois’ embracing of Communism, and his sense that Communism was the only way to stem the tide of American Capitalism which, in his view, trampled the lower classes in pursuit of profit. For DuBois, he saw those “lower classes” as composed largely by Black Americans, and thus, Capitalism was an evil perpetrated upon not simply a socioeconomic class, but a race itself.

    Once again, it might be clear that we can link socioeconomic class with race. Those who embrace Capitalism and abhor Communism, probably intuit the effect on groups of people of each particlar point of view.

  3. will shetterly

    Socialists and communists in the US were strongly against racism and segregation, and very active in the civil rights movement. There’s good reason for them to be linked in the minds of conservatives, even if you don’t have to be a socialist to oppose racism.

  4. Bill Baar

    Will’s right. The one postive of the American Communist Party was it did resolutely “mix races” at a time when blacks and whites did not routinely mix much. The Socialist Pary and the Labour movement had less progressives stands here than the CPUSA.

    Alan Wald reviewed some American Communist writers and wrote this of the Party,

    [i]…there will always be some scholars who simply cannot stomach the idea that a major artist could actually have been a real “Communist,” or that the cultural movement around the Party could have been as inspiring and nurturing in one situation as it was constricting and vulgar in another. There is also the temptation to invalidate a credible achievement of the Communist movement (such as its exemplary contribution to anti-racism) by pointing to a deep flaw (blindness to brutal dictatorships). Such conundrums can cause scholars to try to abridge or tiptoe around the whole matter. [/i]

    When people point to Obama’s Communists roots they are often singling out African Americans who were in the Party’s orbit exactly because it was one of the few places at the time were “races mixed”. That’s no bad thing of them to have been attracted to the Party for that reason.

    The failures is dancing around the link, and failing to explain silence on the long series of subsequent failures. The non-Communist left does tip toe around it all.

    Paul Robeson’s betrayel for friends in Moscow to Stalin being one of those classic moments. Tim Tzouliadis’s The Foresaken on Ammerican immigrants to the Soviet Union has some accounts of Robeson turning his back on friends under arrest in the USSR. It was a secret that must have ate away at him. He could tip toe no longer.

  5. Patrick Murfin

    Communism especially, but not exclusively, in the South was often considered an extension of the “Jewish Conspiracy” a.k.a. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Jewish lawyers defended civil rights workers and the “Jewish” ACLU often initiated anti-discrimination law suits. The Socialists, Communists and unionsits, who Will correctly noted were strongly supportive of Civil Rights were considered dominated by Jews. Confabulating two despised minorities into one grand conspiracy allowed segregationists to ennoble themselves, and hopefully to chip away at the passive support for civil rights tenuously offered by non-Southern whites.

  6. Bill Baar

    Yes Pat, but I’m not sure you can put the Socialist Party or the IWW or much of the rest of the left in the same league as the CPUSA when it comes to providing a place where African Americans mixed as easily as everyone else. Certainly in the Chicago experience there is no other Left Organizastion that held quite the place among African Americans as the CP did. You and I know them all well and there was not other tradition quite like it. I’d be hard pressed to name anyone else.

  7. Dan

    Wow, thanks all. Will @ 5 — I often disagree with Cornel West, but yeah, he’s always worth reading.

    (Note to self: posts on politics draw more comments, more quickly, than posts on most other subjects.)

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