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

In recent years, the historiographical treatment of the mechanics of both Southern segregation and domestic anti-Communism has developed apace. Some three-and-a-half decades after Numan V. Bartley's pioneering work on "massive resistance" (The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s) appeared, scholars are beginning to return to the subject of Southern segregation and to treat it with the nuance and subtlety that has long been the preserve of histories of the African-American side of the Freedom Struggle. Within the last decade, the traditional arguments of whether domestic anti-Communism in the United States was a "top-down" product of manipulative elites or a populist response to grassroots pressure have been augmented by some excellent state-by-state case studies, including those by M. J. Heale (McCarthy's Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965) and Philip Jenkins (The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960). The focus of Black Struggle, Red Scare is the intersection of these two stimulating topics of postwar U.S. history. Woods readily acknowledges that the scale of his task, and the rich texture of the available source material, make the subject too vast for any single volume. He aims instead to examine the phenomenon of southern anti-Communism only at its most intense, from 1948 to1968. In those years, he argues, the social and political turmoil generated by burgeoning civil rights activity in the region, and the white South's determination to resist racial change, gave what he terms the "southern red scare" sufficient momentum to sustain the South's peculiarly regional brand of McCarthyism. Segregation and anti-Communism continually reinforced each other during those decades, he argues, coalescing to form the backbone of an "extreme southern nationalism . . . a regional desire to protect the southern way of life.'"

Woods bases many of his detailed findings on the official documents of Southern red-baiting committees, the personal papers of Southern red-baiters, and contemporary newspaper reports and editorials. The book uncovers much that is new about the previously murky world of segregationist propaganda and the distribution networks that underpinned politicians and other prominent figures who accused civil rights activists of Communist affiliations. Woods demonstrates that such activity retarded the progress of the civil rights movement by convincing many Americans that the leading proponents of civil rights were, at the least, sympathetic to Communism and even, at worst, acting on orders from Moscow. Ultimately, however, Southern anti-Communists failed to persuade a "critical mass" of their fellow citizens that Communism had actually corrupted the main focus of the Freedom Struggle. Woods's conclusions are in line with the sensible findings of Richard Fried, who argues that anti-Communism hindered the civil rights movement by exacerbating splits within the movement's ranks.

Perhaps because of the need to impose intellectual boundaries on this richest of historical topics, Woods's study focuses most intently on the work of formal red-baiting agencies in the South and the intricate network of "local, state, and federal institutions [that] directed the southern red scare," most of which were crafted as mirror images of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As Sarah Hart Brown has shown, such committees sought to hound any individual in the South seeking to challenge the racial status quo and provided what might be termed the set pieces of segregationist anti-Communism. Although Woods's decision to focus on these institutions is understandable, it leads to a number of conceptual problems. Such a focus, combined with the belief that HUAC was the "principal contributor" to the Southern red scare, surely negates the ex tempore red-baiting that characterized so much segregationist rhetoric in the two decades covered by the book. Bartley may have argued 37 years ago that resistance was driven by neo-bourbon elites, but this view was long ago superseded by a...