Cold War Progressives: Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom

4. "Battleships, Atom Bombs, and Lynch Ropes"

Chapter 4 “Battleships, Atom Bombs, and Lynch Ropes” What do we want? That our children may dwell in peace. Peace without battleships, atom bombs, and lynch ropes. —Shirley Graham, 1948 The founding of the Progressive Party in 1948 was a significant milestone in the lives of Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Graham (Du Bois), and Charlotta Bass, helping to mark their evolution from social activists to public intellectuals . Their success in uniting race and gender emancipation ideologies and linking them to world peace with the support of mixed-sex, racially integrated organizations complicates critiques that nationalist movements have historically discouraged women’s attempts to address feminist concerns. Moreover, the work of these women in the Progressive Party and in organizations like the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice —which shared agendas and membership—impressively demonstrates a comprehensive strategy to operate within both political and social movements in a comprehensive attack against the dehumanizing effects of white supremacy and for the promise of global peace. In the early 1950s, Progressive Party cofounder Eslanda Goode Robeson emerged from the formidable shadow of her talented husband, Paul, to take a place at the center of postwar leftist social and political movements. Robeson ’s role as a prominent figure in the party, her cofounding of such notable civil rights organizations as the Council on African Affairs and the short-lived Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and her reputation as a well-reviewed author did not go unnoticed. In the summer of 1953, she landed on the radar of “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy, hastening an appearance before his permanent Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. Convinced that previous Democratic administrations had, in the words of one newspaper report, “loaded American overseas [military] libraries with books by Communist authors,” the commit- 87 tee was intent on identifying Communist Party members and ridding libraries of their texts.1 Despite Robeson’s increasing importance in debates surrounding the relationship between U.S. foreign and racial policy, it appears McCarthy expected a submissive witness. He was quickly disappointed. The books that concerned the senator and his committee included African Journey (1945), a travelogue describing Robeson’s anthropological studies in the mid-1930s, and the biography Paul Robeson, Negro (1930), both of which complimented Soviet policy and criticized U.S. race relations.2 According to reports in the African American press, Robeson told the committee that despite her status as a “second-class citizen” due to her race, she remained a loyal American who believed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. She then refused to answer any questions concerning her own or her husband’s possible membership in the CPUSA. Asked to explain her husband’s relationship with Soviet Communists, she answered, “Why don’t you ask him?” When the committee inquired as to whether she was ever part of a Communist cell, she claimed to not know about such things. And when an FBI informer testified that Eslanda had addressed a Detroit rally on the topic of “McCarthyism,” but was unable to answer whether she had spoken for or against it, she replied, “I’ll give you two guesses.”3 Perhaps the most significant of Robeson’s strategies that day was her asserting not only her First and Fifth Amendment rights, positions taken by others testifying in anticommunist hearings, but also the Fifteenth Amendment protecting African Americans’ right to vote. She pointed out that McCarthy’s committee was entirely white because blacks in the South had been denied their voting rights. In doing so, Robeson forced race to the center of the debate on U.S. anticommunism in both its domestic and its international manifestations. Prominent enough to earn an appearance before McCarthy’s committee, Eslanda Goode Robeson was only one of several influential black leftist women who in the postwar years shaped the discourse of decolonization by linking it with the issue of world peace. Women like Shirley Graham (who would marry W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951) and Charlotta Bass joined her as Progressive Party founders who were instrumental in placing efforts to end Jim Crow in the American South within a larger anticolonial liberation movement for peace and freedom.4 Their evolving understanding of the multiplicity of oppression would shape their construction of a transnational anticolonial feminism that joined the imagery of world annihilation by atomic warfare with the racial violence 88 of Jim Crow as they connected the...