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9 1 the Cold War and the long Civil Rights movement there’s a sort of unwritten rule that if you want to criticize the United States you do it at home. . . . We have to prove we’re patriotic. . . . Here is a man (Robeson) who is making some other country better than ours, and we’ve got to sit here and take the gaff, while he is important enough to traipse all over the country, to be lionized by all these white people, saying things for which he will not take any responsibility. —Bayard Rustin on Paul Robeson, early 1950s a decade before President Johnson plunged the nation into a large-scale war in Vietnam, famed african american entertainer Paul Robeson was under siege. His personal and financial fortunes had plummeted after the U.S. government revoked his passport in 1950 because of his outspoken leftist views and his admiration for the Soviet Union. in a climate in which the fear of communism bordered on hysteria, Robeson would eventually succumb to the emotional strain. although he was one of the most prominent victims of the Red scare, he was not alone. the government similarly harassed thousands of americans, black and white, who dared to speak out against the Cold War and the domestic campaign against communism .1 as a despised minority denied the perquisites of membership in the nation-state, african american activists and organizations were singled out; the latter included the national negro labor Council, Southern negro Youth Council, american labor Party, Civil Rights Congress, and Robeson’s Council on african affairs, which continued to link the causes of peace and civil rights.2 Despite unremitting pressure from the FBi, Robeson remained resolute. While Ho Chi minh and the Vietminh’s 10 Selma to Saigon ongoing war against French imperialism in faraway Vietnam was hardly a salient event for most americans in 1954, Robeson, a longtime opponent of colonialism, hailed Ho as “the modern-day toussaint l’ouverture leading his people to freedom,” and he chided african american leaders for their silence in the face of “twenty-three million brown-skinned people” in indochina struggling for their independence. Robeson queried whether “negro sharecroppers from mississippi should be sent down to shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?”3 Robeson’s musings presciently reflected the dilemma African Americans would confront in the following decade when the americanization of the Vietnam War coincided with the passage of landmark civil rights legislation that toppled Jim Crow. the suppression of african american activists and artists during the Red scare, including Robeson, W. e. B. Du Bois, langston Hughes, and journalists Charlotta Bass and William Worthy , as well as the deportation of radical trinidadian intellectuals C. l. R. James and Claudia Jones—all of whom criticized america’s Cold War policy—had a chilling effect on civil rights activists’ willingness to speak out against the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. their response to the Vietnam War was further complicated by the fact that many of these early dissenters to the Cold War had ties to the Communist Party.4 the Vietnam War was an offshoot of the Cold War, and for more than forty-five years, Americans lived under “the shadow of war.”5 this Cold War backdrop inevitably had a racial component and therefore profound ramifications on African Americans’ ongoing struggle for civil rights at home, validating historian mary Dudziak’s assertion that “civil rights reform was in part a product of the Cold War.”6 When african americans confronted the explosive issue of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, mcCarthyism was only a little more than a decade in the past. this proximity to the Red scare, combined with the Cold War ethos, which too often conflated dissent from american foreign policy with communism, left an imprint on many veterans of the struggle for racial justice, including Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young Jr., and even longtime pacifist Bayard Rustin. They had witnessed the vilification of an illustrious group of African American leftists , intellectuals, and activists like Robeson, who had linked the african american movement for freedom with the anticolonial movement in general and the Vietminh’s struggle against French colonialism in particular. now in the prime of their careers, with many of their cherished goals tantalizingly within their grasp, these wily veterans of the african american [3.22.70.9] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08...

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