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163 conclusion In the poem “I Heard a Black Man Sing,” Earl Conrad pairs iconic images of white and black migrants to celebrate interracial unity: The peat bog soldier in the camp, The Joads out seeking food, The black man breaking from his chains: He sang in fighting mood!1 Conrad, a white Communist, originally wrote the poem in 1941 and dedicated it to Paul Robeson, the radical black singer famous for his anthem of cultural pluralism, “Ballad for Americans.” Republished in the Popular Front journal Negro Story in 1944, Conrad’s poem serves as a counterpoint to Himes’s withering depiction of racist Okies in If He Hollers Let Him Go. The pairing of Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family, the populist heroes of The Grapes of Wrath, with the fugitive slave “breaking from his chains” testifies to the continuing power of the migration story as a narrative vehicle for the Left’s interracial social movement, despite the outbreaks of racial violence and the CP’s backsliding on civil rights during the war. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, writers and artists on the interracial Left turned to the themes and forms of the migration narrative to advance a broadbased struggle for democracy. Stories of hoboes, migrant workers, and dispossessed families unmoored from traditional sources of stability allowed these writers and artists to imagine the transformation of capitalist economic, racial, and gender hierarchies. The durability of these Popular Front migration narratives into the postwar period challenges a lingering historiographical understanding of the black-Left alliance as one of white co-optation and black disillusionment that splintered with the onset of World War II. Yet while civil rights unionism still seemed possible in 1944, Cold War anticommunist repression eviscerated class-based social movements in the United States, narrowed the range of the African American freedom struggle, and altered the trajectories of black and white migration narratives. 164 conclusion As postwar political repression destroyed the possibility for a union-led civil rights movement, the migration narrative lost its salience as a vehicle for revolutionary social change. It took a vicious, protracted, state-sponsored crusade against communism to sever the alliance between African Americans , trade unions, and the communist Left. Radical activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Shirley Graham, Paul Robeson, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lorraine Hansberry continued to rail against capitalism, imperialism , and racial hierarchies in the Cold War era, but they relied less on the domestic trade union movement and the white Left, turning instead to Third World liberation movements for alliance and inspiration. As historian Robin Kelley argues, “A vision of global class revolution led by oppressed people of color was not an outgrowth of the civil rights movement’s failure but existed alongside, sometimes in tension with, the movement’s main ideas.”2 In other words, Kelley argues for international black radicalism as a countertradition to—not a successor of—the racial liberalism of the 1950s. In this global context, stories of internal migration no longer adequately conveyed the vision of an interracial class struggle. Moreover, narratives that imagined alliances between African American and southern white workers withered amidst anticommunist purges and escalating racial hostilities in the South. The fracturing of the interracial Left resists sharp periodization, in part because it continued to shape postwar social struggles, although it was increasingly embattled. At first, a surge of strikes immediately following the war attested to the new power of American labor and its potential role in reshaping the American economy.3 In both the South and the North, trade unions were on the vanguard of a vigorous civil rights movement in the immediate postwar period. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for example, the CIO’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Industries attacked Jim Crow by organizing voter registration drives, challenging voter qualification tests, and encouraging black citizens to participate in electoral politics.4 In 1946, when CIO president Philip Murray launched an effort to organize southern industrial workers called “Operation Dixie,” he referred to the campaign as a “civil rights crusade.”5 A civil rights movement based on equal access to employment and housing flourished in northern cities as well, built upon the foundations of the black Popular Front. In New York City, for example, African American leaders from four CIO unions organized the Negro Labor Victory Committee that placed over 15,000 black workers in defense jobs. Communist activists continued to shape urban politics after the war, joining union leaders, city [18.218.61.16] Project MUSE...

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