Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South by Yasuhiro Katagiri (review)

One of the most promising and fruitful trends in the historiography of the civil rights movement has been the study of Massive Resistance. In recent years, historians have studied the impact of residential separation, political opposition and grandstanding, social organization and cultural expression by die-hard segregationists. With Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri, a professor at Kyushu Sangyo University in Japan, describes the embrace of Cold War rhetoric among opponents of civil rights. In particular, Katagiri focuses on the influence of two northern anti-Communist crusaders, Myers G. Lowman and J.B. Matthews, who provided crucial assistance to southern politicians and officials as they formed committees and held hearings to prosecute civil rights activists and organizations. Katagiri’s analysis provides a necessary context for understanding opposition to the civil rights movement in the Heart of Dixie.

The language of the Cold War, with its demonization of “subversive” elements and its insistence that substantive change to the social order was somehow un-American, proved eminently useful to southern segregationists. As Katagiri notes, anti-Communism was flexible enough that southern states applied it to localized civil rights protests while also universal enough that it allowed southerners to speak in terms of a more “nationalized” opposition to social change (xviii). Two “northern messiahs” helped southern leaders to shape their anti-Communist rhetoric, Myers G. Lowman and J.B. Matthews. Lowman a leader of the anti-Communist Methodist layman’s group called the Circuit Riders, began working closely with the Louisiana state government to hold hearings and investigations into supposed “subversive” groups and individuals connected to civil rights agitation. Joseph Brown (J.B.) Matthews was a former Socialist and supporter of civil rights who abruptly turned anti-Communist and professional informant. Matthews made a career of testifying on the connections between civil rights activists and organizations and the Communist Party, and soon became a favorite and colleague of Lowman. Finding success in Louisiana, the two northerners traveled throughout the South, assisting other state governments with their own anti-communist hunts.

In 1957, the crisis surrounding the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School led to a shift in the nature of Massive Resistance when, according to Katagiri, segregationists de-emphasized states’ rights constitutionalism (proven weak in the face of Eisenhower’s intervention) in favor of a “Cold War imperative” (121–23). Lowman and Matthews traveled to Arkansas, where they helped state politicians hold their own hearings on the extent of communist “subversion” into the Little Rock incident. In the same vein, they also worked with a Tennessee state committee seeking to declare the Highlander Folk School a Communist front and with a Florida committee targeting the NAACP after a bus boycott in the capital of Tallahassee. The NAACP, in particular, became a favorite target of southern state “little HUACs,” which used the organizational leadership and fund-raising capabilities of Lowman and the testimony and network of Matthews to have the organization painted “Red.” Lowman’s and Matthews’ efforts peaked in Mississippi where, in 1959, the two helped the state mastermind its own hearings on the extent of communist subversion in the state. Inspired by Mississippi’s committee and encouraged by popular resistance to civil rights, local groups fought to ban books deemed subversive, persecuted college faculty who spoke out for integration, and promoted a version of “patriotism” that adhered to the color line.

Thanks to the efforts of Lowman, Matthews, and their circle of professional anti-Communists, southern Massive Resistance found a useful and fairly effective weapon in the fight against civil rights. As civil protests escalated in Mississippi and Alabama in the early 1960s, Lowman, in particular, provided his expertise to state and local groups interested in painting sit-inners, marchers, and other activists as an advance front of the communist revolution. However, the...