Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anti-Communism on the Jim Crow South by Yasuhiro Katagiri (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2014 95 recent trend in scholarship, a trend he describes as “a willingness to see and explore southern worlds that exceed simple binaries of race, religion , gender, geography, and class” (7). Readers will find no simple binaries in this collection, and they will find overwhelmingly plausible challenges to some of the South’s most pervasive master narratives. Rebekah Dement Farmer University of Louisville Yasuhiro Katagiri. Black Freedom,White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anti-Communism on the Jim Crow South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 424 pp. ISBN: 9780807153130 (cloth), $47.50. Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace Civil Rights and Anti-Communism on the Jim Crow South Yasuhiro Katagiri In recent years, historians have examined the complex relationship between the Cold War and the American civil rights movement in greater detail. This literature focuses in part on how the United States government coped with the hypocrisy of espousing freedom and democracy abroad while dealing with embarrassing civil rights issues at home, particularly in the South. In some instances, such embarrassment prompted governmentofficialstosupportcivilrightsprogressforthe sake of Cold War advancement. Conversely, antiCommunist politicians often attempted to capitalize on the Cold War political climate by linking civil rights advocacy to Communism. Yasuhiro Katagiri’s Black Freedom,White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South builds on the narrative of southern politicians’ ruthless campaign to link civil rights and Communism by focusing on the role of prominent northern collaborators who assisted southern red-baiting efforts. Though McCarthyism fell out of favor nationally by the mid-1950s, it continued to thrive in the South, where civil rights activists targeted longstanding Jim Crow laws. Without the national anti-Communist platform so prevalent earlier in the decade, southern states constructed “little HUACs”tocombatburgeoningcivilrightsactivity. MuchofKatagiri’snarrativedetailiswell-knownto those familiar with the field; his work distinguishes itself in the emphasis on contributions from J. B. Matthews and Myers Lowman, ardent anti-Communist power brokers who served as “northern messiahs in the white South’s segregationist enterprises ” by orchestrating comprehensive red-baiting BOOK REVIEWS 96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY campaigns (92). Lowman was a Cincinnati-based activist and executive secretary of an anti-Communist group known as the Circuit Riders. Matthews, a reformed leftist, built vast anti-Communist networks from his Manhattan penthouse headquarters and famously once implied that “ten-year-old actress ShirleyTemple had been duped into unwittingly working for the Communist interests” (42). Together, they worked with southern state governments to orchestrate vicious McCarthy-style investigations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Katagiri’s work, beautifully written and expertly researched, divides some chapters by state, outlining campaigns in Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, and Mississippi. While state officials did not redbait monolithically across the South, the common thread was a relentless effort to discredit civil rights organizations in the interest of preserving segregation, usually through state-run anti-Communist groups. Such campaigns frequently involved Lowman and Matthews; the latter used his “encyclopedic knowledge of the American Left” when testifying as an expert before multiple statewide anti-Communist committees (164). Louisiana politicians set the tone with anti-NAACP measures and an investigation into Louisiana State University employees, including the former director of the press that published Katagiri’s book. Arkansas officials turned to “strident cries of Communist conspiracy” after appeals to states rights’ rhetoric fell flat in the famed Little Rock desegregation crisis (125). Mississippi, described by the author as “the white South’s most promising citadel of racial segregation and discrimination,” used state-approved organizations to smear progressives and censor textbooks that favored integration (185). Even Georgia, a state with a relatively moderate reputation on civil rights, had high-ranking state officials publishing anti-Communist tracts and supporting the maintenance of traditional southern race relations with widespread political support. In profiling each state, Katagiri blends established historical scholarship with primary sources, including the personal papers of Lowman, Matthews, and other noteworthy anti-Communists to demonstrate the willingness of southern politicians to tap into the patriotic rhetoric of the Cold War era. The materials illuminate the cost exacted from relentless, sustained witchhunts in the South. For example, southern anti-Communists were so intent on depicting...