Imperial Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement in the Early Cold War

Fig. 1.

Jack O’Dell appearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, 1956.

Jack O’Dell

It took just three questions to establish that this meeting of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) was not to have an easy time. Having agreed to tell the truth and having given his name, former National Maritime Union (NMU) organizer and suspected Communist Jack O’Dell (born 1923) declined to state his address, instead accusing the SISS of having already colluded with the press to publish photographs of his previous home, marked with an arrow, ‘as if it is an invitation for some one to destroy the house or something’. Thus began his combative exchange with the chamber, chaired by Mississippi Senator James Eastland, on 12 April 1956.¹ Members of the New Orleans Police Department, along with a United States Marshal, got lucky when they raided O’Dell’s home weeks before the SISS hearings commenced in Washington. Acting on the subcommittee’s behalf, the police claimed possession of 175 different publications, from works by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Du Bois, and US Communist historian Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003) to copies of left-wing journals like Political Affairs, Freedom, and the National Guardian, as well as union leaflets and voter registration applications.² For Senator Eastland, and the segregationist and anticommunist forces he represented, it was an incriminating list. Even more serious, among the confiscated materials was a document titled ‘Proposals on Southern Party Organizing – 55–56’, which directed members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) to make contacts, form study groups, organize discussion clubs to plan goals for the 1956 elections, and distribute literature advocating desegregation and the Communist Party platform.³ Getting nowhere with questions about O’Dell’s place of employment, social security cards found in his room, whether he knew Paul Robeson, or whether he was a CP operative, SISS chief counsel Robert Morris perhaps felt that the witness would become daunted when faced with this list of the Party’s own organizing proposals.

He did not. Citing protections against illegal search and seizure, O’Dell’s response to the document was to submit that ‘This committee still hasn’t cleared up for me on what grounds it has violated the fourth amendment of the Constitution and invaded people’s homes and taken things out of their house, library, and so forth’. He also linked Eastland with the White Citizens’ Councils and referred to him as the ‘junior partner’ of notoriously racist senator Theodore Bilbo, and asked Morris if he was ‘some kind of dictator’.⁴ Two years later, this time appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whose central evidentiary exhibit was again this same CP proposals document, O’Dell was asked whether his activities in the cause of civil rights were anything more than a front for the Communist conspiracy. The reply: ‘The Jim Crow system in the United States is not a front; it is a very real thing, which every Negro in the United States has experienced. It is not a front. If you think it is a front, you have a great deal to learn about your own country’.⁵ O’Dell’s confrontations with the apparatuses of anticommunism clearly indicate that the second red scare was at times fiercely resisted. They also shed light on two important, often quite separate, historiographical debates.

Perhaps most obviously, O’Dell’s appearance before these committees speaks directly to a longstanding disagreement about whether the cold war hindered or helped the African American freedom movement. From one perspective, the superpower contest provided an opening in which pressure from the Soviets pushed Washington towards reform and thus had a salutary effect on movements for racial equality.⁶ From another, cold-war anticommunism abrogated the internationalist and economic components of postwar challenges to racial capitalism, and thus limited what the movement could accomplish.⁷ O’Dell’s intellectual production has emphatically advocated the latter interpretation, while his overlapping activist work has demonstrated the persistence...