The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955

4. Cold War Consequences: The Council on African Affairs in Decline, 1950–1955

4 Cold War Consequences The Council on African Affairs in Decline, 1950–1955 During World War II, Roosevelt’s historic speech had not outlined any prerequisites to enjoy the Four Freedoms he described. The Freedom Train exhibit illustrated the increasing contestation of the definition of freedom in the postwar years. By 1950, with the Cold War becoming more entrenched, the idea of freedom was becoming linked with the notion of national loyalty. In the late 1940s, President Truman instituted a loyalty program for federal employees, and the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress in 1947,required union leaders to swear they owed no allegiance to the Communist Party. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy dramatically called into question the loyalty of State Department employees when he publicly claimed to possess a list of spies working in that strategic government agency.That same year,the McCarran Internal Security Bill mandated that groups considered subversive must register with the government and that their members could have passports withdrawn. As essayist Henry Steele Commager insightfully pointed out at that time, a “new loyalty” was being “etched more sharply in public policy.”1 Rather than protecting one’s access to basic freedoms, this new loyalty was constricting. It directed a citizen to prove himself as loyal in order to enjoy the benefits of free society. Conformity, above all, was the basis of the new loyalty and it, in Commager’s words, denied“freedom of thought and conscience.”2 Citizens were expected to embrace American society as it was without interrogating its shortcomings. Groups or individuals who did challenge aspects of American society, like the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sometimes became Cold War 146 Cold War Consequences · 147 casualties. The influential national security paper from 1950 known as NSC-68, which positioned the United States and the Soviet Union as diametrical foes and helped bring about increased military spending, defined a free society as having several clear attributes. The paper indicated that a free society welcomed diversity and derived strength from “its hospitality even to antipathetic ideas.”3 Ironically, the U.S. government was restricting oppositional views even while arguing that the“free trade in ideas” was fundamental to a free society.4 A consequence of the early Cold War was, thus, an atmosphere that circumscribed freedom of speech and freedom of political association. Critiquing U.S. policy, as the Council on African Affairs did, was not embraced in this political climate.As a result, the council was pushed into a defensive position in the early 1950s in which the organization was forced to contend for its right to function. Yet, another consequence of the Cold War was resourcefulness in responding to the political environment. The formation of Freedom newspaper illustrated a tenacious spirit among activists on the progressive left. Even though the paper lasted but a few years, it showed how organizers and writers persisted in creating outlets from which to advocate for both southern civil rights and colonial freedom for Africa. Freedom was part of a near-continuous vision that linked the values and goals of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Council on African Affairs with an emerging generation of activists who established Freedomways journal just a few years after Freedom and the council folded in 1955. A lot of Cold War rhetoric was tinged with an increasingly militaristic tone in 1950. Early that year, in a speech that was later proven to be largely fabricated, Senator McCarthy alleged that the Communist Party had penetrated the Department of State.McCarthy’s hawkish anticommunist tone was unambiguous and foreshadowed future armed conflict. Declaring that the“rumblings of an invigorated god of war”were audible,McCarthy evaluated the current political winds by stressing that “this is not a period of peace” but rather time for“the show-down” between“communistic atheism and Christianity.”5 That summer, the formation of Cold War alliances instigated U.S. intervention in a“hot” war on the divided Korean peninsula. The council, and other groups, which had been calling for peace, had to now face the tangible evidence that their pleas had gone unheard. Undaunted, the Council on African Affairs quickly denounced the 148 · The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World Korean conflict and circulated an antiwar petition that was signed by 150 African Americans.6 The September issue of New Africa also published statements against the war from leaders and activists around Africa. The petition was...