Reframing Black Internationalism and Civil Rights during the Cold War

Year 2009, Issue: 29, 63 - 78, 01.04.2009

John J. Munro Ian Rocksborough-smith

Abstract

Consider the following clash of interpretations. In his recent biography of Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born vice president of the National Maritime Union who like many other trade unionists with Communist Party affiliations, was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO during the early cold war. Historian Gerald Horne argues that cold war anticommunism had a decidedly deleterious impact on the prospects for substantive Black freedom in the United States. Horne posits that “the trade union movement in the nation was deprived of its most class-conscious proletarians when the NMU was downsized. African Americans, likewise, were deprived of jobs that had sustained them since the era of slavery. For blacks, the gains brought by the civil rights movement were bitter-sweet indeed, as they gained the right to eat in restaurants just as their means to pay the bill deteriorated” Red Seas 288 .1 Historian Jonathan Rosenberg presents a rather contrasting depiction of cold war civil rights. For him, “the contention that, on the whole, America’s conflict with the Soviet Union had a baneful impact on the civil rights struggle is difficult to sustain. What race reform leaders had been seeking for some five decades—the abolition of legally sanctioned segregation in the military, education, employment, public accommodations, and voting—came to pass during the cold war” 232 .

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