by Mary Grabar
In a 1951 Ebony magazine article, the NAACP’s Walter White accused one-time friend Paul Robeson of abandoning blacks for “adulation . . . from the Soviet Union and from white leftists.”23 Robeson is still cast as a victim of anti-Communist witch hunts. But White’s charge is borne out by observations made by David Horowitz, who recalls that there was a “palpable reverence” in the air for Robeson at the Progressive rallies Horowitz attended in his youth: “As he entered the room, a hush stilled the audience, virtually all white, which rose as one and began to clap rhythmically, Soviet style. . . .”24 Interestingly, Howard Zinn’s FBI file indicates that an informant advised agents on July 14, 1948, that Zinn had filed a property damage claim on New York State arising from the Peekskill Riots,25 which began as protests of a planned Robeson concert. As the October 1, 1950, issue of Commentary put it, Peekskill residents could see that the Robeson concerts—which had been taking place yearly since 1946—“could no more be considered mere musical events than a Communist rally in Madison Square Garden.” In 1946, one of the Robeson “ushers” had stabbed a local resident and veteran. Sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, a Communist front group, the concerts “were primarily fund-raising events and Communist demonstrations,” and the residents of Peekskill knew it. Military veterans, especially, were angered by Robeson’s allegiance to the Soviet Union, which he had publicly announced in 1946 and then reiterated in 1949, stating, “I love this Soviet people more than any other nation . . . it [is] unthinkable that the Negro people of America or elsewhere in the world could be drawn into war with the Soviet Union.”
James Rorty, who wrote the Commentary article, described what the Communists were up to: “As for the Communist-controlled Civil Rights Congress which again sponsored Robeson, its avowed interest in the defense of free speech and assembly was . . . wholly hypocritical. Those familiar with the Communist program have long recognized that it requires the exploitation of the civil rights issue only with the objective of polarizing extremist passions and sowing the seeds of discord—the more violent the better—that will disrupt the democratic process. What the Communists wanted was another propaganda harvest. . . .”26
Howard Zinn would like the reader to believe that the Communist Party helped blacks and treated them with respect, so he does not tell us the story of the first black Communist, Lovett Fort-Whiteman. In 1924, Fort-Whiteman became the first African American to attend a Comintern training school in Moscow and the first national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, a Communist Party organization. In 1930, he moved to the Soviet Union. And in 1939, he died there—in the Gulag. In 1998, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson published The Soviet World of American Communism, which drew on Soviet secret police records. They learned from archives in the newly independent Kazakhstan that on July 1, 1937, Fort-Whiteman had been sentenced to five years of internal exile for “anti-Soviet agitation”—largely because he had criticized Langston Hughes’s short stories. William L. Patterson and James Ford, “high-ranking black CPUSA leaders,” were called to lead a meeting with “all the Negro comrades” to decide the fate of Fort-Whiteman after he criticized Hughes.27 His punishment was changed to five years’ hard labor on May 8, 1938, and he died on January 13, 1939, at the age of forty-four28 after being starved and overworked and then beaten when he could not make quota.29
Homer Smith, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 to work in the post office and then served as a correspondent for black publications, met Fort-Whiteman, who with Langston Hughes and a cast of about twenty, were to make the anti-American propaganda film Black and White (the project was abandoned when the Soviets sought diplomatic relations with the U.S.). Smith described Fort-Whiteman in his 1964 memoir, Black Man in Red Russia, as someone who had acted as the “mentor” of other black Americans living in Russia, thus continuing the work he had done in the U.S. On speaking tours, Fort-Whiteman “pleaded fervently for . . . support for the Scottsboro boys and Angelo Herndon” and “expounded loud and long on lynchings, Jim Crow and the oppression of his people in America, and condemned with fiery emotions the enslavement of black people in the African colonies of European imperialist nations.” But none of that saved him from death in the Gulag. And Smith himself only narrowly escaped Fort-Whiteman’s fate.30
Robert Robinson, a black machinist and engineer who also moved to the Soviet Union, found himself trapped there for forty-four years. In his 1988 book Black on Red: A Black Man’s Forty-Four Years inside the Soviet Union, Robinson recalled meeting Fort-Whiteman and noted his disappearance. During his time in the Soviet Union, he met Paul Robeson and asked for help in getting out. Robeson refused. Robeson also betrayed Jews. In the 1950s, after returning from trips to the Soviet Union, Robeson lied to those who asked about the Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer, claiming that he was being treated well. Soon Feffer and other Jews “vanished” into the Gulag.31
Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.33 The single substantive mention of Randolph is in relation to the protest that brought about the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), which Zinn claims “had no enforcement powers and changed little.”34
But, in fact, Randolph and NAACP leaders succeeded in opening up opportunities for blacks, including via the FEPC. They politically maneuvered FDR by appealing to his sympathetic wife. Their actions on behalf of black soldiers and black federal workers raised the standard of living for many blacks. The FEPC, reports William J. Collins in the American Economic Review, “was the direct outcome of A. Philip Randolph’s threat to lead 100,000 people in a march on Washington to protest the meager opportunities for black workers in defense-related employment, including the armed forces.” Collins’s research contradicts Zinn’s claims that “the nation . . . kept blacks in low-paying jobs.”35 The FEPC, which was “established to receive, investigate, and resolve complaints of discrimination by Executive Order 8802,” which outlawed discrimination in defense industries, did have some success and started the upward trajectory in terms of wage growth for blacks. Collins explains that “between 1940 and 1950 the proportion of black male workers classified as operatives (semi-skilled workers) in the Census rose from 12.6 to 21.4 percent (whites went from 19.0 to 20.2 percent), and the proportion of manufacturing industries rose from 16.2 to 23.9 percent (whites went from 25.5 to 27.7).” In a previous study, he had found that “black men who worked in war-related industries during the 1940’s and who were still working in such industries in 1950 earned a substantial premium (around 14 percent) over observationally similar black men who did not enter these industries.” True, improvement did not come instantaneously and uniformly. But Collins describes what the FEPC was able to do: “FEPC intervention altered the racial balance some firms struck in their hiring decisions by (1) providing advice on how to integrate the workplace, (2) giving managers a ready excuse for hiring blacks if white workers objected, (3) threatening to bring more powerful government agencies into the fray . . . (4) publicly embarrassing firms and unions that refused to hire blacks.” In summary, “The FEPC appears to have accelerated the pace of black economic advancement,” according to Collins, who also notes that this economic advancement continued through the twentieth century.36
The FEPC came as a consequence of the campaign for an integrated military and for African Americans’ “right to fight”—rather than just
serve in support positions in the military. In 1938, the ten-member bipartisan Pittsburgh Courier National Steering Committee had campaigned for Republican congressman Hamilton Fish’s House Bills 10164, 10165, and 10166, which would “abolish discrimination in the Army,” “provide for the creation of a Negro division,” and “appoint Negroes to West Point.”37 These efforts had only limited success at the time on account of opposition by FDR and the Southern Democrats. But Randolph was satisfied for the time being with Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, at a time when it looked like the U.S. would become involved in war. He did not want to interfere with the war efforts, so an end to segregation in the military would have to wait.38
But in 1947, Randolph and Grant Reynolds, commissioner of correction for New York State, founded the Committee Against Jim Crow in the Military Service and Training—which expanded early in 1948 into the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, as Jervis Anderson recounts in his 1972 biography of Randolph: “On March 22, 1948, after Randolph had made it clear that the civil disobedience movement would be satisfied with nothing less than an executive order against military segregation, President Truman invited a group of black spokesmen to the White House to discuss the subject. Among them were Randolph, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lester Granger, and Charles Houston, a special counsel for the NAACP.”
Randolph told the president that the “mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”
Nine days later, Randolph testified on the universal military training bill in Congress, telling the committee, “This time Negroes will not take jim crow lying down. The conscience of the world will be shaken as by nothing else when thousands and thousands of us second-class Americans choose imprisonment in preference to permanent military slavery. . . .” Randolph threatened to advise blacks to refuse to serve. And during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July 1948, when Hubert Humphrey “was waging his historic fight against the Dixiecrats to obtain a strong civil rights plank in the party’s platform, scores of blacks led by Randolph were picketing the convention hall.” According to Anderson, it was “the combined pressure of the Randolph campaign, the Humphrey civil rights floor fight, and the need to retain the black vote in the November election” that led President Truman to issue Executive Order 9981 ending racial discrimination in the military. When he received confirmation from Truman’s spokesman that segregation would be ended, “Randolph called off the civil disobedience campaign and wired congratulations” to Truman for his “high order of statesmanship and courage.”39 The reader of A People’s History will learn none of this.
Besides failing to celebrate individual heroes of the fight for civil rights, Howard Zinn was also not a big fan—either as an author or as an activist—of the black group that was most responsible for African Americans’ legal progress in the Civil Rights Movement: the NAACP. We have seen how in 1960 he was instrumental in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). That radical group soon pushed its way into the civil rights spotlight and elbowed aside the NAACP.40
Along with Ella Baker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who spearheaded the initiative, Zinn attended the initial SNCC conference in 1960 as one of the “middle-aged radicals”—adults who served as mentors to the college and high school students. Zinn describes the founding in his autobiography: “SNNC . . . had been formed . . . when veterans of the recent sit-ins got together in Raleigh, North Carolina. Inspiring and overseeing its beginning was the extraordinary Ella Baker, veteran of struggles in Harlem and elsewhere. . . .” Later, Zinn was asked to join SNCC’s executive committee as one of their two “ ‘adult advisers,’ along with [Baker].”41 He was “principal speaker” at the 1963 annual meeting in Atlanta and returned to speak again in 1964, when he reminded attendees that in spite of integration of schools in the South and of communities in the East and the “liberalizing” of hiring policies in the West, they should not “become oblivious of Negroes in Mississippi where Jim Crow and terror still rule supreme.”42 Zinn just loved to tell young people how bad things were. And as we have already seen, he had more sway in the organization than he let on.
SNCC, unlike the NAACP—which in the 1950s heeded Justice Department memos warning that Communists were targeting its youth divisions—was friendly to Communists and Communist sympathizers.43 In its first year, the John F. Kennedy administration had ended government programs to educate the public about Communism, and military leaders were dissuaded from speaking out against it.44
And Zinn did what he could to move young black activists in a more radical direction—closer to Communism. Zinn had made clear in a 1960 article in the Nation that it was his goal to transform Spelman College into a “school for protest.”45 In his 1964 book SNCC: The New Abolitionists, he described the traditional classroom experience as “pallid and unrewarding” because it is “divorced from the reality of social struggle.” He criticized “Negro colleges” for their “century-long traditions of conservatism and obsequiousness.” Only “militant students,” he stated, could become civil rights leaders.46 On the question of whether SNCC was Communist—suspicions arose because the group received support from Carl Braden’s Southern Conference Education Fund and the National Lawyers Guild—Zinn wrote that “SNCC workers are young, and they have grown up in a world where there is no longer any single meaning of ‘Communism’ or ‘Communist,’ where varieties of communism develop in different parts of the world. . . .’ ”47
Apparently, Zinn was responsible for the solo trip of one of his favorite students, Marian Wright Edelman, in 1959 as a nineteen-year-old to study and travel in Europe and summer at a youth camp in the Soviet Union. He had nominated her for the Merrill Scholarship and dissuaded her from traveling with a group from a women’s college.48
According to his FBI file, Zinn was “host for [a] soviet youth delegation in 1961,” had sponsored the Student Peace Union Group in 1962, and was reportedly trying to recruit students to attend the Soviet-sponsored Eighth World Youth Festival in Finland in 1962—exactly the kind of thing the NAACP had been steering youth leaders away from. And in his role as founder and head of the Non-Western Studies Program, funded by the Ford Foundation, Zinn had hosted Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University, and formerly of the Institute of Pacific Relations, as a speaker in 1961. Zinn’s FBI report referred to the Senate Judiciary Report #2050 of July 2, 1952, which called IPR “a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American . . . policies toward Communist objectives.” The youth festival was a project, in part, of the International Union of Students, which was described as a “communist organization” in HUAC’s “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications.”49 (Lattimore’s role in the disastrous Communist takeover of China has been noted in the previous chapter.)
SNCC members were happy to cooperate with the CPUSA, for example on behalf of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Letters from executive director Frank Wilkinson, a member of the CPUSA,50 and other members inviting SNCC to join their efforts began arriving soon after SNCC was launched.51 On May 22, 1964, Wilkinson lobbied John Lewis and James Forman of SNCC and Robert Moses of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which included SNCC, on behalf of two individuals who wanted to participate in the Mississippi Summer Project.52