May We Forever Stand

by Imani Perry

  Many of the participants became future national leaders in their respective countries, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. All three had important political and ideological connections to black Americans and West Indians prior to the Congress. Nkrumah had attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. Azikiwe had attended Howard University and was mentored by William Leo Hansberry (the uncle of playwright Lorraine Hansberry), who was a specialist in African history and a speaker at the 1927 Pan-African Congress. And Jomo Kenyatta had participated in a black intellectual community in London in the 1930s that included Ralph Bunche, Amy Ashwood Garvey (Marcus Garvey’s widow), Paul Robeson, George Padmore, and C. L. R. James. The congress of 1945 merely served to formalize the transnational network of black resistance. Its final declaration called for unity among the colonized and subjugated, and for collective and coordinated resistance. African American activists and politicians were deeply inspired by this, and the black press touted it. Among those who publicly expressed their common cause with African liberation were Adam Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, and, of course, DuBois. Importantly, however, this transnational black political unity lay in tension with the vision of racial liberalism being promoted by the federal government.

  As ever, in the 1940s DuBois learned from and was responsive to the events and developments of his time. Conflicts with the U.S. delegation to the United Nations (which included Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also a member of the NAACP board) and disillusionment with the evolving role of America as a postwar world power reinforced his growing radicalism and his refusal to be confined to a safe domestic agenda. He was not a liberal, he was a member of the Far Left.

  DuBois became a supporter of the leftist youth organization the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) at a time of rising hysteria about communism and the onset of the Cold War. SNYC was first established in 1937 at a gathering of over 500 delegates in Richmond, Virginia. Their organization was set against the backdrop of two national crises: (1) the Scottsboro case and (2) a white mob attack that had taken the lives of seventy African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. The mob violence began when a tubercular youth was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly shooting three white women despite the fact that it was established at trial that he was in his hospital bed at the time of the shooting. In 1935, many future SNYC students had attended the meeting that led to the National Negro Congress, and they responded by creating their own organization, which included participants from virtually all of the historically black colleges as well as high school students and young adults who were out of school.

  SNYC activism ranged from studying the inflated prices of commercial goods sold in black communities to tobacco workers’ fight for better wages and labor conditions. They organized local farmers, sharecroppers, and domestic worker unions and encouraged black workers to join the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also performed educational functions. They were teachers of reading and writing. They explained the democratic process to those who had been excluded from it. Like the Crisis and Opportunity magazine, they also held art and poetry prizes through their newsletter The Cavalcade. In local communities, SNYC organized arts programs and lectures for young people. Its members assisted in the development of libraries and clubs, and—as a precursor to the mid-1960s work of another student group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—they encouraged black southerners to register to vote. They did so with an innovative performance project, the Caravan Puppeteers, which staged puppet shows about voting rights. From 1937 to 1948, SNYC formed chapters in ten southern states, with a total membership of 11,000 at its peak.

  Although a radical organization, SNYC also worked “within the system.” It sought to enlist the support of Eleanor Roosevelt for several of its initiatives and participated in fact-finding work for the Fair Employment Practices Committee that Roosevelt created in response to the demands of the March on Washington Movement.

  In 1946, the ninth annual convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress took place in Columbia, South Carolina. Diane McWhorter described that year’s gathering:

  The celebrity lineup included Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell; Howard Fast, the white communist whose Reconstruction novel Freedom Road had become a youth congress bible; and again Paul Robeson, who led the audience in a round of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro national Anthem.” The guest of honor, W. E. B. DuBois, gave his speech in a chapel so crowded that loudspeakers were set up on the lawn. Its premise was memorable for its improbability, “The future of American Negroes is in the South,” and declared over and over that the revolution for black freedom worldwide would take root in that cradle of segregation. He urged the audience to stay there and fight.17

  The anthem was invoked in a way distinct from the commonplace of the early 1940s. This was not as a signal of black integration into the “American ethos” and patriotism. Here it was part of a reemergent black radical tradition, following in the footsteps of black socialists, communists, and nationalists of a generation prior. Although there was, as with the National Negro Congress, a political range in attendees, at heart the SNYC was a far left organization.

  A deep political rift was coming in black America, notwithstanding the success of the Pan-African Congress and the SNYC conferences to bring black people of various political ideologies and identities together. Events in the NAACP were a bellwether. In 1947 an informal poll of the staff in the NAACP national office showed that 70 percent of them supported Vice President Henry Wallace in his bid for the presidency. Executive Director Walter White warned everyone on staff to not campaign for Wallace. White was a strong supporter of Truman, even though it was clear Wallace had a much stronger position on civil rights and also showed greater support for working-class people. DuBois was one of the many staff supporters of Wallace. This put him at odds with Walter White yet again. The board was thereafter courted strongly by Harry Truman, who was an aggressive opponent of any left-wing or socialist organizations or policies. Truman’s suspicion of the Left included the SNYC, which was tracked by the FBI under his administration. Particular alarm was raised when the SNYC publicly supported Henry Wallace. In fact, the worry over black support for Wallace was national. He’d garnered public support from Paul Robeson and inspired the young (and not-yet-famous) playwright Lorraine Hansberry to campaign for him (in the process she also joined the staff of Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom). In addition to his support of civil rights, Wallace was very critical of the Marshall Plan, and he invited both communists and socialists to participate in his campaign, although he identified as a progressive.

  Wallace’s running mate, U.S. Representative Glen Taylor of Idaho, was invited to give the keynote address at the 1948 SNYC spring convention in Birmingham. Police Chief Bull Connor responded with predictable brutality, threatening to arrest any black person seen talking to a white one during the conference. Bomb threats were directed at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where the conference was supposed to be held (a harrowing anticipation of events to come), and as a result the pastor decided not to let the SNYC use the church. The conference opened instead at the smaller Alliance Gospel Tabernacle Church. Few people attended, the result of the red-baiting in the local press combined with the threat of a violent attack. Bull Connor stuck a makeshift wooden segregation sign in the yard of Alliance Gospel Tabernacle. When Glen Taylor stepped outside of the church, Connor placed him under arrest.

  Racist intimidation was also often political intimidation in the 1930s and 1940s. The widespread assertion that Wallace was a “red,” a charge repeated by not just segregationists but also the executive director of the NAACP, was a sign of the McCarthyism that was coming to sweep the nation. But more than that, it signaled the coercive power of postwar liberalism. Liberalism framed the outer limits of the kind of calls for justice black people were “supposed” to make. And this was
understood and adopted by more than a few influential black people. At times, this meant going further than encasing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in Americana; it meant rejecting the very idea of a black anthem. For example, in honor of Flag Day in 1948, a black newspaper in Atlanta, the Daily World, proclaimed, “We have no other anthem; for we are Americans, citizens of the great Republic of the United States,” as a means of showing their patriotism and deflecting the anticommunist discourse that attended every effort to pursue black social and political efforts and inclusion. Professing 100 percent loyalty, however, implicitly meant minimizing connections to Africa and the struggles of working people around the globe.18

  The Southern Negro Youth Congress would only continue for one more year. In 1948 it rapidly lost the support of many formerly eager participants, including HBCU presidents and members of the Urban League and the NAACP. Many of these people moved toward the mainstream of racial liberalism, or at least away from the Far Left. For the 1948 campaign, despite the political leanings of the majority of its staff, the NAACP officially supported Harry Truman. And as the Cold War sedimented, the shift to the center by these organizations, as well as by mainstream political institutions, had a devastating impact on black political activity. Soon any and all aggressive efforts to address racial inequality could be labeled “red.” Unions were pressured by the federal government to purge both communists and members who were simply antiracist. The NAACP’s support of Truman was a deal of sorts: the organization disengaged from anticolonialism and affiliation with labor organizers, Marxists, socialists, and other leftists, and in return it got a modest and ultimately superficial commitment to civil rights. Truman did indeed call for new civil rights legislation. He revitalized the FEPC and signed an executive order to desegregate the military. However, at the 1948 Democratic Party convention Truman was silent on civil rights, despite his knowledge that black voters would be a decisive force in the presidential election that year. Truman’s support only went so far. He didn’t want to rock the boat with southern white Democrats, whom he considered an essential constituency.

  Hubert Humphrey, however, then the mayor of Minneapolis and a Senate candidate, was a much stronger supporter of racial equality. Humphrey delivered a speech at the Democratic convention that called for racial equality and challenged the thinly veiled bigotry behind the slogan “states’ rights.” Incensed, the Mississippi delegation marched out of the auditorium and immediately created the Dixiecrat Party. In short, Dixiecrats were Democrats who passionately believed in maintaining legal segregation and white supremacy. In the end, Truman couldn’t hold his party together, even though he maintained the NAACP’s fidelity to it with minor promises.

  Although it took time for the arrangement to take root in the many local chapters of the NAACP, this alliance between it and the Democratic Party was a key force in shifting the center of gravity for black politics for the next twenty years. In the 1940s a growing number of black political figures, including some NAACP members, were primarily aligned with bastions of power, not unlike Booker T. Washington once was. They could sustain support by tapping into some of the organic patriotism born in black folks generally in light of World War II, as well as some glimmers of hope that black people felt with the rise of racial liberalism. The fight against fascism was not, for black Americans, a mere abstraction but was hard fought abroad and now to be fought at home. The Double V campaign they embraced during the war was carried into the next phase of black politics. But ultimately notwithstanding these organizations negotiations with the powers that be, they couldn’t deliver on the goal of strong federal government support for black Americans.

  And while the shift in mainstream black politics, led by the NAACP and the Urban League, was toward an exclusively domestic civil rights framework, this did not destroy the black radical imagination and black socialism, nor did it eradicate all black organizations that pursued an international black freedom movement, but it did complicate and diminish their work and send them into the shadows.

  DuBois delivered a talk titled “Behold the Land” at the closing session of the final conference of the SNYC in 1946. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s appeal to the Exodusters,19 as well as his own lectures from years past, DuBois urged the young people once again not to flee southern racism by going north, but to stay and fight. In the speech, he identifies the South as part of what we now term “the global South”:

  Here in this South is the gateway to the colored millions of the West Indies, Central and South America. Here is the straight path to Africa, the Indies, China and the South Seas. Here is the path to the greater, freer, truer world. It would be a shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and the gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulphur, the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right to happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.

  Such internationalist politics would remain a gentle undercurrent in black political life, but its most public proponents would suffer mightily.

  That year, in an interview conducted in Paris, Paul Robeson was quoted as likening U.S. policies toward Africa to those of Hitler and Goebbels toward Jewish people. In the United States, this statement was met with widespread public outrage. And in August 1950 the U.S. government revoked Robeson’s passport for eight years. Protesters who supported Robeson circulated flyers in response that read “Lift Every Voice for Paul Robeson.”

  In 1950 DuBois ran for U.S. Senate in New York on the Progressive American Labor Party ticket and received an impressive 206,000 votes. Soon thereafter, he was targeted for investigation by the FBI. In February 1951, DuBois was indicted for “serving as an agent of a foreign principal” because of his antiwar work with the Peace Information Center in New York. He was eighty-two years old. The National Committee to Defend Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, established in response, urged supporters to “‘Lift Every Voice’ in a mighty chorus of protest!” In November, DuBois was released after a federal judge, finding no evidence that he was an agent of the Communist Party, dismissed the charges against him. However the State Department illegally withheld his passport for seven more years. As he fought against this punishment, DuBois received no support from the NAACP, which he had worked to build for so many years, or from his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, and only minimal support from black newspapers. Many didn’t mention him at all. His books were removed from public libraries in the ultimate sign that had become a persona non grata in his own country.

  The use of “Lift Every Voice” by activists who supported both Robeson and DuBois echoed its earlier use by Claudia Jones, the Trinidadian Communist Party leader who published a popular pamphlet called Lift Every Voice for Victory in 1942. Her pamphlet used the story of Joe Louis to mobilize antifascist sentiment among African Americans and encouraged them to advocate for the United States to enter World War II as a commitment to rejecting all forms of fascism and racism.

  Other small pockets of leftists continued to reference “Lift Every Voice and Sing” after the Robeson and DuBois defense campaigns. The group People’s Songs was founded in New York in 1945 by three white leftists: the folklorist Alan Lomax, folk singer Pete Seeger, and Lee Hays. The trio believed music could serve as a means of pushing progressive social change. They had published a quarterly newsletter beginning 1946, which included some folk music, but they were ultimately bankrupted after putting all their resources behind Henry Wallace’s campaign. When they returned to publishing in 1953, they titled their collection of folk music Lift Every Voice: The Second People’s Songbook. This was likely both in honor of Paul Robeson and a reflection of
the ongoing identification of some segments of the white Left with the cause of black freedom. This songbook would provide the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1960s, a hallmark of 1960s counterculture. It also featured a good deal of Robeson’s songs.

  Something particular was being invoked in the associations made between the Negro National Anthem and DuBois and Robeson. It was as though leftists were imploring masses to remember the many-decades-long commitment these activist artist intellectuals had shown for black people. It was an appeal for public support when Robeson and DuBois were at their most vulnerable. The invocation of the anthem was more than a clever effort to capitalize upon its gravitas and the sentimental associations it would elicit. It was also a reminder about who had fought for black Americans, and an assertion that those who had fought for them must be fought for in kind.

  But a younger man would figure more prominently than these older leaders as a symbol of racial uplift and the politics of racial liberalism. Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in Major League Baseball, was handily deployed as a symbol for civil rights and a cold warrior. The pages of a black historian’s memoir of his schoolboy years in New Jersey capture the pride Robinson brought to black Americans.