In Battle for Peace During ‘Scoundrel Time’

Abstract

Using the praxis and persecution of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as a case study, this article analyzes the ways in which anticommunism became a tool of investigating, policing, discrediting, and ultimately curtailing what I call “Radical Black Peace Activism.” During the Cold War, the U.S. state apparatus treated this form of activism as an anti-American, foreign-inspired threat to national security attributable to the Communist “peace offensive.” Radical Black Peace Activists linked the end of global conflict, disarmament, and non-proliferation with antiracism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. They argued that progress and justice could only be realized through international cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In other words, they demanded a new world order that would displace the United States, and its relentless militarism, as the world’s police. The investigation, indictment, and defamation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which coincided with the intensification of the Korean War, is illustrative of how Radical Black Peace Activism was treated as a form of Soviet-backed subversion. Through anticommunism, the U.S. state apparatus deemed the use of anti-Black and antiradical repression imperative to its security, stability, and status as the global defender of freedom and democracy.

A false peace: Bringing racism and race into peace scholarship in the metropole.

“…They provide crucial articulations of the abundant connections between racial justice and peace. However, mainstream peace and conflict models have marginalized their insights (Black Alliance for Peace, 2022; Burden-Stelly, 2019).…”

“…Her work clarified how racism, sexism, and the exploitation of capitalism presented barriers to sustained peace, not simply because they disrupted peaceful group relations but also because they denied justice and equality as prerequisites for peace. Jones’ internationalist, intersectional, and anti-imperialist contributions to the peace movement, Marxism, and the fight against racial oppression were deemed such a threat to the government during the time of the 1950’s Cold War red scare, resulting in her dubious arrest for violating the Smith act (Burden-Stelly, 2019).…”

Overcoming Repression: Effective Strategies of Contemporary Black Social Movements in Canada and the United States

“…However, Black social movements in Canada and the United States that attempt to mobilize Black people and address racial inequality are repressed (Choudry, 2018). This is evident in the United States where prominent Black leaders of the Civil Rights movement, such as W.E.B Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. were heavily followed, surveilled and harassed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (Burden-Stelly, 2019;West, 2008). Similarly, in Canada, national security was structured around the national interest of those who held political and class power (Choudry, 2018).…”

“This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois

“… 1. Those in favor of prosecuting Du Bois included Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who publicly linked the PIC with the Soviet Union’s “peace offensive” amid the intensifying Cold War. Public opinion swung against him, and Du Bois was vilified as “un-American” (Lanham 2017; Burden-Stelly 2019; Getachew 2021). Even the NAACP, which Du Bois founded, refused to publicly support him beside a lukewarm statement of neutrality (Du Bois [1952] 2007, 62).…”

“…Those in favor of prosecuting Du Bois included Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who publicly linked the PIC with the Soviet Union's "peace offensive" amid the intensifying Cold War. Public opinion swung against him, and Du Bois was vilified as "un-American" (Lanham 2017;Burden-Stelly 2019;Getachew 2021).…”