Justice / Retrieval

How McCarthyism and the Red Scare Hurt the Black Freedom Struggle

Union activists linked the struggle for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, to the broader struggle against capitalist domination.

by Paul Heideman via Jacobin on May 21, 2020

...necessary to navigate them successfully. It wasn’t always like this. In fact, the split between race and class can be traced to a specific moment in American history, when the causes of racial and class equality were sundered. That moment was the Red Scare in the middle of the twentieth century.

Before the Red Scare, there was a potent movement for black equality that included the Left, most centrally the Communist Party. Based in the new industrial unions, this movement fought for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, and linked that fight to the broader struggle against capitalist domination. The anticommunist campaign of the late 1940s, however, beginning under the Truman administration, crippled this movement, delaying the fall of Jim Crow by a decade or more and narrowing the movement’s focus to legal equality, leaving its larger ambitions unfulfilled.

Civil Rights Unionism

In the 1940s, the movement for black equality made its biggest strides since Reconstruction. In 1941, prodded by socialist A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee. It was the first substantive federal commitment to civil rights since the 1870s. In the courts, the NAACP’s legal team won rulings against the “white primary” system and against racially restrictive housing covenants. In just six years, the NAACP went from 50,000 members to 450,000. One result of this ferment was a narrowing of the black-white wage gap at a speed not approached since.

At the heart of all of this activity was the militancy of the black working class. Two processes had come together to enable this militancy. First, technological change in Southern agriculture had pushed black Americans out of the cotton fields and into the cities, creating a black proletariat on a scale never seen before. Second, the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) created a union movement that broke, however incompletely, with American labor’s historic embrace of white supremacy.

Black Americans streamed into the CIO unions, whether in Detroit in the United Autoworkers, Alabama in the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Chicago in the United Packinghouse Workers, or at sea in the National Maritime Union. While most CIO unions were to the left of the more conservative American Federation of Labor when it came to race, the leftmost were the unions in which Communist Party (CP) members played a leading role. Known as the “left-led unions,” these organizations were ferocious in their assault on racial inequality, whether on the factory floor or in the community more broadly.