In 1954, Abner Green, executive secretary of the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB), was sentenced by a New York State grand jury to serve six months in a federal prison.
His crime? Green refused to turn over financial records, including lists of contributors to both the ACPFB, an immigrant rights organization serving foreign-born people around the country, and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), an advocacy group for racial justice where he served on the board of directors. The grand jury also imposed an extra six-month sentence on Green because he declined to turn over records for the ACFPB’s bail fund.
The investigation of the ACPFB was facilitated by the Internal Security Act of 1950. Part of the anti-communist mobilization known as McCarthyism, the bill created a Subversive Activities Control Board, the organization that initially subpoenaed the organizational records from Green. Organizations like the ACPFB were investigated by the board and, if confirmed to be “Communist fronts,” organizations that weren’t officially Communist but were backed by the party, had to register with the federal government, limiting their political activities. Additionally, the law made it a felony to support what it described as “totalitarian dictatorship” and authorized the president to arrest and detain those suspected of espionage or subversion.
Deployed exclusively against leftist organizations, the Internal Security Act eroded civil liberties and threatened any advocacy groups that could be tarred as a Communist front. As a result, many longtime supporters of the ACPFB withdrew their annual contributions, citing fear of persecution.
Also called the McCarran Act after its chief sponsor, anti-communist senator Patrick McCarran, the bill authorized the president to detain those deemed a threat to national security in camps built specifically to hold dissidents. The text of the act invoked the dangers posed by a “Communist movement which . . . is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world.”
With its leader jailed and its funding stream reduced, the ACPFB struggled. It survived briefly only because of the brave work of organizers, many themselves foreign born. The CRC disbanded in 1956. Many in leadership in these groups did at some point affiliate with the Communist Party. But the notion that their organizations were mere “fronts” for Moscow is laughable: these were organizations focused on ending racial violence and what the ACPFB referred to as the “deportation terror” in the United States.