Black and Red All Over

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the news in January 2022, you’ve undoubtedly heard about how the U.S. government is convinced that Russia is about to invade its smaller neighbor, Ukraine. As someone who is chronically online (thanks to being in graduate school and also due to our current Covid reality), I’ve seen my fair share of news stories about it.

All this talk of the United States and Russia potentially going head-to-head over Ukraine has me thinking about the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and how the competing ideologies of communism/socialism and capitalism were used as justifications for wars and proxy wars by the two superpowers in the latter half of the twentieth century. I think the history of Black people and capitalism is well known by the general public. And I don’t just mean BET and Black Enterprise—think back to when it was us who were literally the capital. But I think what might be lesser known is the history of Black people and communism. Even through the Cold War, many Black people in America were convinced that socialism was the most expedient way to achieve Black liberation. Even prominent figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X regularly expressed anti-capitalist views.

A real quote.

A real campaign ad, too.

But I’m not here to write a sweeping history of Black American anti-capitalism, socialism, and communism (all of which are related ideologies), because that would take too long and doesn’t quite fit the theme of this blog. What I am here to do is to talk briefly about what the HistoryMakers Digital Archive has to say on the subject of communism. One of the benefits of the Digital Archive is that it brings together people of wildly different beliefs and experiences and allows you to compare them side-by-side. That’s essentially how it went when I decided to conduct a simple search for “communism” within the archive.

I wasn’t disappointed. The results in the DA with the keyword “communism” (and related terms like “Marx,” “Lenin,” “Stalin,” and what have you) ran the gamut from a scathing indictment from Whoopi Goldberg of the perceived material conditions of citizens of communist East Germany to the actual Marxist-Leninist organizing efforts of Jamala Rogers with the Congress of Afrikan People and the Revolutionary Communist League. It’s very interesting to hear the thoughts about communism as an ideology from this diverse range of HistoryMakers, most of whom lived through the Cold War, and hear some of what they went through during that era. One of the most fascinating, to me, was the account of Roger Walden, an Army officer who was accused of being a communist during the Second Red Scare just because some people thought he was seeing Paul Robeson speak.

If you would like to see the clips I’ve compiled that I thought were especially interesting to this topic, you can see it here.

SBA Update

So, February is around the corner, and I’m still putting on the Digital Archive contest for Black History Month. I’ll be writing how that goes, of course, so stay tuned.

For now, if you are an undergraduate at Northeastern University and would like to participate, head to https://bit.ly/historymakerscontest .