Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace

Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South

Yasuhiro Katagiri

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780807153154
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history -- the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South.
In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after -- while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded -- northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the "northern messiahs" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, "race-mixers, " and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists.
Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement -- and those who struggled for equality -- fought to overcome.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Merging Southern Parochialism with Americanism: Black Monday and White Fears in the Troubled South
• 1. Crying Aloud and Sparing Not: Myers G. Lowman, J. B. Matthews, and the Politics of Insecurity
• 2. “Communism and Integration are Inseparable”: Louisiana as the Harbinger of Segregationist Anti-Communist Inquisitions in the South
• 3. With Unwisdom, Injustice, and Immoderation: A Southern-Flavored McCarthyism in Georgia
• 4. “A Peaceful People Have Been Torn Asunder by the Communist Conspiracy”: The Little Rock Desegregation Crisis in Arkansas as a Turning Point in Massive Resistance
• 5. “Run ’Em Out, Boys, Run ’Em Out”: Webs of Suspicion, Suppression, and Suffocation in Tennessee and Florida
• 6. “ We Must Identify the Traitors In Our Midst”: Red Hearings, Red Herrings, and Red Machiavellianism in Mississippi
• 7. “This is a Part of the World Communist Conspiracy”: The White South’s Desperate Stand against the Civil and Voting Rights Acts
• Conclusion: “No Lie Can Live Forever”: From Massive Resistance to Massive Fallacy
• Abbreviations and Shortened References Used in Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index