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'Brown' and red: Defending Jim Crow in Cold War America
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'Brown' and red: Defending Jim Crow in Cold War America
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Journal Article
'Brown' and red: Defending Jim Crow in Cold War America
2022
Overview
It would be difficult to overstate the centrality of 'Brown v Board of Education' to American law and life. Legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum have lavished more attention on that Supreme Court decision than any other issued during the last century. In recent decades, the standard account of 'Brown' has placed that most-scrutinized opinion in a geopolitical context. 'Brown', the standard account maintains, must be viewed as a product of the Cold War era. By the 1950s, the persistence of laws codifying racial subordination had become an embarrassment for the US on the global stage. The US effort to defeat communism around the world thus rendered the recognition of civil rights for Black Americans a Cold War imperative. This article complicates and challenges that account by exploring the central role that anti-communism played in segregationists' opposition to Brown and civil rights. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a broad array of Americans contended that preserving Jim Crow was a Cold War imperative in its own right. For this group, anti-communism and segregation were not just compatible, but inextricably intertwined. Their ranks included northerners and southerners alike: politicians, jurists, columnists, and ordinary citizens. White supremacists did not invoke anti-communism merely as a disingenuous ploy to combat 'Brown'. Both long before and long after 1954, anti-communism helped to shape the contours of segregationist thought. The defenders of Jim Crow assailed integration as a product of communistic central government authority. They insisted that racial equality would create discord within the US, just as the Soviets desired, and that civil rights activists were tainted by communist affiliations. Many segregationists viewed themselves as committed Cold Warriors, undertaking closely connected fights against both a foreign ideological threat and a domestic social one. As such, the Cold War represented not only a divide between the US and the Soviet Union; it also reflected a debate within the United States over the relationship between racial justice, national security, and foreign policy. Understanding that segregationists viewed their cause as a Cold War imperative recasts dominant views within legal academia, where this essential component of 'Brown's' geopolitical context remains under-appreciated. While it is tempting to dismiss every segregationist invocation of anti-communism as the product of either irrationality or opportunism, it would be a mistake to do so. Linking segregation with anti-communism transformed the defense of Jim Crow from a regional priority into a national one. Anti-communism also helped resolve a core tension in the segregationist belief that Black citizens did not actually want integration, allowing civil rights lawsuits to be attributed to communist agitation. Reckoning with this significant element of the civil rights era, this article thus illuminates the logic of a racist worldview. In so doing, it provides a fuller, more accurate portrait of a critical period in constitutional history, of the complex dynamics undergirding legal change, and of the malleable, tenacious character of racism in modern America.
