On April 17—notably, the anniversary of the failed, anti-communist fueled Bay of Pigs Invasion—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill requiring K-12 public schools to teach students about “the evils and dangers” of communism. According to DeSantis, an anti-communist education is necessary for grade school children and will serve as a deterrent against radicalization later in life. “It’s going to give the students the truth about communism,” he said of the new bill. “We might as well tell them the truth when they’re in our schools, because [at] a lot of these universities… they’re going [to] be told how great communism is.”
While many on Twitter reacted to the news by questioning the governor’s decision to add communism to the curriculum despite censoring slavery, race, and LGBTQ+ history, DeSantis’ political move is not about “favoring” communism over other subjects. It is instead a blatant example of how our education system is so often used as a major tool of indoctrination.
Understanding the history of (anti-)communism, particularly in the American South, reveals just how sinister a tool anti-radical censorship and propaganda has been and continues to be when wielded by the fascist state to quell movements for freedom, justice, and equality.
Ron DeSantis, the State of Florida, and many others in the South continue to lead the nation’s further descent into fascism. Southern states and their regional conservative, liberal-centrist, and far-right political leaders work alongside corporate interests and the cultural influencer class to advance regressive legislation and social policy changes. This fascist push has resulted in book bans, classroom and press censorship, repression of mass protests, youth healthcare access bans, reproductive unfreedom, investment in the ever-expanding carceral apparatus, xenophobic anti-migrant policies and the erosion of the progressive civil liberties gained for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQ+ folks, and other marginalized groups.
What we in the South know is that studying “truths” about communism also means studying the ugliest parts of Southern history. Doing so sheds a much needed light on how the radical political histories of our freedom struggles are deeply intertwined with communism. So much so that the white supremacist governance structure that has reigned over the South since the antebellum period co-opted the 20th century national struggle against the “Red Menace” as a means to impede the very social justice movements we herald as inherent to the Southern political identity.
There is no Southern culture of resistance without communist politics and struggle, nor is there a greater blueprint for technologies of state repression than the anti-communist strategies advanced by Southern white supremacists to upend radicalism and progressive movements.
Considering these connections brings to mind the lyrics of Southern songstress Nina Simone in her protest anthem, “Mississippi Goddam.” Banned from radio stations throughout the South following its release in 1964, the song laid bare the atrocities of anti-Black violence, racial discrimination, and government lies in the South. In one verse, Simone sings:
Picket lines, school boycotts
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister, my brother, my people, and me
We happen to agree with DeSantis on the importance of learning about this subject. So, be it an introduction or a refresher on the (anti-)communist history of the South, we’ve got y’all covered with a reading list on the “truth about communism.”
In 1963, North Carolina implemented a ban prohibiting “known members of the Communist Party” (or anyone who cited the Fifth Amendment during questioning by a state or federal government body) from speaking at public universities. However, since there hadn’t been any known communist activity in the state since the 1950s, this ban raised questions about who the state was actually trying to censor on campuses. Communists on Campus reveals the tactics of conservative legislators to suppress civil rights, prevent the political empowerment of Black people following desegregation efforts, and ensure a more deeply-entrenched conservative stronghold in the state’s political leadership. Billingsley’s work provides yet another reminder that “two large historical forces—the Civil Rights Movement and anticommunist witch hunts—occurred simultaneously.”
On November 3, 1979, five members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) were shot and killed by members of the American Nazi Party (ANP) and the Ku Klux Klan at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. Elizabeth Wheaton examines the anti-communist rhetoric and policy of previous decades that lead to what is now known as the Greensboro Massacre.
Angelo Herndon was a coal miner and communist union and labor organizer working in Georgia and Alabama during the 1930s. He was just 19 years old in 1933 when he stood trial after an arrest based on Georgia’s insurrection laws in retaliation for organizing a multiracial labor rights demonstration in Atlanta. In this prison autobiography, Herndon relays the story of his arrest and the adversity he continued to face in a court system that criminalized the communist fight for workers’ rights and beyond.
Benjamin J. Davis Jr. attributed his radicalization to his experience as a defense attorney in the case against Angelo Herndon, having been hired by the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party of America. Gerald Horne’s Black Liberation/Red Scare is one-part semi-biography of Ben Davis and one-part analysis of the 1930s-1960s Communist Party.
Black Bolshevik is Black communist leader Harry Haywood’s autobiography, which details his political growth, his work in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and his later expulsion from the party which culminated in Haywood’s fierce criticism of political revisionism as well as the role of revisionism and repression in the Cold War era CPUSA. Born to enslaved parents in Omaha, Nebraska after their early wave Great Migration odyssey, Haywood’s pioneering theories on Black Power and Black Nationalism were heavily informed by his critiques of the CPUSA’s failure to offer an adequate political response to the Southern Question and its “Negro Problem.” Despite misalignment with the emergent New Left of the 1960s, Haywood’s questions regarding anti-Southerness as anti-Blackness are essential interventions for any understanding of communism with a sharpened comprehension of racial capitalism.
In Sojourning for Freedom, Erik S. McDuffie highlights early 20th-century Black women activists and emphasizes their achievements through their involvement with CPUSA. One such woman was Esther Cooper Jackson, a Virginia-born, Alabama-based civil rights and communist activist who chronicled the experiences of Black women in domestic work, was a founding editor of the political literary magazine Freedomways, and became an important leader in the Southern Negro Youth Congress.
This award-winning book “tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama’s repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.” Robin D. G. Kelley’s work highlights how the courage and conviction of working-class folks “from Alabama’s farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets” forged a substantial movement.
What happened to nine Black boys in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931—convicted of assaulting two white women on a train despite evidence to the contrary—is yet another story from Southern history that should be widely known, but unfortunately is not. “Remembering Scottsboro explores how this case has embedded itself into the fabric of American memory and become a lens for perceptions of race, class, sexual politics, and justice.” Making use of the Communist International and NAACP archives, James A. Miller examines how the CPUSA and the NAACP—versus the mainstream media—contributed to the narrative around The Scottsboro Boys.
“After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder.” In this work, Mary Stanton explores the political climate of this era and how communists were scapegoated alongside Black and Jewish people in the wake of the Great Depression. Ultimately, these marginalized groups were able to come together to push back against the state’s repressive tactics.
Stacy Braukman chronicles Florida state senator Charlie Johns’ appointment as Chairman of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee in 1956. Now remembered as “The Johns Committee,” the group was tasked with surveilling and investigating subversive activities in Florida’s academic institutions, especially any suspected communist activities and “homosexual perversions.” Braukman’s study argues that the creation of the Johns Committee was a logical counter-move by the state in response to the mounting moral panic and social anxieties surrounding sexuality, politics, and race relations in the Cold War era. It demonstrates the use of anti-communist counterinsurgency to repress all modes of resistance.
In The White South and The Red Menace, George Lewis gives an account of the way white Southern segregationists deployed anti-communist rhetoric to destabilize the Civil Rights Movement following the end of the second World War until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Lewis argues that despite the array of strategies available to segregationist opponents of racial progress and civil rights, leveraging the anti-communist political climate of the Cold War years was among the most formidable tools of white resistance to an integrated society.
In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri examines collaborative efforts made by Northern anti-communists and Southern segregationists to quell the national spread of revolt and radical organizing during the Cold War. As Northern anti-communists saw the South as a new landscape for expanding their anti-labor base of support, Southern segregationists found in the conservative Northerner a vital partner in combating legal desegregation policies and the growing Civil Rights Movement. Katagiri’s study shows the way the spread of McCarthyism in the South became a vital tool of repression for the segregationist bloc.
By Angela Davis Angela Davis’ An Autobiography is a classic text for an introduction to communism from a Black Southern and Black Feminist perspective. Originally published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography details Davis’ journey from her childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to her political trial of the 1970s and beyond, to her work with CPUSA and the Soledad Brothers. Despite her later-career turn towards more neoliberal, pragmatic approaches to abolitionist changemaking in recent years, Davis’ autobiography is a must read for anyone seeking firsthand accounts of communist struggle against the backdrop of global political upheaval and American racial reckoning.
