Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement

This collection of essays looks at the impact of anticommunism on black political culture during the early years of the Cold War, with an eye toward local and individual stories that offer insight into larger national and international issues.

'The history of a long civil rights movement with a crucial radical component carries powerful implications for ongoing battles for liberation that require a transforming vision of democracy and a holistic program of struggle for political, social, economic and cultural equality. This volume makes a valuable contribution to that understanding. Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement is a valuable source for scholars, activists and all who work for a just world. It is deeply instructive to learn of past efforts to forge democratic change, to learn the price of rupture of those efforts and to grasp the elements of continuity that enrich activism today.' - Mark Solomon, Against the Current

'This trailblazing, challenging, and exceedingly thoughtful book establishes a New Paradigm for the consideration of the most profoundly monumental change in this nation in recent decades: the retreat of Jim Crow. This book should not only be read, it should be pondered and studied intensively, for there are nuggets of wisdom on every page.' - Gerald Horne, Author of Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the U.S. and Jamaica and the forthcoming Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Struggle to Free Kenya (Palgrave Macmillan)

'Lieberman and Lang have assembled an arresting collection of essays unabashedly tackling the troubled marriage of Communism and the movements for Black Freedom, Peace, and Mexican-American rights after World War II. While acknowledging an unbroken history of idealism and activist resistance to domestic exploitation over the decades, a range of scholars make available fascinating new research to remind us what was lost in a tragic era when fear and expediency led to a misguided 'crusade' against those imperfect but devoted militants standing in the vanguard of social justice.' - Alan M. Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, USA; author of Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (2007)

'A stimulating collection of articles dealing with the Civil Rights Movement...As a whole, the book is convincing because of the detailed examples put forth to support the major hypotheses.' - Choice

ROBBIE LIEBERMAN Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, USA.   CLARENCE LANG Assistant Professor at the African American Studies & Research Program and Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.