The Cold War, the Red Scare, and the Black Freedom Struggle: Anti-Racist Protest in the New York Times, 1946-1956

Matthew Nichter, Rollins College

This article presents new quantitative data on African-American protest during the years 1946-1956. Previous quantitative studies of this period found very little protest prior to the bus boycotts of the mid-1950s. However, these studies suffer from serious methodological shortcomings, such as reliance on the highly-condensed New York Times Index, and arbitrary exclusion of anti-racist protests sponsored by labor and leftist groups. Correcting for these deficiencies, I find that the frequency of protest rose considerably between 1946 and 1948, declined sharply over the next two years, and remained at a low level until the mid-1950s. In addition, I find that anti-racist protests sponsored by labor and leftist groups were quite common at the beginning of the postwar decade, but rare by the end of it. These results suggest that the relationship between the Cold War and the black freedom struggle was complex. While geopolitical competition with the U.S.S.R. may have sensitized the U.S. federal government to accusations of racism and encouraged some reforms, the anticommunist red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s undermined a nascent African-American insurgency and recast the anti-racist organizational field in the U.S., marginalizing labor and the left.

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 Presented in Session 45. Race, Labor, and Inequality in Modern Capitalism