Black and Red: W.E.B. Dubois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963

by Gerald Horne

Many historians have seen a radical shift in W.E.B. Du Bois' political activities in his later years. Following World War II, the evolution of his political perspective led to his ouster from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he had worked for years, and the Justice Department's indictment of him for failure to register as a foreign agent. In this extensively researched study, Gerald Horne shows that Du Bois' later activities were the culmination of his lifelong concerns, which Du Bois resolutely followed despite the threats of Cold War McCarthyism. In investigating Du Bois' last 20 years, Horne shows how the confluence of Cold War anticommunism and attempts to discredit the civil rights and anticolonial movements influenced the evaluation of Du Bois' activity. The recently opened papers of W.E.B. Du Bois and previously unexamined papers of the NAACP are among the new sources Horne examined for his study.

Genres: History, Politics, United States, Race, Biography, Africa

457 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1986

About the author

Dr. Gerald Horne is an eminent historian who is Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. An author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews, his research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, war and the film industry.

Reviews

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important and valuable book. Unfortunately I couldn't find it for purchase at any sort of reasonable price, so I had to speed-read it in the library, which felt like a slightly unsatisfying way to consume such a book. It's criminal that these things aren't widely available!

Horne gives the reader a detailed and sympathetic political biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the great radical thinkers of the 20th century. Unlike most other biographers of Du Bois, Gerald Horne does not separate his last few years from the rest of his life. Du Bois' thought evolved, certainly, but he was consistently radical, consistently socialist, consistently pan-African, and a relentless fighter for world peace. Horne points out that Du Bois didn't change so much as the political environment in the West, where McCarthyism and Cold War turned leftism into thought crime.

As Martin Luthur King Jr put it on February 23, 1968, the 100th birthday of WEB Du Bois (and just a few weeks before King's assassination):

We cannot talk of Dr Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Seán O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.

[Degenerate Chemist · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Black and Red" is definitely one of Horne's strongest works. It covers the final years of WEB Du Bois life and his association with the communist party.

The book begins at the end of WW2 when Du Bois was rehired by the NAACP and follows his activities through his eventual death in Ghana, Sir did not really retire. Du Bois saw how anticommunism was a tool to enforce order and knew what that would mean for the Black Community. His foresight and political honesty made him a man to be reckoned with even as the NAACP had made itself obsolete by trying to appease the US government while claiming to fight for Black rights.