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Jack continued his activist work while he was underground, only covertly. After his 1951 indictment, he wrote for Communist Party publications under a pseudonym, critiquing the Party’s position on race and relationship with mainstream civil rights leaders. His work underground became central in the Party’s revision of its official position on the Negro Question in 1959. Jack also used his trial in 1956 as an opportunity to defend his communism by tying it to his role in the black freedom movement, and his legal strategy illustrates connections and collaboration among lawyers, activists, and thinkers of a range of political viewpoints.

As the civil rights movement gave way to black nationalism, Black Power, and urban unrest, Freedomways and the Communist Party worked to navigate these changes. Jack remained committed to Party work despite its waning relevance, but his writings on the Angela Davis case and on Vietnam offer examples of his commitment to pressing issues. For Esther, a Popular Front approach to her work at the Freedomways allowed discussion, debate, and the promotion of a range of views on the journal’s pages. Freedomways also became a central part of the transformation of black history and black studies in the 1970s and 1980s. As managing editor, Esther shaped the journal by soliciting, selecting, and publishing articles and responding to correspondence. Esther and Jack continued to support one another while they developed their independent careers and activism.

The vision Esther and Jack had for the postwar years did not materialize, and they found themselves navigating increasingly intense anti-Communist trends in US politics. The Cold War inaugurated a period of fear and anxiety that intersected with the black freedom movement in the South. No longer able to sustain a movement that fused leftist economic reform and racial equality, the Southern Negro Youth Congress folded in 1949. Jack worked briefly for the Louisiana Communist Party, and the family then moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, Jack worked with the Communist Party to organize autoworkers, and Esther was an activist with the Civil Rights Congress and the Progressive Party. In 1951, the couple moved to New York City, where Jack was indicted under the Smith Act.

James and Esther Cooper Jackson’s marriage, commitment to communism, and devotion to the black freedom movement evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Their experiences were shaped by major events like the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s relationship, gender dynamics, and leftist activism offer unique insight into the influence major political and social changes had on the long black freedom movement. It also provides a new look at the relationship between Communists, communism, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s love informed their activism, and their activism shaped their love.

James Jackson and Esther Cooper were raised in similar middle-class, talented-tenth black households with politically engaged parents. Jack grew aware of race, segregation, and economic inequality by engaging with the tobacco workers in his community, whom he later organized into a union, and by protesting segregation in the Boy Scouts of America. Esther was active in college organizations dedicated to supporting the opposition in the Spanish American War and then worked in a segregated Methodist settlement house in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was exposed to extreme poverty. They each attended college during the Great Depression and joined the Communist Party before meeting. They met in 1939 and worked with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which Jack founded, before marrying in 1941.

Cedric J. Robinson’s previously published essay discusses how Wright’s art expresses both the terrors and the possibilities of modern times. According to Robinson, Wright’s choices of literary forms enabled him to explore the complexities and subtleties of radical politics more authentically than conventional history, biography, or political-tract writing would allow. Through novels, Wright brought living consciousness into direct confrontation with social theory and ideology. Believing that Marxist ideology paternalistically remained for rather than of the (especially black) proletariat, Wright wanted to draw on existing folklore to express blacks’ deep and complex consciousness. Robinson argues that for the Communist Party USA to make good on its promise to serve as the greatest guarantee against fascism, it had to come more fully to terms with the appeal of fascism among the working class. Wright’s art tried to make sense of that troubling phenomenon.

During this five-year period, Crouch became a district organizer for the newly renamed Communist Party of the USA. As such, he was responsible for overseeing larger Communist efforts at the state level. He worked first in Virginia, where he organized unemployment councils to help those suffering through the Depression, ran candidates for state and local offices, and tried to organize dockworkers. Those efforts amounted to little, and he was reassigned to Utah where he engineered a massive strike through the National Miners Union. Although scolded for some of his efforts during the strike wave, which ultimately failed to win workers to the Communist-led union, Crouch was promoted to district organizer and assigned to oversee operations in North Carolina and Virginia. There, he focused on organizing textile workers and creating United Fronts with liberal organizations but achieved little success as ill health and poor leadership skills doomed his efforts. Although demoted and reassigned as a result of these failures, Crouch remained committed to the Communist cause.

As the Cold War deepened, Crouch continued to serve as an anti-Communist informant. He testified in federal trials against union leader Harry Bridges and federal employee William Remington, naming both as Communist Party members. Although Bridges survived the accusations, Remington was convicted and died in prison. Crouch also spent much of the early 1950s warning the nation about the dangers implicit in the Korean War and demanding that the nation do more to attain a total war footing. When those demands fell on deaf ears, he returned to the witness stand and testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee where he offered additional information and warnings about the Communist threat to the nation. He concluded this era by testifying before the Subversive Activities Control Board which was trying to determine whether or not the Communist Party of the USA was foreign controlled. Crouch asserted that it was, and thanks to his testimony the Party was ordered to register as a foreign agent with the federal government. Crouch thus achieved some success in the early 1950s and became ever more convinced in the righteousness of anti-Communism.

This chapter considers the combination of circumstances and events following World War II that held the seeds of political repression during the McCarthy era. These developments signaled unmistakably that the Soviet Union and its allies threatened America’s security on the international scene. On the domestic front, McCarthy-era repression targeted the Communist Party USA and alleged “Communist front” organizations. Whether a significant internal Communist threat existed in the postwar years was open to question. However, the widespread belief that such a threat did exist, and the related claim that liberal Democrats—New Dealers and their political successors—bore responsibility and could not be trusted to respond adequately, would soon become a reality in American politics. McCarthyism was energized not by opposition to communism but by the linkage of Marxism with liberalism. It was also energized by bare-knuckle partisan political tactics.

This chapter explores the national resurgence of the Congress of Racial Equality, which coincided with the student-led sit-in movement during the early half of 1960. Specifically, this chapter shows how a CORE chapter emerged in Brooklyn, New York and it tells of the local people, some who were moderates, and some who were former Communists, who emerged as the chapter’s leaders.

As the war escalated, antiwar feelings increased on campus, and the first SDS meeting of the semester overflowed its venue. The Illinois student movement was sparked by the creation of a campus W. E. B. DuBois Club, whose connection to a Communist Party youth group of the same name was ambiguous. The founders announced they would seek university recognition and access to meeting rooms, adding they would challenge the twenty-year-old Clabaugh Act by bringing a communist speaker to campus, putting the administration in a quandary. This would be the seed from which the Illinois campus movement would grow.

This chapter follows Jonathan Daniels to Scottsboro, Alabama, and provides a concise account of the arrest, convictions, and eventual release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American youths who were falsely accused of rape in 1931. Daniels's calls for justice for the Scottsboro defendants are contrasted with his opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation advocated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He saw the 1933 Costigan-Wagner bill and the 1937 Gavagan bill as impossible to pass in the Senate, unlikely to be effective, and certain to breed resentment among white southerners. His preferred solution was local and state action as well as education to increase whites' commitment to the rule of law. The chapter acknowledges that the defense of the Scottsboro Boys by the International Labor Defense (ILD) helped the Communist Party-USA gain in the 1930s the greatest influence it has ever had in American politics and culture.

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.

At the next SACA rally the movement widened its scope, renaming itself Students for Free Speech (SFS), and published a manifesto that spoke of broader goals, including “human freedom.” The new group voted to invite Louis Diskin, an avowed member of the Communist Party, to speak on campus, though moderates expressed concern at the new direction. Student senators offered meeting space to the DuBois Club in their offices, violating university rules; in late March Diskin spoke to a crowd of thousands on the quad, yet despite all appearances the administration claimed the speech did not violate the Clabaugh Act.

This afterword explores conservative purges, which have not received adequate attention because the conservative movement and its apparent opponents have agreed on certain seemingly innocent misrepresentations, which need to be corrected. Purges have not been limited to removing undesirables from the masthead of conservative magazines nor to breaking social and professional relations. More typically, this shunning has been accompanied by campaigns of character assassination that have sometimes lasted years. What happened to M. E. Bradford was all too typical of this process of defamation. Conservative movement leaders have behaved in a way that one might have expected in an earlier age from the Communist Party USA. In all likelihood, however, American Communists would have been generally better read and more cerebral than those who draw their picture of reality from conservative media stars.