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The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”

This chapter examines the role of the Better America Federation (BAF), a business lobby headquartered in Los Angeles, in promoting the doctrine and practice of anticommunism during the interwar period. BAF and other business lobbies harnessed the passion and the infrastructure of the Red Scare to promote their economic and industrial agenda. They used anticommunism (and generous financial inducements) to revitalize and reorient urban police “Radical and Anarchist Squads.” This chapter first considers the open shop movement's fight against communism before discussing big business' domination of of economic and industrial policy during the 1920s. It then looks at the rise of the BAF and its use of the Red Squad and the California Criminal Syndicalism Act as instruments of labor suppression. It also describes the BAF's cultural war against Bolshevism, along with the scandal involving the BAF as well as the federation's demise and resurrection. The chapter shows that the BAF dominated anticommunism on the Pacific Coast from around 1920 until well into the Cold War as part of the Anticommunist Spider Web.

The LAPD’s ability to maintain its independent partisan power in the face of procedural reforms and antipolice protest rested on its intelligence operations. Police spying, this chapter shows, targeted groups that challenged the status quo, none more so than anti–police abuse activists and movements for racial justice, using a capacious definition of “disorder.” But these same groups exposed the Public Disorder Intelligence Division’s surveillance operations (previously known as the Red Squad), leading to new regulations on the department’s activities, the end of the PDID, and the establishment of the department’s new intelligence unit, the Anti-Terrorist Division. The reforms, however, did not change the underlying power relations between the police and residents.

The coda gives a snapshot of three critical institutional arrangements that offer a framework for understanding the end of the Black Arts movement. Each of these three institutions--Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities; the seminar on the Reconstruction of African-American Literature, co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association and National Endowment for the Humanities; and the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (and larger surveillance state)--were tied to Fuller’s life and the closing window of opportunity he faced at the end of the movement. More importantly, the coda contends that the presence (or absence) of these institutions in our collective memory help to shape our broader understanding of the Black Arts movement. It not only offers a three-pronged conclusion to the narrative arch of the book, but it also argues that cultural politics played a tremendous role in shaping African American intellectuals’ access to institutional resources.