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Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 2004)
BLACK STRUGGLE, Red Scare is a useful addition to the growing scholarship on the southern Red Scare. The monograph's main argument is that white segregationists rallied against the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement because they believed that it was part of a foreign, Communist-inspired conspiracy that threatened the (white) "southern way of life." (2) Southern anti-Communism was a key component of what Woods calls "southern nationalism," a "defensive regional ideology" and "set of values and traditions" rooted in the historical memories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, suspicion of centralized government power and modernity, fundamentalist Protestantism, and, above all, white supremacy. (2) It was this ideology that made the southern Red Scare distinct from anti-Communist hysteria nation-wide. Indeed, as McCarthyism lost traction nationally, anti-Communism, Woods asserts, gained ground in the South, especially at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s.
The book is arranged chronologically. The opening chapter argues that post-war, anti-black, Communist hysteria "had deep roots in the region's past." (12) Immediately before and after World War II, Southern nationalists took the lead in institutionalizing anti-Communism at the national level. Convinced that post-war black militancy was a Soviet plot to destroy the southern way of life, Senator James Eastland and other Dixiecrats virulently opposed civil rights reforms and became some of Joseph McCarthy's staunchest allies during the peak of the Cold War.
The southern Red Scare grew in tandem with massive resistance against the Civil Rights Movement immediately after the Brown v. Board decision (1954). White southerners not only held the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] responsible for the Supreme Court's decision but believed the organization was part of a Soviet-directed conspiracy. The Eisenhower administration's decision to send federal troops to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock coupled with the Soviets' launching of Sputnik in the fall...