Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968

Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968. By Jeff Woods. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xiv, 282 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8071-2875-9. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8071-2926-7.)

This book explores the use of anticommunist politics by the defenders of segregation in attempting to destroy the movement to abolish Jim Crow. Seeking to preserve a racially coded social order, "southern nationalists" (p. 1) increasingly conflated the issues of Communism and civil rights activism.

Jeff Woods provides meticulous coverage of regional and national organizations employing this strategy. Red-hunting segregationists solicited hard-core followers with an ideology that confirmed Communist sponsorship of the civil rights insurgency. Evidence to support the "red and black" (p. 9) hunt was manufactured through state-sponsored investigation, political espionage, and the use of paid informants. The allegations were then disseminated through published reports widely distributed in arch-segregationist circles and broadcast by well-reported, if largely inconclusive,...