RADICAL BLACK PEACE ACTIVISM AS NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

For the United States, Internationalist peace efforts not only portended the spread communism, but also directly contravened its drive to amass nuclear weapons, police the international system, and neutralize hostility and opposition. The achievement of radical conceptualizations of peace and progress, the new global hegemon believed, would undoubtedly endanger the U.S.-led postwar order, especially since the “military-industrial complex” and defense industries had become essential to the functioning of its economy (Clayton 1995; Markusen Reference Markusen1992). Peace would make it exceedingly difficult for the United States to control dissent directed against its capitalist-imperialist ambitions. Given this reality, HUAC regarded advocates of disarmament as supporters of communism and the Soviet Union, using as an example the “terrible strikes that delayed U.S. rearmament” during the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939-1941 (HUAC 1949, p. 89). For the Cold War state apparatus, to be against war, aggression, and imperialism was to be against the United States, and therefore a threat to national security.

The 1945 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) constitution elucidates why, after WWII, anticommunism was used to construe Radical Black Peace Activism as an imminent source of destabilization that threatened U.S. authority. The CPUSA constitution drew the linkage between antiracism, peace activism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and socialism that was interpreted by the U.S. Cold War state apparatus as evidence of communist subversion. Exacerbating such “subversion” was the CPUSA’s increasing interracial leadership and explicit position on racial justice. In 1945 it elected the Afro-Trinidadian Claudia Jones to the National Committee and the African-American Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. to the National Board. Indeed, by 1947 there were four African descendants on the National Committee—Davis, Jones, Ferdinand Smith, and Abner Berry. Likewise, in 1948, Pettis Perry was made executive secretary of the National Negro Commission (HUAC 1954, p. 121; HUAC 1949, p. 22). The 1945 Communist Party preamble stated:

Here, peace is understood as inextricable from international solidarity and the end of all forms of racialized exploitation. The association of a durable peace with solidarity among progressive peoples and the socialist reorganization of society challenged the hegemony of the United States as the pre-eminent global political and economic authority. Additionally, the promotion of the United Nations as the leader of international cooperation threatened to hold the United States accountable, on the world stage, for its racist, anti-democratic, and repressive practices against Black Americans. It also had the potential to expose the United States’ deep ambivalence toward independence in the Caribbean and Africa, an equivocation constituted by its antipathy toward and suspicion of Black anticolonialism and anti-imperialism and the promotion of Pan-African unity within its borders (Fraser Reference Fraser1994).

A host of Radical Black Peace Activists presented arguments that were consonant with the 1945 CPUSA platform. In a June 2, 1949 article entitled, “Negroes in the Ranks of the World Front Fighting for Peace and Progress,” published in the Polish newspaper Trybunu Ludu, Paul Robeson, the prolific and world-renowned leftist artist-activist wrote:

This and similar writings and speeches, along with his participation in the World Peace Conference in Paris that same year, brought the U.S. state’s anti-Black, antiradical, and anticommunist hysteria to new heights.^{Footnote 8} Robeson was subjected to a program of continuous FBI surveillance, discipline, and harassment that lasted for over a decade (Horne Reference Horne2016; Perucci 2009). He was blacklisted and attacked from all sides, with the white press calling him a traitor, the Black press denying that he spoke for Black people, and the Cold War state apparatus discussing whether such statements were grounds for the forfeiture of his citizenship (Merriweather Reference Merriweather2002). Given this backlash, liberal peace and civil rights organizations began to expel and exclude communists and “fellow travelers” like Robeson, to omit policies and platforms that might be construed as communist, and to mute any criticism of U.S. foreign policy that contravened Cold War statist pedagogy (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2011). The fact that liberal Black leaders and organizations felt compelled to disassociate themselves from Robeson—who had never admitted membership in the CPUSA—and those like him, and to enshrine their programs in patriotic nationalism, underscores that the conjuncture of Blackness, radicalism, internationalism, and peace activism was anathema to the U.S. Cold War state apparatus. It also demonstrates how anticommunism was used to transmute seemingly universal values like peace and progress, when enunciated by radical Black activists, into targets of state-sponsored discrimination and discipline.

In 1950, Claudia Jones, communist union leader Ferdinand Smith, and four of their working-class comrades wrote to the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee of the United Nations to challenge their detainment at Ellis Island. Their continual surveillance, harassment, and arrest were a result of the escalation of the Korean War, concern about Black loyalty and the presence of leftist “aliens,” and the passing of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (Horne Reference Horne2005). The letter clearly conveys Radical Black Peace Activism:

This earnest message enjoined that progressives who understood the interdependence between racial hatred, working-class exploitation, and global war—and who had the courage to oppose it—were often the first victims of “reactionary movements” (Horne Reference Horne2005, pp. 214–215).

Jones was first arrested and sent to Ellis Island on January 19, 1948, not least because she applied her Radical Black Peace Activism to the liberation of Black women. She argued that this group in particular was essential to the peace movement because imperialism was played out through the bodies of their husbands and sons; because their men were subjected to violence in the armed forces that matched lynch mob violence against Black civilians and veterans alike; and because war threatened to permanently militarize and conscript their youth. Moreover, the economic hardships produced by the conjoining of warmongering, capitalist exploitation, racism, and profit-driven imperialism fell disproportionately on Black women’s shoulder. Such conjuncture threatened to drive them off the land in rural areas and subjected them to deteriorating labor conditions and declining wages in industry. Jones’s upbraiding of war was accompanied by the demand to organize and unionize women, to equalize pay, to take special action to protect “triply exploited” Black women, and to increase leadership of the latter in the peace movement through the creation of peace committees among them. She also proffered that a broad antiwar and anti-imperialist coalition of labor, women, youth, and the general working class was necessary to combat Black bourgeois promotion of the Korean War (Davies Reference Davies2011). Like Robeson, Jones saw peace as the antidote to anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and perpetual war.

Jones’s deportation hearings were set to begin shortly after her initial arrest, but they were postponed because few were willing to testify against her. However, at a hearing on February 16, 1950, the Immigration and Naturalization Service found her guilty of being an alien that joined the Communist Party. Her “crimes” included teaching and promoting the violent and forceful overthrow of the U.S. government, helping to organize the Communist Party whose aim was the same, and issuing directives to topple the U.S. government in Public Affairs, the theoretical journal of the CPUSA (Davies Reference Davies2011; Johnson Reference Johnson1985). It was during the latter period of incarceration that she and her comrades beseeched the U.N. to intervene on their behalf. That year Jones also wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Worker attributing her political imprisonment to the nexus of anticommunism, the suppression of Radical Black Peace Activism, and the U.S. drive for nuclear war:

On June 29, 1951, the FBI arrested Jones for a third time, in this instance under the McCarran Act, for violating the 1940 Alien Registration Act, commonly known as the Smith Act. Her specific offense was that she had given a speech and written an article on the role of women in the struggle for peace, which violated the conditions of her bail (Johnson Reference Johnson1985; Sherwood 2000). In “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” Jones reiterated that progress and equality could only be achieved if the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to coexist peacefully, atomic weapons were outlawed, and the Cold War ended. She exhorted that international peace activism was the anecdote to the threat of the atomic bomb, global armament, the Marshall Plan-funded Atlantic war pact, and “the monstrous Truman-Acheson doctrine that war [was] inevitable.” Further, Jones argued that international solidarity was necessary to challenge “big capital’s” reactionary ideological campaign that violently opposed women’s struggles for peace, economic redress, and social welfare (Davies Reference Davies2011, pp. 90–93). In addition to giving speeches and organizing mass peace rallies throughout the United States, Jones served on the National Peace Commission at the end of the Korean War from 1952 to 1953. On January 21, 1953 she was convicted under the Smith Act, and after the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeals, Jones was imprisoned in 1955—despite deteriorating health related to hypertensive cardiovascular disease—and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom on December 9 of that year (Davies Reference Davies2011).

An important but often forgotten organization committed to Radical Black Peace Activism was the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ), founded in September 1951 by a national cadre of militant Black women. Taking a political position similar to that of Claudia Jones, the group sought to rally Black women to defend Black male leaders who were being systematically victimized by the state. As well, they sought to organize wives and mothers of those who were being “legally lynched,” imprisoned, and hounded by U.S. authorities; and those who had been widowed as a result of police terrorism and who had lost their sons in foreign wars.^{Footnote 10} Their program made the indelible connection between the insults, humiliations, and indignities of Jim Crow, the antiradical repression and violence meted out by the domestic police state, and the U.S. war machine that sent Black men to kill other racialized persons on behalf of a country that systematically devalued and disregarded Black life. In response, they organized a sojourn to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington D.C. from September 29 to October 1, 1951, during which they protested the lynching, beating, shooting, and unemployment of Black men who, to add insult to injury, were “forced to become part of a Jim Crow army and go thousands of miles [to] Korea to carry out war to other colored peoples” (McDuffie Reference McDuffie2011, p. 160).

In 1952, STJ organized a conference for members on the Eastern seaboard to mobilize against a government that sent their husbands, brothers, and sons to fight oppressed people in the Global South, that appropriated astronomical sums “for the destruction and enslavement of other peoples,” but that provided “no protection to the homes and persons of Negro citizens… [and] refuse[d] passports to Americans who speak the truth” (Cleveland FBI 1952a). Members urged that as long as the United States continued to wage war, racialized people throughout the world would continue to be targeted, dominated, and oppressed. Anticommunism would also continue to be a means of silencing and subjugating those who rejected the capitalist, imperialist, and racist warmongering of the U.S. Cold War state apparatus. STJ held that, when considering the destruction and devaluation of Black life, one could not separate racialized terrorism, like the bombing murder of Harry and Harriet Moore on Christmas Day 1951; state terrorism, like the wrongful conviction of the Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee; and imperial terrorism, like the draft of Black men into an unjust and unnecessary war (Cleveland FBI 1952b). In addition to organizing protests, rallies, and boycotts, STJ worked closely with a number of leftist entities, including the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Labor Council, and the Progressive Party to challenge military buildup, aggression against other nations, and the Korean War (Cleveland FBI 1952c; New York FBI 1958). Given their Radical Black Peace Activism, the FBI insisted that all of the organization’s officers were either in the CPUSA or “front organizations;” that STJ was “Communist Party sponsored;” and that it followed the Communist Party line. This misrecognition rationalized persistent surveillance, which included the infiltration of at least one “stool pigeon,” Julia Clarice Brown, who provided extensive information (Wilson Reference Wilson, Blee and Deutsch2012). In the final analysis, the backlash against Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and others with identical commitments to peace, internationalism, and Black liberation, highlights that, for the Cold War state apparatus, Radical Black Peace Activism augured subversion and treachery.

For the United States government, peace was only possible through a combination of military strength, capitalist prosperity, and the defense of “freedom” through armament, nuclear build-up, and anti-Soviet aggression. Stated differently, the U.S. notion of peace hinged on the eradication of the purported totalitarianism and expansionism of the Soviet Union and containment of the “communist-inspired” radicalization of racialized and colonized populations. Thus, peace became conflated with “anti-communist stability” that was contingent upon a strong military and long-term heightened tensions among the public (Lieberman Reference Lieberman, Lieberman and Lang2009, pp. 201–203). By this logic, peace would be achieved through willingness and readiness for war. It was in this hostile environment that W. E. B. Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism was violently contested by the Cold War state apparatus. His passport was revoked for circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, which ostensibly made him an agent of a foreign nation because, according to HUAC, it was a “smoke screen” for communist aggression against South Korea (HUAC 1954, p. 95). Because the Stockholm Peace Petition had the support of the Soviet Union, HUAC conceived of it as an instrument of communist subversion instead of as a genuine demand for the restoration of peaceful cooperation in the world-system. As such, the U.S. government all but criminalized any peace activism that dovetailed with the U.S.S.R. line, listing a number of organizations dedicated to worldwide peace solidarity—including the Du Bois-led Peace Information Center (PIC)—as subversive, communist, and/or communist fronts.^{Footnote 11}

THE RADICAL BLACK PEACE ACTIVISM OF W. E. B. DU BOIS

In the interwar period, W. E. B. Du Bois had developed a body of scholarship that was decidedly antiwar, and that analyzed the conditions under which world peace was possible (Morris Reference Morris2015). While his critique of war simultaneously castigated racism, colonialism, and imperialism, socialism was not yet an essential element of his plan for durable peace. For example, when Du Bois returned from the Soviet Union in 1926, he rejected the latter’s form of socialism for American Negroes. He nonetheless criticized capitalist exploitation, and advocated conscious consumption, production for use and not for profit, and a slow and orderly redistribution of wealth under the tutelage of an intelligent and unselfish leadership class (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1968). By the early 1930s, during which he wrote “Marxism and the Negro Problem” (1933), taught “Karl Marx and the Negro Problem” at Atlanta University (1933), and published Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935), Du Bois had begun to systematically study and employ Marxist analysis. However, his promotion of a separate Black cooperative economy at the Amenia Conference, held from August 18–21, 1933, revealed that he was not quite convinced of the efficacy of interracial proletarian struggle. Thus, Du Bois’s denunciation of war did not fully develop into Radical Black Peace Activism until the next decade.

Even in Du Bois’s early politics, the elimination of war was not merely the absence of military conflict; it was the historical fulfillment of equality, justice, and the end of colonial and racial exploitation (Morris Reference Morris2015). In critiquing the white peace movement’s vitriolic white supremacy in 1915, he argued for the necessity of antiracism and anti-imperialism alongside antiwar activism. His 1923 declaration that “it pays to kill niggers” linked warmongering, corporate profit, and anti-Blackness. He extended this perspective in 1931, associating war with the economic exploitation and material dispossession of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Moreover, in two articles, “The African Roots of War” (1915b) and “The Realities in Africa: European Profit or Negro Development” (1943), he highlighted that, while fighting Germany in each of the World Wars, the imperial powers continued to undermine the self-determination of Africans through their colonial-capitalist plunder. In this way, war, colonialism, and racialized oppression were mutually constitutive.^{Footnote 12} In effect, Du Bois’s antiwar politics enframed the material and political realities of dispossessed persons (Marable 1983/1984).

In “Social Planning for the Negro, Past and Present,” (1936) Du Bois inveighed against both radical and liberal programs that promoted war and violence:

Each scenario, he maintained, was catastrophic for Black Americans living under racial subjection because they would “stand between the two armies as buffer and victim, pawn and peon.” Black people, then, could “only abhor violence and bloodshed” and eschew violent confrontation “except as the last defense against aggression.” Wanton promotion of war not only inhered in anti-Blackness, he insisted, but also served to reify capitalism; consequently, “The first study of the workers is not to fight but to convince themselves that union of workers, class solidarity, is better than force and a substitute for it” (1936, p. 124–125). By 1947, when Du Bois proclaimed that the emancipation of Black workers would help to establish the foundation of world peace, he had already convincingly conceptualized the rootedness of peace in a larger program of human emancipation (Marable 1983/1984; Du Bois Reference Du Bois1913). Over the next quarter century, this militant promotion of the permanent demise of war and interstate violence developed into a radical vision constituted by “the integral themes of peace, African liberation, and socialism” (Marable 1983/1984, p. 404). His Radical Black Peace Activism came to advance that war would foreclose the possibility of African self-determination, a comfortable standard of living for the working class, and a socialist future for the whole world.

Given his aversion to war and its integral racism, as early as 1918 Du Bois was the target of surveillance for possible subversive activities. The government began to question his Americanness given his criticism of U.S. treatment of Black soldiers during WWI—a deep skepticism that would follow him until he left the United States for good, after joining the CPUSA, in 1961. Wartime policy required truly loyal citizens to withhold their criticism of American society until after the Germans had been defeated. As the editor of The Crisis magazine, which was identified as a radical publication during WWI, Du Bois had written several articles that criticized the war department and pilloried discrimination against Black soldiers. This incurred the displeasure of officials in the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation because it threatened to undermine Black loyalty to the war effort. Such concern was particularly ironic given that Black loyalty was considered suspect at best (Ellis Reference Ellis1984). Likewise, Du Bois’s public demands for Black equality were a source of ire for the U.S. Justice Department, and this early suspicion of his loyalty to the United States would become more acute as his activism became more radical and supportive of the Soviet Union. Even his conciliatory “Close Ranks” editorial, in which he encouraged Negroes—much to the consternation of many Black leaders, like Hubert Harrison—to “forget [their] special grievances and close [their] ranks shoulder to shoulder with [their] own white fellow citizens and allied nations that are fighting for democracy… gladly and willingly with [their] eyes lifted to the hills,” (Du Bois 1918, p. 111) failed to mitigate his previous writings that chastised U.S. race relations.

Du Bois’s antiwar position, however, was considered to be even more antagonistic than his racial agitation—bordering on subversion. Protesting the war, like agitation for civil rights, was thought to be inspired by foreign propaganda (especially German propaganda), antithetical to the American war effort, and therefore seditious. Many promoters of peace became objects of government surveillance, were jailed, or were exiled. Activists who were Black, radical, and advocates of peace were considered particularly prone to subversion, and therefore especially targeted, because historically, the injustice, racism, and oppression inherent in war tended to inspire Black opposition. Additionally, when Black people did support U.S. war efforts, their stance was contingent upon an assessment of whether their lived conditions would be improved (Pittman Reference Pittman1952). As Robbie Lieberman (Reference Lieberman, Lieberman and Lang2009) points out, Black radicals that promoted peace and freedom were considered disloyal given their critique of U.S. foreign policy that used the discourse of democracy to dominate racialized folks the world over.

In 1951, Du Bois, whose antiwar militancy had exploded into full-blown Radical Black Peace Activism, was arrested for these very politics not least because he had made a decided move to the left. His acceptance of the Vice-Chairmanship of the Council on African Affairs (at the request of fellow radical Paul Robeson); his push for cooperation with the Soviet Union instead of the increasing polarization of the world; and his support for the 1948 presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace (the Progressive Party candidate) attest to this move (Marable 1983/1984). He began to consistently argue that war undermined rationality, good will, and collaboration; that violence and aggression would not resolve differences in ideology; and that war and respect for civil rights were irreconcilable (Du Bois 1995a; Horne Reference Horne1986). Furthermore, he rejected the U.S. position on peace because it was entangled with anticommunist repression, the violation of civil liberties, and the continued abuse of and violence against racialized peoples and nations (Lieberman Reference Lieberman, Lieberman and Lang2009).

Hostility toward Radical Black Peace Activism reached a fever pitch during the Cold War for two reasons: first, because peace was an essential component of U.S.S.R. propaganda, and second because international peace activism linked United States militarism and warmongering to the reification of racialization, imperialism, and colonialism. As such, it challenged the hegemony of the United States as the arbiter of freedom and justice. One example of the conjoining of red-baiting and anti-internationalism is anticommunist sociologist Wilson Record’s (1964) mischaracterization of Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism. He claimed that communists had exploited Du Bois’s international popularity by persuading him to support peace. Record’s position, which dovetailed with official U.S. discourse, was twofold: one, that in crusading for peace and progress, Du Bois was actually supporting a communist plot to undermine the United States; and two, that communists were using the language of peace to hoodwink, exploit, and confuse (Black) Americans to support their nefarious causes. Radical Black Peace Activism, according to this logic, was not only dangerous and subversive, but was also another example of Black peoples’ susceptibility to exogenous forms of manipulation and trickery that called into question their suitability for citizenship and belonging.

In reality, Du Bois’s struggle for peace was neither new nor a result of communist manipulation, notwithstanding its intensification as the Korean War became “hot,” and his support for and admiration of the Soviet Union increased. Not an insignificant number of Black leaders succumbed to anticommunist pressures; they stopped criticism of the Korean War, ceased promotion of harmonious international cooperation, and delinked domestic struggle for civil rights from foreign policy concerns. Du Bois and other Radical Black Peace Activists took the opposite approach. They equated nuclear proliferation with the emergence of the security state, racial and economic injustice, and the ascent of neocolonialism in the Global South. They never strayed from their position that war was antithetical to freedom and justice in the United States and throughout the world more broadly (Lieberman Reference Lieberman, Lieberman and Lang2009; Meriwether Reference Merriweather2002; Mullen Reference Mullen1999; Roark Reference Roark1971).

The Cold War state apparatus maligned peace advocacy as communist manipulation, as foreign-inspired, and as inimical to U.S. security and stability. To the latter, Du Bois lamented, “[it is] a shameful proclamation to the world that our Government considers peace alien, and its advocacy criminal” (Aptheker Reference Aptheker1978, p. 306). The Cold War state apparatus treated Radical Black Peace Activism as a form of anti-American subversion precisely because it inhered in anticapitalist analysis and anticolonial linkage and fomented international coalition building. Insofar as peace and international cooperation were the conditions under which white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and the immiseration of the international working class could be vanquished, the United States was necessarily hostile to any form of politics that strove to achieve these ends.

In response to the conflation of peace activism with subversion, Du Bois wrote in 1949, “We know and the saner nations know that we are not traitors nor conspirators; and far from plotting force and violence, it is precisely force and violence that we bitterly oppose… [W]e do not defend Communism nor Socialism, nor the American way of life... [we] promote peace!” (Du Bois 1995a, p. 751). Nonetheless, it was the very act of promoting peace over “the American way of life” that effectively equated Radical Black Peace Activism with anti-Americanism. The DOJ filed charges against Du Bois to determine whether the Peace Information Center, and by extension he, as its chair, used peace advocacy to act as an agent of a foreign political organization or power, specifically the World Committee of the Defenders of Peace (later renamed the World Peace Council). According to the Attorney General’s List, the latter was a communist front (Du Bois 1995b). Du Bois became especially susceptible to U.S. retribution because, despite the hostile environment, he was extremely effective in his antiwar organizing (Horne Reference Horne1986). He, along with his second wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, influenced Americans “from California to Massachusetts” to join the peace cause (Moos Reference Moos1951). He and Paul Robeson, through the Council on African Affairs, were also able to garner support internationally, especially in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. Moreover, Du Bois provided a critical link between Black and white antiwar activists by helping to cultivate Black opposition to the Korean War (Moos Reference Moos1951).

The PIC was especially targeted for its circulation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, also known as the “ban the bomb petition”; the February 8, 1951 indictment stated in part that, “at the request of its said foreign principal, [PIC] published and disseminated in the United States the ‘Stockholm Peace Appeal’ and related information pertaining primarily to prohibition of the use of atomic weapons and instruments of war…” (quoted in Hunter and Robinson, Reference Hunter and Robinson2018, p. 164). The Petition emerged out of an international mass movement that called for the outlawing of atomic weapons, international controls to enforce the measures, and the treatment of any countries that use atomic bombs as war criminals that had committed crimes against humanity (Horne Reference Horne1986; Hunter and Robinson, Reference Hunter and Robinson2018; Lieberman Reference Lieberman, Lieberman and Lang2009). On July 13, 1950, the Peace Information Center indicated that the Petition had received over 1.5 million signatures from forty states (Lewis 2000). The goal of two million signatures was ultimately surpassed, with more than 2.5 million Americans signing it, notwithstanding the fact that many who signed the petition were criticized, arrested, physically attacked, and fired from their jobs. Du Bois was not immune from such repression; his civil liberties were severely curtailed, and his civil rights were violated in a number of ways, including the denial of a permit by the mayor of New York to hold a peace rally—the first time this had occurred in 150 years (Horne Reference Horne1986). Despite the slanderous campaign against it, the Stockholm Peace Petition may have been signed by more people than any other appeal in the history of the United States (Horne Reference Horne1986; Lieberman Reference Lieberman1992). The U.S. government saw it as a threat precisely because of the overwhelming international response to it: there were ten million signatories in France, sixty million in China, 115 million in the Soviet Union, and 3.75 million in Brazil (Horne Reference Horne1986). This international coalition posed an enormous challenge to the U.S. administration that had come to understand its prosperity, defense, and security as tied to sustained militarism.

In The New York Times, Secretary of State Dean Acheson called the Stockholm Peace Petition a “propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union” (Biondi Reference Biondi2003, p. 161). HUAC accused it of condemning the United States to national suicide, and of attempting to confuse and divide Americans (HUAC 1951; Horne Reference Horne1986; Lieberman Reference Lieberman1992). It was maligned as a ploy to undermine resistance to communist aggression; the first step of U.S.S.R. infiltration and invasion; and a fraudulent hoax meant to manipulate those who desired peace. Thus, by circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, Du Bois was accused of committing what amounted to treason on behalf of the Soviet Union (Lieberman Reference Lieberman1992). By labeling it as communist-inspired, the United States attempted to discredit it in order to legitimate the use of nuclear weapons and aggression, to prevent dissent, and to suppress the international movement for peace. Du Bois replied to the gross misrepresentation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, and of Radical Black Peace Activism more broadly, thus:

He maintained that the actual threat to stability, tranquility, and prosperity was the United States’ disingenuous insistence “that the existence of Socialist and Communist states are in themselves reasons for fear and aggression” (Marble 1983/1984, p. 402). Years later at an event commemorating Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. echoed the latter sentiment, enjoining that, “our irrational, obsessive anti-Communism has led us to too many quagmires” (Lewis Reference Lewis1970, p. 376). Du Bois held that U.S. aversion to the Stockholm Peace Petition conveyed that the purported protector of freedom and democracy in reality lacked commitment to peace, real understanding of the horrors and ravages of war, and empathy for those who were impoverished and devastated by such dehumanizing aggression (Lewis 2000). It was therefore the United States, not communism, socialism, internationalism, or even the Soviet Union, that undermined peace and cooperation.

Shortly after his campaign for the U.S. Senate,^{Footnote 13} Du Bois was indicted under the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 for operating as an “unregistered foreign agent” and for failing to register the PIC (Amsterdam News 1951; New York Daily Mirror 1951). The DOJ also filed charges against PIC members Kyrle Elkin, Elizabeth Moos, Abbott Simon, and Sylvia Soloff. Soloff was let go on the last day of the trial, as the judge declared that she was wrongfully indicted because she was never a PIC officer (Moos Reference Moos1951). The DOJ sought to determine “whether or not this organization acted as an agent or in a capacity similar to that of a foreign organization or a foreign political power” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1968, p. 389). On multiple occasions, the FBI interrogated members that had attended even one meeting, and many were subpoenaed for the trial. The organization was only in existence from April 3 to October 12, 1950 due to unrelenting anticommunist pressure, but the trial proceeded even though the Center was disbanded before the indictment came down (Horne Reference Horne1986). U.S. v. Peace Information Center, et al. proceeded in November 1951. The prosecution used anticommunist rhetoric, the Korean War, and demonization of the Soviet Union to discredit Radical Black Peace Activism. It called as its star witness Oetje John Rogge, a former Assistant Attorney General and founding member of the PIC. Interestingly, it was Rogge who had invited Du Bois to a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace that aimed to better U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations (Hunter and Robinson, Reference Hunter and Robinson2018) and it was Rogge’s home at which the PIC was formed. In his testimony, he claimed that the objective of the PIC was not peace, but rather to enact U.S.S.R. foreign policy. He also argued that the purpose of the World Committee of the Defenders of Peace, for which the PIC was ostensibly an agent, was to focus international attention on the United States’ use of the atomic bomb to distract the world from Soviet aggression in Korea. This was notwithstanding the fact that in August 1950, Rogge had signed a petition in Prague pledging his support to the World Committee and its peace program, and that he was one of the first signers of the Stockholm Peace Petition (Moos Reference Moos1951). The government intended to use this testimony to subject the PIC to the “Russian and Communist controversy” so that “current popular hysteria could be aroused against [Du Bois and the PIC]” (National Guardian 1951).

The attempt to redbait Du Bois and the other defendants was evidenced in the insignificant witnesses called to testify against them, all of whom were either FBI informants or were well known for their anti-U.S.S.R. position, such as “Mr. Lissner,” a reporter from The New York Times (Moos Reference Moos1951). The prosecution also tried to use “parallelism” to convict the defendants. According to Bernard Jaffe, one of the defense lawyers:

Parallelism was one of the primary techniques used in McCarran hearings, and its use was rejected for perhaps the first time in the PIC trial. Thus, “Deprived of the use of parallelism, unable to confuse the issues with redbaiting, the case proved… ‘as thin as the broth made from the shadow of a homeopathic pigeon that had starved to death’,” and the PIC was acquitted of all charges on November 20, 1951 (Moos Reference Moos1951). The judge announced that the government had failed to support the allegations of the indictment, and that the only way to move forward would be through conjecture as opposed to the conception of law. Despite the acquittal, Elizabeth Moos pointed out that the defendants lost nine months of their lives, peace of mind, and over $35,000. Regarding the cost of justice, Du Bois lamented, “It had not occurred to us how costly justice in the United States is. It is not enough to be innocent in order to escape punishment. You must have money and a lot of it” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1968, p. 375). Moreover, the defendants had been subjected to indignities, harassments, slanderous publicity, and the cloud of criminality, which severely impeded their ability to continue the fight for social justice (National Guardian 1951; Moos Reference Moos1951).^{Footnote 14}

Much to the surprise of his detractors, Du Bois’s Radical Black Peace Activism garnered overwhelming support worldwide, and his arrest and indictment elicited trenchant condemnation. Alice Citron, the “creative and indefatigable” secretary of the National Committee to Defend Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, aimed to internationalize the case to elicit global sympathy and support for Du Bois and the PIC. She noted that government authorities did not in fact realize how influential Du Bois was until heads of state from all corners of the globe began sending letters outlining his importance and insisting upon his innocence (Du Bois Papers 1951a, b, c; Levering Lewis Papers 1987; Moos Reference Moos1951). When he was arrested, “protest from white and [B]lack arose, and from Europe and Asia as well as Africa…” (Du Bois 1995c, p. 779). An international defense committee was established and headquartered in Brussels; international unions like the World Federation of Trade Unions sent resolutions of protest; women’s conferences throughout Europe discussed the case and passed resolutions; and Du Bois received letters of support from students, activists, leaders, and state officials from Global South countries including China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Iran (Moos Reference Moos1951). The International Union of Students wrote that his work on behalf of peace honored—not threatened—the best of U.S. traditions, and that his prosecution was “an attack upon peace supporters, upon Negro people, and upon the rights of professors and students to act for peace” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1968, p. 374). Fellow Pan-Africanist George Padmore shared their position, writing in a letter that such violent censure by the Cold War state apparatus was meant to undermine Du Bois’s “heroic fight for peace” and to “blackmail” him into silence, which was an egregious insult to democracy and to African people throughout the world (Padmore 1951, p. 311). The court was especially sensitive to the opinion of formerly colonized countries that would assuredly have a negative reaction to the imprisonment of a staunch anticolonialist like Du Bois. This preoccupation both confirmed the state’s anxiety about international pressure undermining their authority and cajoled them into resolving the case in Du Bois’s favor.