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COLD WAR AND BLACK LIBERATION       CHENG

affairs. Reference has been made to the loyalty and security programs initiated by Truman. Internal security was a by-product of the Cold War; and it was Truman's program that laid the foundation for the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism symbolized the nation's psychotic hysteria over the communist menace. Invoking sensationalism, indiscriminate accusations of subversive plots, demagogic appeals to "Americanism" over communism, McCarthy rode the crest of the reactionary wave with his flamboyant charge of 213 communists working in the State Department. McCarthyism per se will not be dealt with in this discussion, but it is vitally important to be aware of this man's role in helping to create a national mood that stifled dissent of any kind. It is against this background that one must view the context of the black liberation struggle in the post-war years.


a new dawn of freedom

John Hope Franklin offers this picture of the black situation in the post-war period:

The executive branch of the federal government itself... sensitive both to domestic and foreign pressures, exerted considerable influence in eradicating the gap between creed and practice in American democracy. The interaction of these forces created a better place for Negro Americans as the nation moved into the second half of the Twentieth Century.21

Another writer, Henry Moon, reflecting an optimistic expectation from the federal government, echoed the sentiments of the NAACP when he described the Truman civil rights report as "a new charter for freedom" and as a "declaration of our renewed faith in the American goal-the integrity of the individual human being, sustained by the moral consensus of the whole Nation, protected by the government based on equal freedom under just laws."22 To Secure These Rights was indeed the first federal document blessed by the President's office which unequivocally came out against segregation. Interestingly enough, Truman established the Commission in response to a meeting with a group of blacks in September 1946; among those in the group was Paul Robeson.

Moon also predicted that a labor organizing drive in the South would stimulate the Negro vote as well as an emergence of a new unity between black and white labor. On a national level generally, many blacks were looking to the continued cooperation of the CIO

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 08:50:17