2026-06-26 –, Room 204 PC Desk (Seats 30)
US anti-communism has been naturalized in larger narratives about the Cold War. Few political leaders and commentators, especially in the US, question the righteousness of anti-communism. Though scholars have explicated protest to US Cold War policy, there is little understanding of this opposition and the harassment those opposed faced. This panel will explore opposition to US Cold War policy and its relationship with transnational freedom movements. As Zifeng Liu demonstrates, the Soviet Union took leadership in the global peace struggle both to cover for its own shortcomings in military proliferation, and to expose the imperialist motivations of the capitalist states. Radical Black communists took up the Soviet call for peace; however, as Liu demonstrates, this did not mean they were averse to violence. Rather they reimagined peace within the communist cosmology and argued that peace was not just the absence of war, it required the dissolution of empire. Similarly, Denise Lynn explores the transnational movement against the Korean War. Black radical women saw the war as a threat to the communist states, and the self-determination of post-colonial nations. Black American communists organized with their compatriots overseas to expose US war crimes and reveal the US’s neo-colonial ambitions. Cacee Mabis’ study takes up a spatial analysis exploring the significance of Durban’s ‘Red Square” – designated as such because Afrikaners believed it was linked to international communism. Mabis instead shows that Nichols Square was a significant location for Indian South Africans involved in anti-Apartheid protests. Together these papers show that anti-communism has stigmatized freedom movements and silenced their importance in global freedom movements.
Anticommunism, Anti-Apartheid, Peace Movement, Soviet Union, Korean War
Reimagining Peace: International Communism and Black Left Feminists’ Antiwar Activism in the Early Cold War
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:Presenting itself as the leader in the global struggle for peace was a crucial component of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy in the late Stalin period. This presentation will use the early-Cold War peace activism of Eslanda Goode Robeson and Claudia Jones as case studies to outline the contours of a Black feminist vision for peace that did not pit struggles against militarism against aversions to war. . In particular, their commitment to “fighting for our children,” which seemed to enshrine a heteronormative logic, was also tied to materialist and anti-imperialist on war. Nor did their peace activism undercut their calls for mass mobilization against militarism or for the strengthening of the might of the socialist bloc to safeguard global peace. Overall, I argue that Black left feminists incorporated and reimagined the communist world’s global peace agenda to advance the cause of anti-imperialism, peace, and feminism.
Title for Additional Participant 2:Durban's 'Red Square': Indian South Africans, Anti-Apartheid Protest, and the Shadow of the Rooi Gevaar
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:Spaces and places hold memories, often outlasting the people and events that gave those locations meaning. Nichols Square, better known as “Red Square,” was located in the non-white area of downtown Durban. It was named Red Square because of the Rooi gevaar, an Afrikaans phrase meaning "Red danger," a term which gained prominence in South Africa during the Cold War and was associated with the perceived threat of international communism. By studying such sites of memory, my paper seeks to connect spatial history and the role Indian South Africans played in the anti-apartheid movement. I discuss the role of these people and places in the advent of the anti-apartheid movement within the larger context of the Rooi Gevaar. By looking at these themes in depth, we will be able to trace the early anti-apartheid protests to their roots in the streets of Durban.
Title for Additional Participant 3:Women Against Forever War: Black Radical Women’s Anti-Korean War Activism
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:In the US, few understand that US policy in the Korean War mirrored Japanese colonialism and sought to prevent Korean self-determination. The US occupation government destroyed a provisional Korean government in 1945, adopted Japanese colonial laws, and propped up anti-communist South Korean dictatorships. Black radical women in the United States warned that the Korean War and US containment policy was a cover for the US’s imperialist designs. Anticommunist hysteria during the Korean War silenced these activists and erased them from historical memory. This project remedies that erasure and centers the anti-Korean War activism of Black radicals who argued that peace required the liberation of the most oppressed, thus, it meant Black liberation, women’s liberation, and self-determination for the colonized.
Denise Lynn is Professor and Chair of History, Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana. Her research focuses on women in the American Communist Party. Dr. Lynn is the Vice-President of the Historians of American Communism and the editor of its journal American Communist History. Dr. Lynn is the author of Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz? Gender, Spycraft, and Anti-Stalinism in the Early Cold War and Women March for Peace: Black Radical Women’s Anti-Korean War Activism from the University of Massachusetts Press and Claudia Jones: Visions of a Socialist America from Polity Press.
Forthcoming
forthcoming