Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.3.1.0046
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Pages: 46-66
• Author: Charisse Burden-Stelly
• Subject Matter: US Fascism,anti-fascism,Black radicalism,Cold War,CPUSA,Claudia Jones

46 Volume Three, Number One

Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism,

and the Threat of US Fascism

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science

Carleton College

Abstract: This article examines the ways that the Black Communist luminary Claudia Jones theorized

the fascist threat in the United States in the early Cold War era. Drawing on her political thought and

that of her comrades, the article begins by dening the peculiar brand of US fascism that loomed large

in the minds of Black radicals who critiqued and militated against global capitalist exploitation. Then,

“the longue durée of McCarthyism” is employed as an analytical framework to explicate the post-

World War II “fascist-like” political formation that both preceded and exceeded Wisconsin Senator

Joseph McCarthy’s reign of repression. The next section highlights Jones’s analysis of the 1940 Alien

Registration Act, commonly known as the Smith Act, which was the rst peacetime sedition act in US

history. The focus of the nal section is Jones’s critique of, and subjection to, the Internal Security Act

of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act, which President Harry S. Truman unsuccessfully vetoed.

As Jones’s biographers Buzz Johnson and Carole Boyce Davies note, taken together, the Smith Act and

the McCarran Act created the conditions for the persecution of thousands of progressives, launched

an all-out attack on their civil rights, and laid the foundation for immigration checks, deportation,

and harassment particularly aimed at Black people. Ultimately, the lives of many Black anticapitalists,

including Jones, Paul Robeson, C.L.R. James, and Ferdinand Smith were fundamentally disrupted by

this “strong anti-Black and anti-communist hysteria” that portended the rise of fascism in the United

States.

Keywords: US Fascism, anti-fascism, Black radicalism, Cold War, CPUSA, Claudia Jones

Introducon: Fascism from Hitlerism to McCarthyism

On December 5, 1955, the United States government ordered the deportation of Claudia Jones,

a prolic leader and theorist in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA),

who, though Trinidadian by birth, had spent most of her life stateside.1 Her expulsion was

the culmination of years of harassment, surveillance, and state repression, primarily under the

auspices of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Act) and the Internal Security Act of

1950 (McCarran Act). This anticommunist violence experienced by Jones and her fellow party

1 See e.g., “Chronology,” in Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment ed. Carole. Boyce Davies (Boulder: Lynne

Reiner Publishers, 2011), xv; Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia

Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 131-66; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Alderson Story: My

Life as a Political Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 115-21; Buzz Johnson,“I Think of

My Mother”: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones (London: Karia Press, 1985), 49-53; and Marika

Sherwood, ed., Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 20-34.

The Journal of Intersectionality

47Volume Three, Number One

members was one aspect of what she feared was the rise of fascism in the United States. After

World War II (WWII), Jones theorized, the threat of US fascism was manifested in the rise in

white supremacist terrorism, especially against Black people; the entrenchment of “Wall Street

imperialism,” which included the subjugation of labor domestically and economic domination

internationally; warmongering and militarism; and, of course, the government’s utilization of

anticommunism to crush the CPUSA and to cripple all progressive thought and activism. As the

National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership argued in 1955, Jones was being persecuted

because she fought against the “fascist-like abuses of the Negro people in the South,” because

she fought for world peace, and for her political views in general. Jones’s “forcible ejection,” the

Committee reprimanded, exemplied “the continuing abuse of the rights of colored people by

the use of anti-Communist hysteria”—a practice that had been a cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s

Germany in the not-too-distant past.2

Jones’s postwar anti-fascism is not surprising given that it was the spread of fascism in

the 1930s that drew her to the CPUSA. In particular, she was impressed by how the Party spoke

about the linked fates of Africans who were menaced by fascist Italy and African Americans who

were terrorized by white supremacy. “I was impressed by the Communist speakers,” she wrote to

her comrade William Z. Foster in 1955, “who explained the reasons for this brutal crime against

young Negro boys [the Scottsboro Nine]; and who related the Scottsboro case to the struggle

of the Ethiopian people against fascism and Mussolini’s invasion.”3 When the Italian fascist

Benito Mussolini ordered the invasion of Abyssinia on October 3, 1935, anticapitalist activists,

organizers, and intellectuals throughout the African diaspora immediately connected this

aggression against one of the only African countries that had evaded colonial rule to European

colonialism, white supremacy in the United States, Euro-American imperialism, and world war.4

As long as Africans continued to be treated as inferior “others” to be ruled by Europeans, the

Pan-African Marxist George Padmore contended, the threat of fascist tyranny would always

be present.5 As early as 1934, the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers

(ITUCNW), founded in July 1928 during the Sixth Congress of the Communist International,

appealed to the global proletariat to rally against Italy’s war provocations. Every subsequent issue

of the ITUCNW’s newspaper, The Negro Worker, defended Abyssinian sovereignty, condemned

the imperialist encroachment upon the country’s territory, and warned that fascist Italy’s actions

represented a step toward another world war.6 “The struggle against fascism and war,” the paper

enjoined, was part of a larger freedom struggle that included “[the] ght for the release of class

war prisoners, [the] ght for the release of the Scottsboro boys and Angelo Herndon, [and]

2 Johnson 1985: 55-7.

3 Jones in Davies 2011: 13-14.

4 Here, the use of “anticapitalist” can be understood as e.g., socialist, communist, Marxist, anarchist, radical

Pan-Africanist, and revolutionary nationalist thought and activism that, despite signicant ideological dif-

ferences, understand capitalism as an economic, political, and social system of exploitation, expropriation,

dispossession, domination, and class antagonism. Anticapitalists of African descent, in particular, analyze

this system to be inextricable from racist oppression, which intensies its deleterious effects on those on the

darker side of the color-line, and especially those racialized as Black.

5 Munro 2017: 48-9.

6 Adi 2013: 175-6.