Red Scare repression silenced antiracists to enforce assimilationist orthodoxy

Evidence

In 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started leading a witch hunt for “Communists,” meaning virtually anyone critical of the dominant ideas of the day, such as capitalism, America’s pro-colonial policy abroad, northern assimilation, and southern segregation. Walter White and his right-hand man Roy Wilkins had to keep the NAACP’s legal activism and uplift suasion carefully within the status quo of anti-communism and assimilation. “The Negro wants change in order that he may be brought in line with the American standard,” Wilkins wrote in The Crisis in December 1951. Meanwhile, antiracists and socialists, and certainly antiracist socialists, were being threatened, fired, arrested, and jailed on trumped-up charges. An eighty-two-year-old Du Bois was arrested (and exonerated) in 1951. The US State Department revoked Du Bois’s passport, as it did Paul Robeson’s, and attempted to silence the St. Louis–born Black dancer Josephine Baker in France, all to manage the freedom brand of the United States abroad. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 920

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core thesis — policy (repression, anti-communism) driven by self-interest precedes and silences ideas, incl. Du Bois’s. Connects to later chapters on how assimilationist framing disciplined civil rights movements. — connects to: The orthodox model’s ban on disagreement suppressed heterodoxy and worsened later conflict. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 787