Book Review Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet indictment of US racism 1928-1937

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Meredith L. Roman, Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937.

[University of Nebraska Press 2012]

 At the beginning of the 21st century many of Clio's devotees have successfully caught up with the reality of the end of the Cold War. In the Anglo-American context, relevant scholarly periodicals - American Communist History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and the Communist History Network Newsletter - and undertakings like the Historians of American Communism (HOAC), the Cold War International Project (CWIHP), the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies (HPCWS), the Yale Russian Archive Project, the Stalin-Era Research & Archive Project, and the Parallel History Project have responded to profound geopolitical and historical changes  in the contemporary world. Likewise, a small band of young historians have offered new, innovative scholarship informed by post-Cold War realities. At the top of the list of these young historians stand Randi Storch, Robin Kelly, Edward Johanningsmeier, Penny Von Eschen, and Mary L. Dudziak, among many others.

In the area of comparative African American and Cold War/Soviet history, a few recent outstanding monographs include Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York:  NYU Press, 2011); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). This fresh variety of revisionist scholarship would have been unthinkable just a generation ago when many, but by no means all, American historians willingly labored as patriotic soldiers in the anticommunist Cold War. However, the new generation of post-Cold War historians has indeed ushered in a new era of advanced historiography. The outlook for the future is bright with scholarly possibilities.

Professor Roman's new book clearly establishes her as a significant figure in this new academic epoch. A Michigan State University Ph.D. [2005] and a product of that institution's "vibrant Comparative Black History program," this young researcher offers us an important new study: Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937, published in the American heartland by the University of Nebraska Press. She was supervised in her graduate studies by a pioneering scholar in Soviet history, Lewis Siegelbaum. Dr. Roman is now Associate Professor of History at SUNY-Brockport.

Most new professional historians can only hope to write such a successful first tome that makes a major contribution to their field of specialization. Roman's excellent study scrutinizes the years of Third Period and Popular Front Communist policies during the late 1920s through the 1930s. This was a time when Soviet leaders concentrated sharply on attacking American racial injustices and elevated antiracism to a high priority. Needless to say, the Soviets utilized this strategy for propaganda benefits in their domestic and foreign policies. However, it also served the legitimate purpose of focusing global awareness on American racism and the customary breaches of human rights inflicted upon African American citizens in the United States during the 20th century.

There is depth in Roman's book. Indeed, she explores how the Soviet approach to racism in the United States exposed American white supremacist views about black inferiority. The best refutation of white racist ideology was the successes of black Americans. Representing a variety of diverse class and political backgrounds, a number of African American writers, politicos and thinkers contributed significantly to Soviet antiracist efforts. To be sure, they helped officials in Moscow challenge the United States' claim to be the world's foremost example of democracy and freedom. Undeniably, they pointed out the shortcomings of the American "myth of superior virtue" during the Cold War.

Professor Roman's engaging opus is a major achievement. She uses illustrative case studies to reinforce her historical arguments. For example, to show the Soviet rejection of racial intolerance during this period, their leaders utilized the trial and chastisement of two white American workers in Russia who attacked an African American laborer named Robert Robinson. Accordingly, this particular Black victim served as the model for Black workers discovering real liberty and social justice during the Stalinist period.

Roman also demonstrates how the Soviets scored a triumph in the way they handled the infamous Scottsboro affair during the Thirties. This case involved an undeniable frame-up reinforced by cooperative all-white southern juries, sham trials, and even an attempted lynching. On March 25, 1931, Alabama police detained nine young African American men at a railroad stop not far from Scottsboro, Alabama. In the process, they encountered two white women-who promptly accused the young men of raping them. Soon after, all-white juries found the nine youths guilty and eight of them were sentenced to death. Although many Americans were outraged by the injustices of the case, the loudest voices raised in protest were those of members of the Communist Party USA. Many white Communists spoke out, but Black Communists took the lead in organizing public protests and legal responses. The case is now widely considered by historians to be an iconic case of a racist miscarriage of justice that led to the end of all-white juries in the South.

During the 1930s, Black Americans connected to Soviet society clearly understood that many of the people in the Socialist Homeland, a world away, comprehended the injustices of the Scottsboro case and the savagery of American white racism in general. Roman reveals in Opposing Jim Crow that for the Soviets their antiracist sensibilities were formed through show trials, antiracist promotions, and powerful depictions of the evils of the racial caste system [segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching] in the United States. For many observers, it was through exposing American racism that the Soviet Union presented itself as a morally superior, raceless society. This dynamic was part of a concerted effort to construct a new Socialist Man in the USSR during the 1930s.

Roman has written an important book that breaks new ground and will be valued by a wide variety of scholars. Everything that went into the making of it was done with great care.

 

 

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