General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We Live In The Emotional And Economic Wreckage Of This Broken Home.... [View all]The Magistrate
(96,043 posts)It may even be that I consider the intellectual left placed less importance on the "Negro Question" than you think it did in the earlier periods we are discussing.
I agree completely that the racial divide was always there. Intellectual left leadership tried pretty hard to ignore it, and in fairness the portion of left intellectual leadership here in those days which was foreign born may not have appreciated quite how endemic to this country that divide was. To return to the original metaphore for a moment, as in many marriages, important differences and difficulties can be papered over or looked away from for quite some time --- until some incident makes doing so any longer impossible for one or both parties.
I will remain of the view that the wide left focus on anti-colonialism after WWI did have significant effect on intellectual left attitudes towards race questions here. Anti-Colonialism made great play with the color bar which was so prominent a feature of African and Asian imperial possessions, and the United States was unique among developed countries of the day in having an 'internal color bar' enforced by law in a section of the country.
I remain of the view as well that lingering and largely unintended after-effects of propagandizing against Nazi doctrines of Aryan supremacy during the Second World War had a great effect on the social and political climate in which the Civil Rights movement operated in the fifties and sixties, and were very beneficial to it.