Both sides in civil rights battle said the other aided Communism

Walter White, the head of the NAACP, came to Springfield in 1949 and said the subjugation and terrorizing of blacks gave Communists fodder for their propaganda against the U.S. This brochure is on display at the Heritage Center for Black History Month.

Barbara Perenic/Staff Photo Walter White, the head of the NAACP, came to Springfield in 1949 and said the subjugation and terrorizing of blacks gave Communists fodder for their propaganda against the U.S. This brochure is on display at the Heritage Center for Black History Month.

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 7:06 PM Sunday, February 5, 2012

If the name Walter White means anything to people these days, it’s connected with the lead character in the cable television show “Breaking Bad.”

But when then-NAACP Executive Director Walter White came to Springfield in January 1949, he argued that the U.S. was giving Communist Soviet Union a huge propaganda break every time Americans failed to stand up to racial discrimination.

A program from Walter White’s Springfield appearance is part of the Black History Month exhibit that opens Wednesday at the Heritage Center of Clark County. Admission is free.

White’s visit was hosted by the Wesleyan Union at a meeting led by the Rev. W.P. Kellogg of Wiley Methodist Church.

In a nod to an earlier form of what’s now called multiculturalism, the invocation was given by Rabbi Sidney Brooks. A reception followed in the North Street AME Church.

“Last night at Athens, Ohio, the Ku Klux Klan burned a fiery cross in front of the home of a nearby Negro family,” White told a large crowd in Springfield’s Memorial Hall.

“As we sit here tonight, news of this is being sent over the world, destroying our democratic reputation,” he said.

“Imagine the field day Moscow radio will have if the 17 Southern senators carry out their threat to filibuster against civil rights legislation,” he added.

White also invoked the specter of Hitler.

Saying that while in Germany he had asked how people could have fallen for Hitler’s theories of racial superiority, White said he heard the response: “How can you ask us that, when you have a segregated Army with whites and Negroes openly antagonistic to each other?”

“Your soldiers and officers tell us privately that they believe Hitler was right in attempting to wipe the Jews from the face of the Earth,” White said he was told.

“And, at the same time,” he said, “we presume to tell the rest of the world how it should conduct its affairs.”

White called blacks burned out of their homes by the Klan “displaced persons, just as the Jews who were driven from their homes in Nazi Germany,” and complained that Americans had displaced their own values in putting off the struggle for civil rights.

“All presidents, including the great (Franklin) Roosevelt, had always told us that the time wasn’t right — that it would have to be a slow process — and that they couldn’t afford to antagonize the South,” he said.

He praised Harry Truman, who would be inaugurated days later, for being the exception, then claimed that the support of blacks was critical in his election.

Arguing “it is well within the range of possibility that by 1952 ... there will be more than 2 million Negro voters in the South,” White declared that “now is the time in human history that democracy can prove its belief in freedom.”

That, of course, did not happen.

Nor was White’s side of the civil rights battle the only to say the other side was furthering the cause of Communism.

Three months to the day after reporting White’s speech, the front page of Springfield’s morning newspaper, The Sun, reported the testimony of a black man who said he’d been trained in the Soviet Union to help organize blacks in the South to rise up in revolution and establish a black nation across the old Confederacy.

Parroting a pattern in the Gettysburg Address, the story added: “Out of this blood bath was to come a new Negro nation, conceived in violence and dedicated to extending the Communist revolution throughout the United States.”

Opponents of civil rights sought to pair fear of greater freedom for blacks with fear of the Soviet Union, trying to show both as part of a new world order they didn’t want to live in.

In the midst of the Cold War, the two sides of the civil rights struggle may have agreed on just one thing: To use the hammer and sickle from the Soviet flag to attack one another’s positions as being an enemy to American freedom.

Contact this reporter  at (937) 328-0368 or Tom.Stafford@coxinc.com.

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