“Dirty War: Claudia Jones and Opposition to the Indochina War”

Abstract

Claudia Jones was an advocate of “positive peace.” Positive peace, as it was explained by Johan Goltung, is “the absence of structural violence” which involves the “egalitarian distribution of power and resources.” Positive peace is not just the absence of war and violence (defined as negative peace), but it also includes justice for all people and “the elimination of the root causes of war, violence, and injustice” and a concerted and unified effort to create and uphold a just society. For Jones, this could only be achieved under socialism. She argued that capitalism fomented war, colonialism, and imperialism and it used state violence to secure control over resources and cheap labor. The advent of the Cold War increased the anxiety of individuals like Jones who feared that it made hot war a likely eventuality. Jones argued that the US commitment to containment meant policing the poor and the “darker side of the color line.” She theorized a notion of peace that proposed the destruction of capitalism and the structures it relied on to maintain power; this included racism, sexism, and the prevention of labor organization. Jones was also an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist and she recognized that US containment policy was merely a re-branding of both. Though Jones died before the US escalated conflict in Vietnam, she watched events in Indochina with trepidation and she argued that the US was heading toward war there.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Oshadhi Herath, “A Critical Analysis of Positive and Negative Peace,” 2016, http://repository.kln.ac.lk/bitstream/handle/123456789/12056/journal1%20%281%29.104-107.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed June 30, 2022).

2 Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, editors, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2019), 2.

3 Claudia Jones to Comrade Foster, 6 December 1955, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York.

4 Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (New York: International Publishers, 2021), 78–81.

5 Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Claudia Jones, the Longue Duree of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism,” Journal of Intersectionality, 3, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 47–9.

6 Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” Political Affairs (March 1950), 32–4.

7 With the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the anti-Vietnam war movement is no longer the largest social movement. Mitchell K. Hall, “The Vietnam Era Antiwar Movement,” OAH Magazine of History (October 2004): 13; Leilah Danielson, “’It is a day of judgement:’ The Peacemakers, Religion, and Radicalism in Cold War America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 18, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 216.

8 Hall, “The Vietnam Era Antiwar Movement,” 13; Danielson, “’It is a day of judgement,’” 216, 236; Leilah Danielson, “Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War: A. J. Muste’s Challenge to Realism and Empire,” Diplomatic History, 30, no. 4 (September 2006): 656, 664.

9 Danielson, “’It is a day of judgement,’” 216, 236; Danielson, “Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War,” 656, 664.

10 Danielson, “Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War,” 236; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Journeys for Peace and Liberation: Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism during the US war in Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review, 76, no. 4 (November 2007): 578.

11 Tzu-Chun Wu, “Journeys for Peace and Liberation,” 581-582.

12 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 3.

13 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “The US 1968: Third Worldism, Feminisms, and Liberalisms,” American Historical Review (June 2018): 711.

14 Tzu-Chun Wu, “The US 1968,” 713; Joanne Nagel, Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections and Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); See: Lynn, D. ‘Gender violence as genocide: the Rosa Lee Ingram case and We Charge Genocide petition’. Radical Americas 7, no. 1 (2022): 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2022.v7.1.001

15 Yulia Granskova, The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South, and the Cold War: Defending the Rights of Women of the ‘Whole World?’ (London: Routledge, 2021), 86; Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting Fascism and Forging new Political Activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Global Cold War History: Local and Global Change, edited by Jadwiga E. Piper and Fabio Lanza (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 53–4; Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: the Women’s International Democratic Federation and decolonisation struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review, 25, no. 6 (2016): 925.

16 “To the Women of Korea,” WIDF Information Bulletin, June 1950, 1, Box 4, Folder 5, Women’s International Democratic Federation Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; Taewoo Kim, “Frustrated Peace: Investigatory Activities by the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in North Korea during the Korean War,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, 20, no. 1 (April 2020): 84, 87, 97.

17 Claudia Jones, ““Half the World”,” The Worker, December 9, 1951, 8; Erik McDuffie, “For a new Anti-fascist, Anti-imperialist people’s coalition: Claudia Jones, Black Left Feminism, and the Politics of Possibility in the era of Trump,” in Post-Cold War Revelations and the American Communist Party, eds. Vernon L. Pedersen, James G. Ryan, and Katherine A.S. Sibley (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 194.

18 McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: the Women’s International Democratic Federation and decolonisation struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” 929; Granskova, The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South, and the Cold War, 85-86; Alain Ruscio, "Il y a 60 ans, Raymonde Dien et Henri Martin", L’Humanité, 11 March 2010 https://www.humanite.fr/node/434397 (accessed July 20, 2022); Kim, “Frustrated Peace,” 88.

19 Claudia Jones, “Half the World,” The Worker, November 4, 1951, 11.

20 Claudia Jones, “Half the World,” Daily Worker, May 21, 1950, 11.

21 Claudia Jones, “Women Crusade for Peace,” The Worker Magazine, March 12, 1950, 1; Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” Political Affairs, March 1950, 34; Denise Lynn, “Deporting Black Radicalism: Claudia Jones’s Deportation and Policing Blackness in the Cold War,” Twentieth Century Communism, Issue 18 (2020): 39–63.

22 Roosevelt Ward, Toward Bright Tomorrows: World Youth United for Peace and Freedom (New York: Challenge, 1950), 6; Gabriel d’Arboussier, “Today our reply will be-Wait!” Freedom, April 1951, 6.

23 Claudia Jones, “The Struggle for Peace in the United States,” Political Affairs, Vol. 31, 2 (February 1952): 1.

24 Jones, “The Struggle for Peace in the United States,” 2–3.

25 Claudia Jones, “’Dirty War:” Negro Americans oppose US intervention in Indochina War,” Negro Affairs Quarterly, June 1954, 2.

26 Jones, “’Dirty War,’” 2.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Paul Robeson, “Ho Chi Minh is Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo China,” Freedom (March 1954): 1, 2.

33 Carol Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 142–3.

34 Zifeng Liu, “Decolonization is not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones, China’s Nuclear Weapons, and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity,” The Journal of Intersectionality, 3, no. 2 (2019): 21.

35 “South Vietnamese People’s Armed Units Wipe Out ‘Special Forces Training Camp,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, December 1963, 9.

36 Dr. Ranjana Sidhant, “Asia Today,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, 10.

37 Dr. Ranjana Sidhant,” Asia Today: Vietnam War May Spread,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, 10.

38 Claudia Jones to A. Manchanda, August 1964, Box 2, Folder 14, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Schomburg Library, Harlem, New York.

39 Claudia Jones to A. Manchanda, August 1964, Box 2, Folder 14, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Schomburg Library, Harlem, New York; “Their Cry Peace-and Their Cry is heard,” and “US Aggression shall be defeated in Vietnam,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, August-September 1964, 1.

40 Claudia Jones, “US Aggression,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, August-September 1964, 4.

41 Abahimanyu Manchanda, “Dear Claudia! We Shall Hold High your Banner of Anti-Imperialism,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, December-January 1965, 5; Interview with Winston Pinder, May 7, 2022. Though Pinder did mention Jones’s commitment to politics, it should also be noted he had no love for Manchanda; Abahimanyu Manchanda, “US Imperialism get out of South Vietnam – Demand World’s People,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, February 1965, 10–11.

42 “US Imperialist Aggressors – Get out of Vietnam,” West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News, February 1965, 1; Jones, “The Struggle for Peace in the United States,” 2–3; Excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam”: Speech at Riverside Church Meeting, New York, NY., April 4, 1967. In Clayborn Carson, et al., Eyes on the Prize: A Reader and Guide (New York: Penguin, 1987), 201–4.