Missiles have no colour: African Americans' reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis

Abstract

This article focuses on the reaction of African Americans to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As will be demonstrated, their reaction was one of strong support for the government's decisions, in spite of the high risks involved and the harsh ongoing domestic struggle for civil rights. Evidence of this support will include examples of personal reactions by prominent black leaders and intellectuals. Also, an episode of segregation which occurred during the crisis will be used to show how in those days of emergency their struggle for equality persisted. The interconnections between domestic civil rights and foreign policy issues will be highlighted.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Helen Franzen, Laura Stanley, Miluska Scheltema Kooij.

Notes

¹ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), 506.

² For an essential overview, see: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965); Thomas Paterson, Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy 1961–1963 (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ernst R. May, Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); Sheldon M. Stern, Averting the Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Aleksandr Fursenko, Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997); The Global Cuban Missile crisis at 50, CWIHP Bulletin, No.17/18, Fall 2012.

³ Alice George, Awaiting Armageddon: How the Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

⁴ On the issue of mutual influence between civil rights struggle and US foreign policy, see: Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael L. Krenn, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land. World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Michael L. Krenn (ed.), Race and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present: A Collection of Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), in particular Vol. 4 and 5 (Race and U.S. Foreign Policy during the Cold War; The African American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II); James E. Westheider, Fighting on two fronts. African Americans and the Vietnam war (New York: New York University Press, 1997). On the growing involvement of African Americans in international affairs and the ways this intertwined with their domestic struggle for freedom, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power. African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), particularly 95–129. On a consequent aspect of this growing influence of race on US foreign policy, i.e. JFK's new, stronger approach to Africa, see Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans. John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), particularly pp.199–203; Thomas Noer, Soapy. A biography of G. Mennen Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 223–271; James Meriwether, ‘Worth a lot of Negro votes’, Journal of American History, Vol. 95, No. 3 (December 2008), 737–763. The latter stresses JFK's political use of Africa in the 1960 campaign to appeal to black voters without committing too much on civil rights issues that risked alienating him pivotal Southern whites votes.

⁵ Figures taken from the report We, The American Blacks, U.S. Census Bureau, 1993 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993), 4.

⁶ For instance, the ‘Brown v. Board of Education's sentence, banning segregation in public schools (1954), or the desegregation of interstate buses (ICC Rules 1955, 1961) and terminals (‘Boynton v. Virginia’ case, 1960).

⁷ For accounts of this and other key episodes of those years, see Frank Lambert, The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Clayborne Carson, et al., Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 2003); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Harvard Sitkoff, Struggle for Black equality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement (New York: Penguin Books, 1989); Henry Hampton, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991). Cary Fraser, ‘Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: the Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race in US Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring 2000), 233–264.

⁸ An ironic remark linking the two events also resurfaced on October 27, again by Robert Kennedy. While the Ex-Comm briefly discussed contingency plans for Cuba in case of an invasion, the Attorney General quipped: ‘He [the Army] goes from Mississippi from Cuba?’ Laughter followed. See tapes transcripts: The Presidential Recordings, John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises, Vol.3, 509 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001) and audio recordings, Tape 42, Miller Center website: http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/presidentialrecordings/kennedy/1962/10_1962. Apart from this remark, the Ex-Comm tapes appear to contain no evidence of African American issues being discussed in those days of crisis, as priority was obviously being given to decision making, rather than to analyse segments of popular reactions.

⁹ See, for instance, Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 155; Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 240–241. Even Schlesinger in his first and largely eulogistic account of the Kennedy presidency acknowledges that at the beginning of his term, Kennedy ‘had, at this point, a terrible ambivalence about the civil rights.’ Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 930.

¹⁰ ‘As the year 1962 came to a close, there were still wide-spread feelings among Negroes that the Kennedy Administration was moving too slowly in the area of civil rights.’ ‘Negro Progress in 1962’, Ebony (Chicago), January 1963, 85. ‘If I were he, I certainly would move faster’, said African American congressman Gus Hawkins. Ebony, February 1963, 42. Also, by 1962 African Americans activists were putting pressure on Kennedy to live up to his electoral promise of eliminating segregation in federal housing programs simply ‘with the stroke of a pen’ (that is, by executive order). After the first year of his administration passed with no such order signed, activists started sending ‘thousands of pens to the White House’ to remind Kennedy of his promise. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 156.

¹¹ Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 264.

¹² According to a national estimate reported in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (George, Awaiting Armageddon, xviii).

¹³ Tom V. Smith, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. Public’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 67 (Summer 2003), 271. The survey was taken in 30 different areas of the country.

¹⁴ Chang, Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile crisis, 381.

¹⁵ George, Awaiting Armageddon, xviii.

¹⁶Radio Free Dixie Broadcasts, 26 October 1962, Robert F. Williams papers. M 4389, Reel 11, Group 1, Series 7, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Berlin (henceforth, RWP, M 4389, 11, 1 7, JFKI). See also M. Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight. Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 181–182. On Williams, see Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hil: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

¹⁷Radio Free Dixie Broadcast, 26 October 1962; see also his poem ‘Herr John Kennedy’, in the newsletter The Crusader, October-November 1962, 4. (RWP, M 4389, 11, 1 7, JFKI)

¹⁸Radio Free Dixie Broadcast, 18 October 1962; ‘U.S. Racism and Imperialism’, The Crusader, October-November 1962, 7. (RWP, M 4389, 11, 1 7, JFKI)

¹⁹Radio Free Dixie Broadcast, 26 October 1962. (RWP, M 4389, 11, 1 7, JFKI).

²⁰ ‘Man, can you imagine those racist thugs in D.C. talking about a blockade of Cuba?… Those paddys are asking,what they call coons, to die in a phoney crusade of Jim Crowed democracy…. You see, if Mr. Charlie comeshere, I'm gonna see Ku Klux Klan written all over him…’ Ibid.

²¹ ‘U.S. Racism and Imperialism’, The Crusader, October-November 1962, 7. See also, in The Crusader, January 1963, 8, his poem ‘All in the papers’ (‘To the brink! There's no turning back / God damn white's cities are turning black /…Threaten Khrushchev – spill the blood of Cuba / A white boy named Crow Jim is jazzing up a tuba’). (RWP, M 4389, 11, 1 7, JFKI)

²²Jet (Chicago), November 8 1962, 12.

²³ ‘Rally Around’, New York Amsterdam News (New York), October 27 1962, 12.

²⁴ ‘Harlemites Backing President's Stand’, New York Amsterdam News, October 27 1962, 1.

²⁵ King released a critical declaration and added his name to a petition condemning the attempted invasion. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Castro in Harlem: A Cold War Watershed, in Allen Hunter, ed., Rethinking the Cold War:Essays on Its Dynamics, Meaning, and Morality (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), 147. The black press too was more critical of the Bay of Pigs, blaming it on ‘elements in the government whom they regarded as antagonistic to blacks’. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind. Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1953–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

²⁶ ‘Struggle for integration must continue, King says’, Crimson (Cambridge, MA), October 25 1962.

²⁷Jet, November 8 1962, 17. Incidentally, this comment was also quoted later by Robert Williams in his newsletter, with the word ‘military’ put in capital letters, in criticism of King's supposed non-violent attitude. The Crusader, January 1963, 3. Robert F. Williams papers. M4389, Reel 11, Group 1, Series 7.

²⁸ The quotation marks here suggested some doubts on the suitableness of a term that was recurrent in public comments of those weeks.

²⁹ Martin Luther King, ‘New Year Hopes’, New York Amsterdam News, January 5 1963.

³⁰ Mays expressed the reasons for his support (‘these are times when…the urgency of the situation cannot wait for weeks of debate in the United Nations’) while expressing a preference for diplomacy (‘we hope that the President will seize every opportunity to negotiate our differences with Russia, or any other nation. The people of the earth do not deserve a nuclear war.’) Benjamin E. Mays, ‘My View: I Support the President’, Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh), November 10, 1962, 14.

³¹ Kennedy's speech, Granger argued, had been ‘‘brinkmanship’ in its most naked form’. Whether this was ‘shrewd or foolhardy remains to be seen; meanwhile the country gangs up behind him whether we want to or not. For this is our country – the only one we'll ever have; … So, let us pray.’ (Lester Granger, ‘Manhattan and Beyond’, New York Amsterdam News, November 3 1962, 3).

³² Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

³³ Philip Randolph Papers, M 4321, Reel 2. John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin.

³⁴ ‘Castro and K Went Too Far’, Baltimore Afro-American (Baltimore), October 27 1962, 4.

³⁵ ‘President had to do it’, Baltimore Afro-American, November 3 1962, 1; ‘Courier Survey Shows Population Behind JFK's Stand’, Pittsburgh Courier, October 27, 1962, 1; ‘Cuba Action Gets Unanimous Backing Among Southsiders’, Chicago Defender, October 24 1962, 10.

³⁶Jet, November 8, 1962, 17.

³⁷ ‘Drop Jim Crow Setup in New Orleans Civil Defense’, Jet, November 8 1962, 10.

³⁸ Branch, Parting the Waters, 673.

³⁹ ‘I Spied on Castro's Cuba. Captain Hennagan Helped to Expose the Missile Plot’, Ebony, April 1963, 1, 115–123. For these missions, Capt. Hennagan would later be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the nation's second highest decoration for combat, as another black magazine, the ‘Negro Digest’, would later proudly note. ‘Desegregation of the Air Force’, Negro Digest (Chicago), March 1965, 19.

⁴⁰ ‘The Voice of Wisdom’, Chicago Defender (Chicago), December 11 1962, 12.

⁴¹ ‘Negroes and Missiles’, Chicago Defender, November 24, 1962, 8.

⁴² Kennedy's address, Robinson wrote, was ‘magnificent and stirring’. ‘All True Americans Back JFK in Crisis’, Chicago Defender, November 3 1962, 8.

⁴³ George S. Schuyler, ‘The World Today’, Pittsburgh Courier, November 24 1962, 12. Mid-term elections on November 6, 1962 resulted in a strong performance by the Democratic Party. However, experts disagree about the real impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the electoral results. See George, Awaiting Armageddon, 133–134.

⁴⁴ John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: the Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 322.

⁴⁵ Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 259.

⁴⁶ Rustin was a Quaker, a member of the War Resisters League and an early activist for nuclear disarmament.

⁴⁷ ‘300 Harlemites Rally in Protest of ‘Military Intervention in Cuba’’, Washington Afro-American, October 30 1962, 8. ‘We must not permit the same people who oppress us here in the US to launch a neo-colonial attack on the brave Cuban people.… Three – fourths of the human race is black. It's our world. We resent your unilateral threats to destroy it.’ Selma Sparks, former secretary of the NY chapter of the NALC.

⁴⁸ Subsequently, an offer to set up an appointment with Carl Rowan (the only coloured member of the US mission at the UN) was rejected by the protesters as an ‘implied jim-crow appointment’. They asked to talk directly with Adlai Stevenson instead. ‘300 Harlemites Rally in Protest of ‘Military Intervention in Cuba’’, Washington Afro-American, October 30. 1962, 8.

⁴⁹ Atti Parlamentari, Verbali della Camera dei Deputati, Seduta del 26-10-1962, 35163.

⁵⁰ On May 1963, for instance, he was on the cover of Time magazine, as a spokesman for the civil rights movement.

⁵¹ Dwight McBride, James Baldwin Now (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 295. See also Harold Bloom, James Baldwin (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2005), 55.

⁵² Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974) 119.

⁵³ ‘Baldwin Connects Race Relations in U.S. to International Affairs’, Crimson, October 26 1962.

⁵⁴ ‘Baldwin Portrays Urgency of Negro Problem in U.S.’, Crimson, November 9 1962.

⁵⁵ This was the first time Davis heard Marcuse, to whom she would become student and academic assistant.

⁵⁶ Davis, An Autobiography, 119–120.

⁵⁷ Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks; Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Pathfinder, 1969), 183. See also Plummer, Rising Wind, 310, confirming that ‘Malcolm X linked Cuba to civil rights’.

⁵⁸ Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: the Story of the Black Panther Party and of Huey P Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1991), 13. A slightly different account of this episode can be found in Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage. Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: The New York Times books, 1978).

⁵⁹ Incidentally, Newton's definition of Cuba as a ‘liberated territory’ was precisely the opposite of the one used by Kennedy in his TV address (‘that imprisoned island’).

⁶⁰ Huey P Newton, David Hilliard (ed.), Donald Weise (ed.), The Huey P Newton Reader (New York: Seven stories press, 2011), 44.

⁶¹ Seale, Seize the Time, 13.

⁶² Newton, The Huey P Newton Reader, 44. This episode is also briefly recalled at the opening of Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: a Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 1–2.

⁶³ This concept is at the core of Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land.

⁶⁴ In 1962, Carmichael was a student of philosophy at Howard University. In his detailed autobiography, he only mentions the Cuban Missile Crisis once, in passing calling it the ‘U.S. missile crisis’, between inverted commas, probably to express his diffidence on the general representation of the crisis as a threat from Cuba to the US, rather than the other way round. Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] (New York: Scribner, 2003), 583.

⁶⁵ Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1937–1939–1976 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2010), 308–330 and in particular 329.

⁶⁶ Gerald Horne, Black and Red. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986), 328.

⁶⁷ W.E.B. DuBois papers, W.E.B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Many thanks to Anne L. Moore, special collections librarian, for her kind help.

⁶⁸ Besides, both of them in the Fifties had been subjected to passport confiscation by the State Department for having criticized the US abroad for racial discrimination (Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 61–63).

⁶⁹Jet, November 8 1962, 15. The request had been made by the mayors of Miami, Dallas, Chicago, and New York. Chicago mayor had recalled that in the days of Theodore Roosevelt, white and black troops had fought together for the independence of Cuba. Dallas Mayor Earl Cabell had invited the blacks to join with whites in presenting ‘a united front to the world’. Similar instances were also filtered from officials in the White House, concerned that episodes might cause international embarrassment to the US in the middle of the crisis. Ibid. A search through the papers of the NAACP did not reveal evidence of these matters having been discussed. NAACP papers, M4350, M4423, etc. John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin.

⁷⁰Jet, October 25 1962, 12–13. Also, in the same line was their chanting ‘Go to Cuba, Nigger Lovers, Go to Cuba!’ during those weeks. Branch, Parting the Waters, 663; Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 151.

⁷¹ Branch, Parting the Waters, 675.

⁷² The article identified O'Dell as ‘acting executive director of the SCLC’, while he was just an assistant. Richard Hack, Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium, 2004), 318

⁷³ Having never concealed from King his past contacts with those circles, O'Dell nonetheless denied being member of the party, and concluded ‘I have nothing to apologize for’. Branch, Parting the Waters, 676–677

⁷⁴ Namely, the Augusta Chronicle; Birmingham News; St. Louis Globe-Democrat; New Orleans Times-Picayune; and Long Island Star-Journal. Hack, Puppetmaster, 318. For confirmation that the FBI was behind this, see also Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, 355; and Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 251.

⁷⁵ Branch, Parting the Waters, 677–678. On the FBI use of the King – O'Dell connection, also see Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary. William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 184.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 679. A year later, Hoover would also manage to obtain from Robert Kennedy the notorious wiretap authorisation, installing bugs inside King's apartment. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 264.

⁷⁷ ‘Halt Segregation of Troops Called for Cuba’, Chicago Defender, November 3, 1962, 1. The story was also reported by the African American weekly of Jacksonville, FL. ‘Protest by NAACP Brings an End to Troops Segregation in Florida’, The Florida Star (Jacksonville), November 10 1962, 1. Robert Williams' Radio Free Dixie gave the news in these terms: ‘White racists in Tampa are fighting to retain their segregated way of life by Jimcrowing the U.S. personnel of the U.S. Air Force. Despite the pleas from Washington and the NACCP for the racists to consider the state of emergency and tolerate the negro soldiers for this short period, the racists are determined to keep these so-called defenders of the free world from spending what could be their last days on earth as first class citizens.’ What the report did not mention, however, perhaps in order to convince audiences of the unfruitfulness of such efforts, was that the NACCP intervention had succeeded in bringing that case of segregation to a halt. Radio Free Dixie broadcast, November 2, 1962. Robert F. Williams papers. M4389, Reel 11, Group 1, Series 7.

⁷⁸ This and the previous declarations are quoted from ‘The Spotlight Is Diverted but Rights Fight Goes on’, Jet, November 8 1962, 14–17.

⁷⁹ ‘Public backs JFK on Cuba’, Baltimore Afro-American, October 27 1962, 1, 14. ‘President Had to Do It’, Baltimore Afro-American, November 3 1962, 1–2

⁸⁰ ‘Quarantine on Segregated States Urged’, The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles), November 10 1962, 12

⁸¹ ‘Baldwin Connects Race Relations in U.S. to International Affairs’, Crimson, October 26 1962.

⁸² ‘All True Americans Back JFK in Crisis’, Chicago Defender, November 3 1962, 8.

⁸³ For a general outlook on the women's role in civil rights movement, see Freedom Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (Touchstone, New York, NY: 2001).

⁸⁴ ‘The Spotlight Is Diverted but Rights Fight Goes on’, Jet, November 8 1962, 14–17.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ ‘Daisy Bates Praises Kennedy's Cuba Stand’ and ‘Daisy Bates Finds Race Proud of Kennedy's Firm Stand on Cuba’, Chicago Defender, November 3 1962, 1. Such a statement of support was featured as the headline on the newspaper's front page.

⁸⁷ On these reports, Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 165–166, 293–294.

⁸⁸ ‘Robert Kennedy Links Cuban and Rights Crises’, The New York Times, October 29 1962, 10. See also ‘RFK Links Bias to Russia Tension’, New York Amsterdam News, November 3 1962, and ‘Robt. Kennedy Links Cuban Crisis, Rights Crisis’, Jet, November 8 1962, 4. Kennedy's speech got praise from the black press (‘Bob Kennedy's Coup’ Baltimore Afro-American, November 6 1962, 3).

⁸⁹ Further confirmation of a similar stand between blacks and whites on the issue of Cuba (though not on the missile crisis itself, but on the more generic prospect of invading Cuba in 1963, 1965) comes from Alfred O. Hero, Jr., ‘American Negroes and US Foreign Policy: 1937–1967’, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 13, No. 2 (June, 1969), 220–251, particularly 231, 249–250.

⁹⁰ The estimated percentage is in ‘How JFK Surpassed Abraham Lincoln’, Ebony, February 1964, 32. Slightly lower but basically analogous figures are in the Gallup and Harris surveys (quoted in Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 849), swaying between 68% and 78%.

⁹¹ Seale, A Lonely Rage, 124.

⁹² ‘Negroes Back Kennedy, Rebuff Republican Bid’, The Florida Star, November 17, 1962, 2.

⁹³ For instance, ‘How JFK Surpassed Abraham Lincoln’, Ebony, February 1964, 25–34.

⁹⁴ NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois, writing on the July 1918 issue of the association's magazine, invited his black compatriots not to hesitate. ‘Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens (…)’. ‘Close Ranks’, The Crisis (New York), July 1918, 111. In the next issue of the magazine, he reiterated ‘if this is OUR country, then this is OUR war.’ ‘A Philosophy in Time of War’, The Crisis, August 1918, 164.

⁹⁵ ‘Double V’ was the slogan popularized by The Pittsburgh Courier in early 1942, calling for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. See Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land, 279.

⁹⁶ Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States 1950–1953 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 321.

⁹⁷ On December 8, 1941, a meeting of the NAACP had affirmed that blacks would give ‘unqualified support to the protection of their country’ during the ongoing war, but added that ‘at the same time we shall not abate one iota our struggle for full citizenship rights here in the United States.’ Quoted in Alan M. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces during World War II: the Problems of Race Relations, 11 Washington, DC: U.S. Government. Printing Office, 1977.

⁹⁸ ‘At the very start of war, the black press and leading civil rights groups had generally been supportive of the administration's Korean policy.… But all these voices were also quick to condemn the continued existence of segregation in the armed service’. This commitment prompted the NAACP to send the lawyer Thurgood Marshall to Korea in 1951, in order to investigate charges of racism in the Army. Casey, Selling the Korean War, 321.

⁹⁹ Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 166.

¹⁰⁰ Such a circumstance was also smartly brought to the attention of the White House by NAACP Secretary Roy Wilkins in a 1961 memorandum. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 156.

¹⁰¹ Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 866. This also opens up a path for further research. Scholars who are in a position to access the archives of those African countries may verify if the evidence matches Schlesinger's causal link. The issue went unaddressed in Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, containing a section on the Cuban Missile Crisis (213–222) but without access to African documents.

¹⁰² ‘Cuba Action Gets Unanimous Backing among Southsiders’, Chicago Defender, October 24 1962, 10.

¹⁰³ A recent example of this is offered by Philip Muehlenbeck (ed.), Race, Ethnicity and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), an anthology of essays highlighting how race was a transnational factor in the Cold war, at work in several world countries, and both influencing, and influenced by, that confrontation.

¹⁰⁴Ebony, February 1963, 88–89.

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Leonardo Campus

Leonardo Campus has a PhD from La Sapienza University of Rome. On the Cuban Missile Crisis and its perceptions he has published several research articles and a book: I sei giorni che sconvolsero il mondo. La crisi dei missili di Cuba e le sue percezioni internazionali (Firenze: Le Monnier, forthcoming, 2014). In 2012 he received a research grant from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Freie Universität, Berlin. He is also author of Non solo canzonette. L'Italia della Ricostruzione e del Miracolo attraverso il Festival di Sanremo (Firenze: Le Monnier, forthcoming, 2014).