Seeing Reds: The Case of the SCHW and Red-baiting

This paper aims to examine how red-baiting was readily deployed during the early Cold War era in the U.S. to browbeat the civil rights and other reform-oriented groups by focusing on the case of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), one of the leading liberal organizations in the South. As the anti-Communist hysteria ravaged American society after World War II, the civil rights struggle was not also free from the charge that it was influenced by the Communists. Although available evidence indicates that the influence of Communists on the civil rights was limited at best, the anti-Communist hysteria in the early Cold War years enabled the red scare and red-baiting as a strategy to resist the civil rights struggle and to undermine a small, but growing, group of white Southerners who opposed segregation. In this regard, the tribulations of the SCHW were symptomatic of the fate that fell to most liberal and racially progressive organizations in the South that challenged the regional status quo. Created in 1938 to promote racial and economic reform of the South, the SCHW was subject to race-baiting and red-baiting from the beginning. In the early Cold War era, the continued charge of the SCHW’s Communist affiliation as well as its heightened challenge to segregation drew attention from the HUAC, which issued a report in 1947 on the alleged Communist influence on the SCHW. The report rendered an official seal of approval to this allegation, as it asserted that the SCHW was a Communist front despite ample evidence pointing otherwise. In doing so, it represented a brazen attempt to red-bait a progressive southern civil rights group out of existence, while also serving as a model for similar agencies across the South that were designed to resist the civil right challenges.