This project analyzes the John Birch Society's opposition to the Black freedom movement from its founding in 1958 to the early 1970s, treating the Society's anti-Black activism in this era as a window into the broader discursive connections between racism and anticommunism that were prevalent in contemporaneous politics. The thesis draws on a wide variety of documents from Brown University's John Birch Society Records and John Birch Society Pamphlets archives, as well as the records gathered by an extensive Anti-Defamation League surveillance campaign against the JBS, held by the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City. The first chapter introduces the Society and its place in postwar America and examines the evolution of anticommunism as a capacious politics capable of acting as a vessel for anxieties about the subversion of racial, gender, class, sexual, and religious hierarchies. The second chapter examines the group's opposition to nonviolent civil rights activism in the first half of the 1960s, arguing that this opposition was driven by a view of communism which was tightly linked with fears of global challenges to white supremacy. The third chapter analyzes the Society's "Support Your Local Police" campaign, its opposition to federal aid for police, and its reactions to the urban Black rebellions that began in 1964 and continued through the end of the 1960s, arguing that the Society's activism consistently defended white officers' perceived prerogatives to locally and autonomously commit acts of anti-Black violence. As a whole, the thesis argues that anti-Black racism was much more central to the Society’s anti-civil rights activism, and to its anticommunist politics in general, than has been previously recognized in the scholarly literature.
Gardner, Emma,
"'Subversion of the American System': The John Birch Society's Opposition to the Black Freedom Movement"
(2024).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/7hdz-ee45
