Note: This review is part of an ongoing series meant to highlight the endeavors of Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library’s Cataloging Committee. The committee is working hard to create a publicly accessible catalog of the library’s collection approximately 12,000 texts from a variety of intellectual disciplines. We aim to center Black authors and subjects that are featured in this collection. Our growing catalog can be browsed directly, or by selecting the ‘Library Search’ link in the site navigation above. Thank you for your continued support. We are currently accepting donations through PayPal.

Toward the end of his life and distinguished career, William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois became embroiled in a criminal indictment of his activities with the Peace Information Center (PIC), an organization whose aims were to distribute information regarding international peace and disarmament efforts. In battle for peace: The story of my 83rd birthday is a frank account of Du Bois and his associates’ efforts to clear his name and fight the war hysteria of post-World War II America. While the greater part of the book recounts the trial, peripheral events, and speeches that Du Bois engaged in to raise funds for the legal fees, the last chapter of the book reveals the supportive themes and social commentary that inform the proceedings. If nothing else, In battle for peace is disarmingly prescient in its final chapter, titled “Interpretations” (p. 160) — many issues of our day are in their nascent stage in Cold War America. In the shadow of McCarthyism, Du Bois dissects American corporate plutocracy and the tendrils of global wealth inequality in his recollection of his trial, with occasional comment by his wife at this time, Shirley Graham.

Du Bois uses the first few chapters to highlight his interest in Pan-Africanism, his habit of international travel and attendance at Peace Congresses, and his ambivalence toward birthday celebrations. He posits as peculiarly American the view of aged individuals as useless and abnormal. The strange fissure between American values and international movements plays a large role throughout this recollection, especially in later chapters. 

The founding and management of the Peace Information Center, as detailed in chapter 5, was the reason for the indictment of W. E. B. Du Bois and his colleagues. The Center attempted to breach the American media blackout of international peace movements by distributing “Peacegrams” and reprinting the Stockholm Appeal, a disarmament initiative by the World Peace Council and originally signed by, among many other prominent cultural figures, Du Bois. For this, the Department of Justice demanded that the PIC register as “agents of a foreign principal” (p. 43) under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. When the parties of the PIC refused to do so, Du Bois and other members were indicted.

A recount of the speaking tour (meant to raise funds for the legal defense) and indictment trial commences. Particularly sobering are Du Bois’s comments on the nature of justice in America: “Justice is not free in the United States” (p. 108). Funds in the tens of thousands were required to structure a sound defense, and Du Bois reflects on the inability of many Black people confined in the justice system to pay necessary court fees. The peripheral accommodation and transportation costs were also prohibitive in this case, because the Du Bois’s legal team consisted of both Black and white members. 

After the trial is over and the Peace Information Center members were rightfully acquitted, Du Bois reflects on the significance of an unfair and destructive indictment by the American government on American citizens spreading the word of peace in a warmongering state. Du Bois condemns the demand by the U.S. government for the complete unity of political beliefs and values, especially in light of the fact that most political motives in the U.S. are tied to the interests of corporate hegemony and resultant global colonialism. He decries the misuse and distribution of wealth by American capitalists to the harm of the national (and global) public. Today, we are witnessing how the enormously unequal distribution of wealth and power determines how one’s community is affected by a global virus. “American exceptionalism” means nothing to historically underfunded and overlooked Black and brown communities, wherein members are disproportionately becoming infected with COVID-19 at a higher rate. 

Inequality has long been an issue, globally and in the U.S. In battle for peace reminds us that the struggle to counter injustice and advocate for peace is a perpetual act.

Note: This review is part of an ongoing series meant to highlight the endeavors of Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library’s Cataloging Committee. The committee is working hard to create a publicly accessible catalog of the library’s collection approximately 12,000 texts from a variety of intellectual disciplines. We aim to center Black authors and subjects that are featured in this collection. Our growing catalog can be browsed directly, or by selecting the ‘Library Search’ link in the site navigation above. Thank you for your continued support. We are currently accepting donations through PayPal.

Stories of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement are especially critical during these times of social upheaval. There are lessons we can learn from the structural and interpersonal struggles within civil rights organizations, and we can apply them today to the struggle against wanton police violence in Black communities and socioeconomic barriers to Black autonomy. The story of Black lives is the story of increased democratic decision-making in U.S. civic society — something we all benefit from. Historical examples of success in the struggle for racial equality provide blueprints for contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and, locally, Anti Police-Terror Project in a country that devalues human life for the sake of profit.

The mid-century fight for civil rights and liberties is synonymous with the life story of Ella Baker, born in Norfolk, VA in 1903, as detailed in this biography (Ella Baker: Freedom Bound) by Joanne Grant, her younger contemporary and fellow activist for civil rights. Baker, shaped by the Black church and moral lessons of her mother and grandfather, provided the framework and structural power by which prominent civil rights leaders could push for change from federal and local governments. Skeptical of media attention and highly pragmatic to the end, Baker was wary of cults of personality in justice circles and valued highly the role of local, mass movements in civil rights organizations. This biography is an exhaustive account of her development as a professional organizer and human relations expert, into an activist who treated everyone with equanimity and created leaders out of youth movements, primarily with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a founding executive and mentor.

Baker was primarily based in New York City (specifically the Harlem neighborhood), but was intimately familiar with Southern struggles, and devoted about two decades of her life to voter registration campaigns, educational workshops, civil rights conferences, and leadership training in the South, all while White Citizens’ Councils and branches of the Ku Klux Klan perpetrated violence against Black people, businesses, and churches. Prior to Baker’s involvement in the Southern civil rights struggle, she had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as director of branches, honing her organizational skills and traveling around the country, sometimes under dangerous travel conditions, enabling local activists to become racial justice leaders. Baker preferred organizing with SNCC because she identified the mass youth movement as the one that would enact national change at the local level, rather than be buried under interpersonal conflict and politics within the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), of which she was also a founding member following the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Though SNCC eventually disintegrated due to several factors, namely the increasing militancy of students, FBI manipulation, and political infighting, the organization successfully registered thousands of new Black voters, increased adult literacy in the South, and created a movement that pressured the federal government to enact new protections and rights for Black Americans. Baker organized directly with activists such as Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Charles McDew, and Angela Davis.

Joanne Grant was a journalist during the Civil Rights Movement, and looked up to Baker as a mentor. Grant highlights the life of Baker as one ferociously dedicated to the struggle of human rights, who found ultimate fulfillment in her work. Since Baker was busy throughout her life organizing and fundraising for civil rights groups, hers is a story that is inseparably entwined with that of the struggle of the Black community as a whole. Grant provides a well-researched account of a historical figure without much psychological extrapolation of Baker’s character, beyond the matters of her direct action within the racial justice struggle.

Without the pragmatism and organizational skills of Ella Baker, the momentum of the nonviolent student movement may not have been harnessed to influence radical changes in American society and government. We need radical action coupled with tight horizontal organization, such as that implemented by Ella Baker, to achieve true democratic ideals.

List of related resources:

• Ella Baker Center for Human Rights 
• Anti Police-Terror Project
• Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, documentary by Joanne Grant