153. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 8

Here's Where It Gets Interesting

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of Momentum, Sharon talks about America’s push to eradicate communists during the Red Scare and Korean War. Many people working toward the goal of civil rights and liberties shared links to the Communist Party, like William Patterson and Paul Robeson. In 1951, Patterson submitted a 237-page petition to the United Nations, called We Charge Genocide. After Patterson and Robeson presented their petition, the U.S. retaliated by seizing their passports, smearing their public image, and labeling the Civil Rights Commission as a communist-front organization.

Because of the country’s persecution of subversives and communists, the NAACP leaders were interested in assisting J Edgar Hoover in rooting out any “bad players” in the organization in order to protect it. In fact, Thurgood Marshall, who knew he was being spied on by Hoover, often acted as an FBI informant. He knew both the costs and benefits of cooperating. Do you think this was an effective strategy to distance the NAACP from the communist party? What about the organization’s push to rebrand themselves as an American organization? What exactly did Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. disagree about? Sharon reveals the source of their strife next time!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome to Episode 8 of Momentum, our special series in which we are highlighting
0:19.8	ordinary Americans who made an extraordinary difference in the struggle for freedom during
0:24.4	the Civil Rights era.
0:27.0	I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.
0:57.3	Take it to on sale now at live nation dot code.uk
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1:42.6	The last episode I mentioned the letter sent by a man named William Patterson to Walter White,
1:56.1	who was the Secretary of the NAACP. The letter congratulated Walter White and Thurgood Marshall on
2:03.4	their success in front of the Supreme Court in winning Brown versus the Board of Education.
2:09.8	Patterson was also working to secure the civil rights of all Americans, but in a different way
2:15.9	than the NAACP, a way that often put him at odds with the leadership of the National Association
2:24.1	for the advancement of colored persons. William Patterson was born in the 1800s and he became an
2:30.5	attorney. He eventually went to England where he was introduced to the editor and publisher of
2:36.2	the London Daily Times, which was the newspaper of the British Labour Party. The British Labour
	...

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