Women March for Peace: Black Radical Women’s Anti-Korean War Activism

Highlighting hypocrisy of US Civil Rights oppression while fighting for Korean freedom

The Korean War is commonly known as the ＂forgotten war＂ because it supposedly had little impact on American culture in comparison to World War II or the American War in Vietnam. Yet from 1950-1953, the conflict produced vigorous anti-war activism, particularly among Black radical women. Informed by their experiences with racism and misogyny within the US, these women were convinced that peace was not just the absence of military aggression, but that it required the liberation of the most oppressed, including the end of capitalist exploitation of women and People of Color and the return of self-determination to colonized peoples--themes that later anti-war activists would echo and develop. Whether or not the Korean War has ever truly been forgotten, the visionary activism of these women has been largely overlooked.

In Women March for Peace, Denise Lynn examines the lives of seven Black women--Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Beulah Richardson--and their resistance to domestic and foreign US policies during the height of anticommunist hysteria. While much peace scholarship focuses on the threat of nuclear conflict, Lynn instead explores how these women connected issues of civil rights at home with international military campaigns, highlights the hypocrisy of containment policies that sought to secure the freedom and rights for Koreans when US citizens were still oppressed. Lynn traces their peace advocacy through their personal papers, local and national articles, Progressive Party documents, and global conventions. Women March for Peace recovers the radical activism of these Black women to understand a crucial chapter in the fight against American imperialism and white supremacy.

DENISE LYNN is professor of history and director of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. She is the Vice-President of the Historians of American Communism and the editor of its journal American Communist History. She has written a regular blog for Black Perspectives and has written for Nursing Clio and Marxist Sociology. Her articles have appeared in American Communist History, Women’s History Review, Indiana Magazine of History, Journal of Cold War Studies, Radical Americas, and Journal for the Study of Radicalism.She is the author of Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz? Gender, Spycraft, and Anti-Stalinism in the Early Cold War and Claudia Jones: Visions of a Socialist America.