Studs Terkel Quotes
A man comes from New York. He says, "These petitions, your name is on all of them: anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, friendship with the Soviet Union.... don't you know the communists were behind them?" And he said, "Look, you can get out of this pretty easy. All you got to do is say the communists duped you. You were dumb. You didn't mean it." I said, "But I did mean it!
He like many others had signed petitions for good causes that were circulated by Communist organizations. Racists then used that fact to claim that desegregation, voting rights and anti-lynching laws were communist ideas. With the Red Scare operating in the 1950s, Terkel, like so many others were Blacklisted and denied opportunities to earn a living. Many claimed that they had been duped and don’t really believe in these causes. Some like Terkel would not. He opposed most of the Communist programs, but agreed with some. Ironically, ideas like anti-lynching and voting rights which were then labeled as Communist ideology, are today supported by the vast majority of Americans.
Louis "Studs" Terkel, 1912–2008, Author, Historian and Broadcaster, Interview, "Voice of America" by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, March 1, 2002
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
William Z. Foster, the 1928 communist presidential candidate, was arrested because his party’s leaflet contained this “inflammatory” slogan.
The logic of the Southern leaders and some Northern racists like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was to fight the Civil Rights Movement using the Red Scare. The Communist Party called for an end to legal segregation and discrimination against Negroes. Therefore, those who advocated an end to segregation were either Communists or dupes of the Communists was their “logic”.
Vladimir Lenin. In their quest for world revolution, the Russian Communists had more problems with arguments in the United States whose reforms and economy had produced a very high standard of living. They knew that to effect a revolution, they had to reach the middle class and the intellectuals. They had little economically to attack America with but they were able to attack the United States morally. Even though segregation was legal in America at that time, many Americans thought it immoral. Most of the rest of the world did also. So that was one of the attack points. Since the communists opposed U. S. racial segregation, many Southern segregationists used a perverted logic and accused everyone who opposed segregation of being a communist. In addition to racial segregation, the Communists attacked other forms of discrimination such as anti-Catholic, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic (See {638737} ) behavior.
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
