It enabled them to empathize with the innocent victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, more broadly, with those around the world oppressed by colonialism.Ĭonsequently, according to Intondi, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was viewed through a very different lens by the African American community than by white America. indicates it."Ĭlearly, these were slurs with which the African American community were all too familiar. This includes the illustrious Time magazine which declared that "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. The answer can be found in the appalling and vitriolic anti-Japanese sentiment Intondi cites, whipped up to dehumanize an entire population.
Intondi quotes poet Langston Hughes asking the question voiced by many others why did the United States not drop the atomic bomb on Germany or Italy? The most widely accepted - but ferociously challenged - argument in favor is that it was necessary to force the surrender of Japan and thus end World War II.īut the underpinnings of racism are glaringly obvious. The debate about whether the US was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki persists today. Rustin's leadership in the anti-nuclear movement, like that of many of his fellow African Americans, has vanished from the history books. Yet despite Rustin's outspoken role for peace and disarmament, the word 'nuclear' never appears in his Wikipedia biography. Perhaps no one better embodied that clear understanding of the link between the struggle for peace and justice and the arms race than Bayard Rustin, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by President Obama. Yet it is rarely their faces that are evoked when there is discussion of the Ban the Bomb marches or, later, the rise of SANE/Freeze. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and many others. Those who joined the struggle against nuclear weapons included Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, but also W.E.B. It was the use and continued testing of the atomic bomb, "that motivated many in the black community to continue to fight for peace and equality as part of a global struggle for human rights." "Since 1945, black activists had made the case that nuclear weapons, colonialism, and the black freedom struggle were connected", writes Intondi.Īfrican Americans recognized colonialism "From the United States' obtaining uranium from the Belgian-controlled Congo to France's testing a nuclear weapon in the Sahara", Intondi writes. The black anti-nuclear campaign: airbrushed out of history This singling out of non-white enemies for the use or threat of atomic weapons drew African Americans not only into the nuclear abolition movement, Intondi contends, but into a form of social activism that connected many issues of civil and human rights on a global, rather than national scale. Intondi, published last year and entitled African Americans Against the Bomb, it was the recognition of those bombings as an act of racism that drew African Americans into the nuclear disarmament movement and future wars that kept them there.Īs Intondi explains in his introduction, "Black activists' fear that race played a role in the decision to use atomic bombs only increased when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam a decade later."
'Racism' is probably not the first word that springs to mind as we reflect on these terrible events, and their immediate and ongoign aftermath.īut according to a fascinating book by Vincent J. This month 71 years ago, the US cropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9 respectively.