From Harlem to Hiroshima: African Americans and the bomb, 1945--1988

From Harlem to Hiroshima examines the African American community's response to the nuclear threat. Beginning with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this dissertation explores the shifting response of black leaders and organizations, and of the broader African American public to the evolving nuclear arms race and general nuclear threat throughout the postwar period. Because of the understandable focus on African Americans' unique oppression, historians have often entirely ignored them when addressing other important issues, such as the nuclear threat that imperils all human beings. This omission comes despite the fact that African Americans, as part of the larger human community, have as great a stake as any other group of American citizens. In fact, given the increasing urban concentration of African Americans, they face a greater risk when it comes to nuclear war and terrorism than do most Americans. Since 1945, black leaders consistently fought for nuclear disarmament, often connecting the nuclear issue with the black freedom struggle in America and liberation movements around the world. They advocated nuclear disarmament, even when it was abandoned by other groups during the McCarthy era, allowing the fight to abolish nuclear weapons to reemerge powerfully in the 1970s and beyond. Black leaders never gave the nuclear issue up or failed to see its importance. And opposition to the bomb kept a host of other interrelated issues on the front burner.