The Question of Interracial Marriage on the Revolutionary Socialist
Left in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s
Christopher Phelps, The Ohio State University at Mansfield
In the era of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States, the institution of
marriage was heavily circumscribed by race. The legal edifice of American segregation
forbade “miscegenation” or “race mixing” in many states, particularly in the Deep South.
Allegations of rape provided a pretext for lynching, and blacks, especially black men,
were so sexualized in the white mind that social equality, with its suggestion of
familiarity, carried lascivious connotations. Even in the North, strong pressures existed
against marriage across the color line. This combustible mix of race, sexuality, and
violence made intermarriage a fraught issue for the socialist movement to navigate.1
The Socialist Workers Party, founded in the United States in 1938, was the largest
Trotskyist organization in the world, composed of revolutionary socialists who upheld the
Soviet Revolution as a model but opposed its bureaucratic corruption under Stalin.
Although it had only a few thousand members at its peak, the SWP attracted many
intellectuals and serious labor activists, giving it influence beyond its numbers. Its
attempt to forge a socialist alternative to Stalinist authoritarianism and liberal reformism
makes it an important subject for historical inquiry.
1
, The SWP was from the outset a multiracial organization that called for full social,
political, and economic equality for the Negro. During the 1940s, significant numbers of
blacks joined the SWP because of a confluence of factors. After 1941, the Communist
Party’s wartime Popular Front subordinated all goals to the defense of the Soviet Union
against fascism. The CP used its considerable influence in the labor movement and black
community to discourage militant actions that would disrupt national unity or
compromise all-out war production. This created a void on the left filled by the
Trotskyists. The wartime mood of African Americans was increasingly defiant, as they
migrated northward to take factory work at unequal rates of pay, were beset by racial
hostility (exemplified by the 1943 Detroit race riot), and faced military segregation in a
war supposedly for democracy and against notions of a “master race.” Hundreds of
newly radicalized black members entered the SWP between 1942 and 1948, bringing the
proportion of blacks to about one-fifth of the membership.
Interracial sexual relationships resulted, but Richard Fraser, a founding member of the
SWP, claimed in a 1974 article that during the 1940s “the leadership did everything it
could to discourage” interracial marriages, “from friendly reasoning, to pleading, to
pressure and social ostracism.” Charles Denby, a black member of the SWP in Detroit in
the 1940s, likewise claimed in his 1952 memoir, ghostwritten by a white woman, to have
heard from Dr. Edgar Keemer, a leading black SWPer between 1942 and 1947, that the
organizer of the Buffalo SWP branch opposed both interracial marriage and sexual
relations.2
2
Left in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s
Christopher Phelps, The Ohio State University at Mansfield
In the era of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States, the institution of
marriage was heavily circumscribed by race. The legal edifice of American segregation
forbade “miscegenation” or “race mixing” in many states, particularly in the Deep South.
Allegations of rape provided a pretext for lynching, and blacks, especially black men,
were so sexualized in the white mind that social equality, with its suggestion of
familiarity, carried lascivious connotations. Even in the North, strong pressures existed
against marriage across the color line. This combustible mix of race, sexuality, and
violence made intermarriage a fraught issue for the socialist movement to navigate.1
The Socialist Workers Party, founded in the United States in 1938, was the largest
Trotskyist organization in the world, composed of revolutionary socialists who upheld the
Soviet Revolution as a model but opposed its bureaucratic corruption under Stalin.
Although it had only a few thousand members at its peak, the SWP attracted many
intellectuals and serious labor activists, giving it influence beyond its numbers. Its
attempt to forge a socialist alternative to Stalinist authoritarianism and liberal reformism
makes it an important subject for historical inquiry.
1
, The SWP was from the outset a multiracial organization that called for full social,
political, and economic equality for the Negro. During the 1940s, significant numbers of
blacks joined the SWP because of a confluence of factors. After 1941, the Communist
Party’s wartime Popular Front subordinated all goals to the defense of the Soviet Union
against fascism. The CP used its considerable influence in the labor movement and black
community to discourage militant actions that would disrupt national unity or
compromise all-out war production. This created a void on the left filled by the
Trotskyists. The wartime mood of African Americans was increasingly defiant, as they
migrated northward to take factory work at unequal rates of pay, were beset by racial
hostility (exemplified by the 1943 Detroit race riot), and faced military segregation in a
war supposedly for democracy and against notions of a “master race.” Hundreds of
newly radicalized black members entered the SWP between 1942 and 1948, bringing the
proportion of blacks to about one-fifth of the membership.
Interracial sexual relationships resulted, but Richard Fraser, a founding member of the
SWP, claimed in a 1974 article that during the 1940s “the leadership did everything it
could to discourage” interracial marriages, “from friendly reasoning, to pleading, to
pressure and social ostracism.” Charles Denby, a black member of the SWP in Detroit in
the 1940s, likewise claimed in his 1952 memoir, ghostwritten by a white woman, to have
heard from Dr. Edgar Keemer, a leading black SWPer between 1942 and 1947, that the
organizer of the Buffalo SWP branch opposed both interracial marriage and sexual
relations.2
2
