The Promise of Peace: How Black Antiwar Writers Reimagined Civil Rights and Shaped the Struggle for Democracy in the United States, From 1898 to the War on Terror

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English Language and Literature

First Advisor

Goldsby, Jacqueline

Abstract

This dissertation narrates and analyzes the evolution of a distinctive approach to antiwar politics that was developed by African American writers, artists, and activists from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Black antiwar writers and activists, this dissertation argues, played a significant but still largely forgotten role in the peace movement, both within the United States and around the world. In particular, they consistently sought to build coalitions between the civil rights movement and the peace movement, aiming to leverage each movement’s institutional capacity to help pursue the other movement’s social, legal, and political goals. In so doing, Black writers and activists worked to redefine the very concept of “peace,” as a legal and a political category, to include racial equality. And as a result, this dissertation argues, both civil rights activism and African American literature were, and still are, powerful sources of antiwar thought—rich archives of an alternative idea of peace. As African American writers and activists worked to change the very idea of peace, they also proposed a much wider set of legal and political mechanisms to regulate warfare. Mainstream white peace activists and international lawyers typically promoted formalistic legal bans on war, eventually codified in the United Nations Charter. Many Black writers, in contrast, imagined and advocated for a set of more radical substantive and structural interventions in the socio-economic system that they believed would prevent warfare, including global decolonization, economic redistribution, and equal civil, political, and socio-economic rights. These writer-activists won only partial successes, but their radical visions of peace ultimately shaped both civil rights law and the laws of war and peace. This dissertation tells that story, using methods from literary history, legal history, and intellectual history—it is, in short, a historical approach to law and literature studies. In style, this dissertation is a narrative history. It employs a mix of individual and group biography, literary close reading, print culture history, philosophical analysis, and behind-the-scenes reconstructions of decision-making by social movement organizations in order to trace what it describes as a “long antiwar movement” and a unique perspective on war and peace developed by African American writers from the Spanish-Cuban-American War in 1898 through the rise of the Global War on Terror in the early 2000s. To tell that literary and intellectual history, this dissertation analyzes the ideas and activism of a wide range of writers, many of whom worked with, influenced, and sometimes clashed with each other. They include, over time: W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Mary Church Terrell, Addie Hunton, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Eslanda Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Rebecca Stiles Taylor, Alphaeus Hunton, Jackie Ormes, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Faith Ringgold, Toni Cade Bambara, Manning Marable, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Claudia Rankine, as well as acts of collective authorship by organizations like the Pan-African Congresses and the Movement for Black Lives. These writers and activists were far from uniform in their views, and they worked in a variety of different domestic and geopolitical circumstances, responding to a series of very different wars. But they shared a deeper, more expansive vision of the meaning and possibilities of peace—a vision that remains urgent in our times.

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