There is no more opportune moment than now for a resurgence of interest in twentieth-century anticommunism and the concurrent struggle for civil rights. Two studies take up the topic energetically and offer new insights. James Zeigler's Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism and The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier offer new investigations of the links between African American radicalism and Communism, albeit from different points of departure.

Frazier's book is a long-awaited investigation of the black radical imaginary of China during the Cold War. With access to underexplored archives, as well as proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, Frazier offers an unprecedented account of some key African American figures’ involvement with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Frazier terms his book “a study of political and cultural traffic” (4) between the PRC and notable African American figures. Through the prism of Maoist China, Frazier offers a reshaped picture of dominant Cold War ideas about race, foreign policy, and international relations. Along the way he elaborates and extends other accounts of black internationalism, demonstrating how China offered a key critical counterpoint to the Cold War binarism of the US versus the USSR. Throughout his book, Frazier offers means of thinking about links between Chinese and African Americans as part of a global imaginary of the oppressed who stood in opposition to white supremacy. At the same time, Frazier offers many of these accounts as cautionary tales about the limits of romantic radicalism. There are two key gestures in the book. The first is to excavate an overlooked and largely hidden history, and the second is to situate that history within broader historiography and discursive claims about the power of black internationalism and the global solidarity of the oppressed. In remapping the Paul Gilroy-inspired black Atlantic tendencies of many studies of black internationalism, Frazier opens up a direction and a new consideration of black globality. In so doing Frazier reminds us that the Cold War and the struggle of developing nations are more than just ongoing geopolitical conflicts, but also discursive spaces represented and portrayed through visual, aural, textual forms for different audiences.

Zeigler keeps his investigation more finely tuned to discursive practices of anticommunism, looking closely at the rhetoric of the red scare and the way civil rights struggles were communicatively impaired. Red Scare Racism offers new insights about the ambivalence within a call-to-arms to back black freedom: while equal rights were supported, other claims (such as to reparations) were deemed too extreme. Under Zeigler's keen critique, red-scare rhetoric is revealed to consistently buck the socioeconomic changes necessary for racism to be properly addressed; without social equality, white supremacy persists, and, as Zeigler argues, without a leftist critique of capitalism, racism is reproduced and reinforced. Offering critical new readings of key texts such as Richard Wright's The God That Failed (1949), the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr., and the protest essays of C. L. R. James, Zeigler's book convincingly demonstrates that anticommunism had long-term damaging effects upon black civil rights. He traces this damage through Barack Hussein Obama's presidency, revealing the links between earlier anticommunism and the unhatched plot to malign President Obama as a secret Communist conspirator. Finally, Zeigler argues that the Cold War red scare persists, and that it persists in the shape of white supremacy that continues to dog, if not dominate, American public life.

Together these books remark on the importance of seeing black American civil rights agitation through a perspective of international political discourses around black freedom. Their work is important because it brings together vigilant cultural historiography and insightful theoretical frameworks about how and why archives matter. Both authors demonstrate successful moments of international exchange and the disconnects, the places where exchange collapsed. All the while, both books turn to the persistent work of radical black artists and intellectuals to answer anticommunism with critiques of Cold War hegemonies. In this way, both works extend the range of scholarship on black radicalism. They will be important milestones as the twenty-first century moves forward into uncertain territory regarding the protection and the precarity of racialized lives who find themselves under the label “un-American.”