From Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, _Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975_ (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001):
***** The Communist Party had emerged in the United States in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and in 1938 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created to rout them out. J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were busy tracking communists and fellow travelers, and in early 1941, the Oklahoma Communist Party bookstore and homes of CP members were raided and trashed, followed by trials under the Criminal Syndicalism Act. Some brave souls remained in Oklahoma, working clandestinely in the party, though most communists fled the state.
My father and mother and all my relatives, my schoolteachers, all the townspeople -- everyone in my universe -- were fiercely anti-communist. When I was growing up, one billboard at the edge of Oklahoma City read, "All Socialism Is Bad." Another screamed "Impeach Earl Warren," announcing that the U.S. Supreme Court was communist. This movement gathered momentum after the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_. School integration was considered communist, and the White Citizen's Council never slept; among the unsolicited materials I received from them was a document that argued that the Metropolitan Opera (which I listened to on the radio every Saturday) was communist. This assertion derived from the fact that some of the performers were black. I realized then that the definition of "reds" had transmogrified from the rebellious workers of my grandfather's generation to anyone who opposed white supremacy and racial segregation.
(p. xx) ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>