Prominent African-Americans opposed atomic bombings
Generally unknown even to most A-bomb historians is that a number of African-Americans in 1945-46 who were then of prominence, or future prominence, tended often to be critics of the August 1945 atomic bombings of Japanese cities. Such criticism was far more likely in 194546 among such black Americans, including especially black writers, than among their liberal white counterparts in the United States.
About three-quarters of those dissident African-Americans were college educated, at a time when less than 1 percent of America’s adult black population had attended college. Most of the African-American critics were northerners, though the bulk of the nation’s black population in 1945-46 still lived in the American south.
Among the significant African-American critics in 194546 of the atomic bombings were: Bayard Rustin, a future top adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King; Horace Cayton, a sociologist and frequent columnist in a leading black newspaper (the Pittsburgh Courier); Langston Hughes, a novelist and essayist and also a near-weekly columnist in a major black newspaper (the Chicago Defender); the Rev. Gordon Blaine Hancock, a prominent minister and syndicated columnist in African-American newspapers (including the Atlanta Daily World); Marjorie McKenzie, a columnist in a major black newspaper (the Pittsburgh Courier); the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, who was also a Democratic congressman from Harlem; Pittsburgh Courier editor and columnist George Schuyler; and the respected novelist and folklore author, Zora Neale Hurston.
Even years afterward, Rustin painfully recalled in the 1950s his sense of despair and unhappiness when learning of the atomic bombings of Japan. To him, those two bombings constituting massive deaths seemed the capstone of carnage, with brutality and savagery.
Sociologist Horace Cayton, who had completed (with the younger scholar St. Clair Drake) what was to become a landmark book on black Chicago, found himself in August 1945 deeply angry. He believed that there had been racial implications, and he was furious that white Americans, did not share his outrage but actually welcomed the atomic bombings.
Hughes, on Aug. 18, 1945, also suggested racial motivations. In his Defender column, he obliquely asked why the $2 billion expended on the A-bomb project could not instead have been used to help clean up slums in America, particularly in African-American neighborhoods.
In his syndicated column, Hancock, also a college educator, called America the “super-slaughterers” of the world. His written indictment was so sharply phrased that it upset some African-American newspaper publishers in 1945.
In her own writing, McKenzie, in more moderate but still harsh words, criticized America for failing to live up to what she called the nation’s “moral obligation” to civilization.
In August 1945, the Powell cut short his honeymoon to return to his important Harlem church — the Abyssinian Baptist Church — to lead a formal protest. On Sunday, Aug. 12, just days after the two bombings, the large Protestant congregation condemned, in a formal resolution, the atomic bombings. That statement declared that the bombing was a violation of morality, and that bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted the murder of innocent peoples.
Powell, though a member of the Democratic Party, was implicitly criticizing President Truman. In 1945-46, Powell was probably the only member of Congress to openly oppose the atomic bombings. But his words apparently went unreported in the dominant white media.
Schuyler termed the two Abomb attacks an “atrocity.” He emphasized what he deplored as the killing of innocent people in those atomic bombings and insisted that such action could not be ethically justified.
In 1945-46, possibly the harshest criticism by any notable African-American was from Hurston. Writing to a longtime associate, Claude Barnett, the founder and chieftain of the Associated Negro Press, probably the leading African-American news syndicate of the time, she bitterly complained that the press had been too soft in its treatment of Truman. She regarded him as a killer. She called Truman “the BUTCHER OF ASIA,” putting those three key words in capital letters in her typed letter.
Hurston, whose novels have since sold millions of copies and are taught widely in U.S. schools, was a well-known writer in the United States and elsewhere, seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But her anti-A-bomb writing has been mentioned — and usually rather briefly — only in a few published books in the past 35 years. To most Americans in 2018, whether black or white, her anti-A-bomb words of 1946 are largely unknown.
The criticism by those eight African-American public intellectuals of the atomic bombings uncovers an important part of the American past — and especially of the political culture of African-Americans. Their criticism contrasts — often rather starkly — with the general approval in 1945-46 with white America, including the white press. In 1945-46, there was something of a racial divide — separating black intellectuals and journalists from many whites — on the subject of the then recent atomic bombings.