Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear
weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have
generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear
movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman's
decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now for
the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb tells the
compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear
disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial
equality.
Intondi shows that from early on, blacks in America saw the use of
atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were
being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve
impoverished communities. Black activists' fears that race played a role
in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S.
threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a
decade later. For black leftists in Popular Front groups, the nuclear
issue was connected to colonialism: the U.S. obtained uranium from the
Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in
the Sahara.
By expanding traditional research in the history of the nuclear
disarmament movement to look at black liberals, clergy, artists,
musicians, and civil rights leaders, Intondi reveals the links between
the black freedom movement in America and issues of global peace. From
Langston Hughes through Lorraine Hansberry to President Obama, African
Americans Against the Bomb offers an eye-opening account of the
continuous involvement of African Americans who recognized that the rise
of nuclear weapons was a threat to the civil rights of all people.
