“Another Side of the Story”: African American Intellectuals Speak Out for Peace and Freedom during the Early Cold War Years

Abstract

In a July 5, 1958, column called “The Ashes of Death,” writer Eugene Gordon exhorted fellow African Americans to take an active interest in the Geneva conference on nuclear testing. “I submit,” he wrote, “that as Negroes you and I are concerned in at least two terribly important ways … The calcium properties of strontium 90 tend to introduce it into the body’s bone structure—be it a black or a white or a yellow or a brown body—and certain quantities produce bone cancer and leukemia.” The second “terribly important reason” he cited was that “Britain and the U.S. explode their ‘dirtiest’ atomic and hydrogen devices as far away from centers of white population as possible. It was a colored people, too, whom our country used as guineapigs for the first atomic bombs in 1945.”1