Another Post-War Settlement:

Eunice Hunton Carter and Mary McLeod Bethune

Christine Lutz

Georgia State University

        On 14 April 1944, 127 representatives of fifty-nine organizations – communist, liberal, Pan-Africanist, Democrats, and Rockefeller Republicans – joined several guests from Africa and Caribbean in New York City at the Council on African Affairs office. Paul Robeson, William Jay Schiefflin and Max Yergan, on behalf of the Council on African Affairs [CAA], had called for a summit meeting “to reach common agreement on basic principles and measures ... essential for the future welfare of the African people.” The conferees hoped to come to a “New Perspectives” agreement among anti-colonial leaders about how best to place Africa at the forefront of the hoped-for United Nations’ agenda. The CAA believed that Africa would be “the main testing ground of the determination and ability of the United Nations.”[1] Alphaeus Hunton, educational director of the CAA and secret Communist Party member, chaired the meeting’s Resolutions Committee, organized the discussions, and held to edit the meeting’s volume of Proceedings. His sister, Eunice Hunton Carter, attended, representing Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women.

        Eunice Hunton Carter was a prominent black attorney, lobbyist, and an influential Republican politician in the Rockefeller camp. Her mentor was Thomas Dewey, Republican governor of New York. Mary Bethune, the well known Floridian, had effected enormous practical and symbolic gains for African American women by 1944. She was a Special Advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and had been a New Deal administrator, the first African American woman to hold such a position in a presidential administration. Thanks to Mrs. Bethune’s work in the National Youth Administration, between twenty and twenty-five percent of the youth in New Deal jobs by 1941 were African American, even in the South.[2]

        Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Bethune had worked in the National Association of Colored Women, at one time the largest secular organization of African Americans in the country. From that Association had emerged the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, with which both women engaged. In 1935, Mrs. Bethune had established the National Council of Negro Women as an organization of leading race women who were young professionals that no longer fit into the outdated model of the NACW. In that endeavor, Mrs. Carter’s help had been essential. Although for many years the National Council of Negro Women was penniless, under Mrs. Bethune’s leadership, young African American professional women moved into influential positions to effect some changes in the race policies of the federal government.[3] NCNW members represented roughly one million black women who had a significant voice in the New Deal and later, in the Democratic Party.[4]

        The National Council of Negro Women and the National Youth Administration sponsored an important conference on “Negro Problems and the Problems of Negro Youth,” and initiated a series of annual conferences sponsored by the federal government on “Participation of Negro Women and Children in Federal Welfare Programs.” Sixty-five black women attended the first of these annual meetings, held in the East Room of the White House in April 1938, an unprecedented event. At that meeting, the African American women issued a paper of their goal for distribution to the President and other New Dealers: integration and equal treatment in the federal Bureaus of Women, Children, Education, and Public Health Service, and with the Social Security Bureau, the American Red Cross, and the Housing authorities.[5]

        With other “united front” black-led organizations, Mrs. Bethune and the NCNW pushed the President to integrate defense industries and the army. In that effort, the Communist Party – notably Doxie Wilkerson and Mrs. Carter’s brother, Alphaeus Hunton – and most famously, A. Philip Randolph, assisted Mrs. Bethune. For instance, women from forty-three organizations, including the NCNW, attended a June 1941 meeting of the Washington Committee for the Negro Woman in National Defense and as a result, three thousand post cards, telegrams, and telephone calls were directed to the President to protest discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces.[6]

        Changes in the positions and style of the National Council of Negro Women [NCNW] illustrate the collapse of unity among African American leaders toward African colonialism in the face of Truman’s and Stalin’s Cold War. Even among those who remained committed to anti-colonialism, the level of interest about Africa and the tenor changed after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, when the House Committee on Un-American Affairs [HUAC] began its hearings.

        At the conclusion of the 1944 “New Perspectives” conference, under Alphaeus Hunton’s direction, the participants resolved, “This conference of Negro and white Americans, with representatives of the people of Africa and the British West Indies also in attendance, calls upon the government of the United States to take the leadership in promoting...a guarantee that the fruits of victory shall be shared by all people.”[7] The body also called for changes in colonial Africa, reforms including an end to peonage; fair and equal wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities; and fair trade practices. Mrs. Bethune pointed out that Africa was “a great responsibility [that] rests on us as American Negroes.”[8] A large number of influential African Americans apparently agreed with Mrs. Bethune and implicitly, Mrs. Carter, who Mrs. Bethune’s go-to and go-fer woman in 1944. The National Council of Negro Women, the Harlem Young Men’s Christian Association, the African Students’ Association, and the First Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church had endorsed the invitation to the meeting.[9] Attendees at the “New Perspectives” meeting included moderates such as Lawrence Reddick; Africans such as Francis (Kwame) Nkrumah; liberals such as George Marshall, chairman of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties; Amy Ashwood Garvey, the Pan-Africanist; W.E.B. DuBois, for the NAACP; and Benjamin Davis, Jr., a leading black Communist Party member. Others were delegates from Liberia, the Belgian Congo, the British Caribbean, Nigeria, India, Puerto Rico, and the USSR. Many representatives of churches and local unions were present, as was a hefty press contingent.

        Speeches by conference participants indicated an almost blind faith in the Allies. The participants had been buoyed by news of battles successes for the “united nations,” Roosevelt’s phrase for the Allies, and they firmly believed that an institution of United Nations would be established following an imminent Allied victory. Amy Ashwood Garvey pointed out that “the times have changed; conditions have changed largely in the world today, and people are thinking more humanely.”[10] If the United States led the Allies to form a United Nations organization after the war, they trusted, such an institution would “abolish imperialism and its evil consequences around the world.”[11] Mrs. Bethune, and certainly Eunice Carter, knew that the principal mover and shaker of the CAA, Mrs. Carter’s brother, was a communist. Mrs. Bethune was chairman of the Board of the Council on African Affairs, also. Such united front activity was commonplace. For instance, in October 1941, Doxey Wilkerson, an open Communist Party member, organized a meeting in Washington, DC at an Elks Lodge “to Mobilize Negro Citizens in Defeat of Hitler and Hitlerism.” Among the meeting’s sponsors were Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women; Alain Locke, mentor to Alphaeus Hunton and Mrs. Carter alike; Judge William Hastie; and Alphaeus Hunton.

        Five months after the 1944 “New Perspectives” summit meeting, the Council on African Affairs circulated a petition to the President and State Department.  One hundred and fifty prominent signatories called upon the twenty-six Allies – the “united nations” – to bring democracy and self-determination to Africa. Eunice Carter and Mary Bethune signed, as did Channing Tobias of the Phelps-Stokes Fund; Arthur Spingarn of the NAACP; William J. Schieffelin; W.E.B. DuBois; Alain Locke, scholar and Pan-Africanist; Max Yergan; Earl Dickerson, Chicago politician and Supreme Court lawyer; the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; Earl Browder of the Communist Party; Theodore Dreisser, Carey McWilliams, Rockwell Kent, and Paul Robeson.[12]

        From the time of the mass protests led by the Communist Party urging that the United States intervene to end the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, to the many protests against discrimination in war production industries, African-American leaders – from Republican Eunice Carter to her communist brother to Democrat Mary Bethune - were more united in their demands and more cooperative with each other on the issue of Africa than they had been since the Amenia meeting of 1915.

        Before the war, Eunice’s mother and Mary Bethune’s good friend, Addie Hunton had served on a delegation to Acting Secretary of State William Phillips to protest the State Department’s collusion with Firestone Corporation in order to exploit Liberia. On this delegation, headed by W.E.B. DuBois, were Mordecai Johnson, Charles Wesley, Dorothy Detzer, Rayford Logan, and Addie Dickerson, again reflecting the wide united front among African Americans on the issue of Africa.[13] In 1941, the National Council of Negro Women showed its concern about Africa and the united front with a luncheon in Harlem, New York, about “The World Today,” with guests from Free France, England, India, China, Ethiopia, Haiti, West Africa, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and the “Jewish Congress.”[14]

        The State Department paid attention. The Department established a separate Division of African Affairs under Henry Villard. The Villard family long had been supporters of civil rights for people in color. In 1943, Henry Villard made a statement in which he tied the welfare of the African people to the national security of the United States.[15] In March 1944, State invited the Council on African Affairs to confer with the Division about lend lease, Ethiopia, Liberia, and the pass system in South Africa. The Division assured the Council on African Affairs – still a united front organization involving Mrs. Bethune – “that the United Nations’ war aims apply to the people of Africa” and that an international agency overseeing the “advancement of the African people might be established.”[16]

        Throughout World War II, the U.S. Department of State consulted with the Council on African Affairs, and the relationship was a friendly one. As late as December 1944, the State Department responded courteously to a letter from the Council on African Affairs asking Roosevelt and the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, to remember Africa while they planned for the United Nations organization.[17]  Toward the end of the war, however, the Department of State turned away from the CAA and paid particular attention to drawing the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) into its perimeter. For instance, in late 1944, representatives of over one hundred organizations, including the NCNW (but not the CAA), met with Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius and most of the U.S. delegation to the Dumbarton Oaks conference of wartime allies. As the Department of State and the NCNW grew closer, not only did the NCNW make very constructive long-term gains for African American women in government service, but also, the NCNW became more conservative in general.

        The National Council of Negro Women published Aframerican Woman’s Journal, a magazine firmly under Mrs. Bethune’s guidance, which carried articles urging African-American women to take up social tasks to benefit women internationally. The Aframerican Woman’s Journal carried articles about discrimination against women of color in Cuba and Haiti, both of which were under the United States’ hand. The magazine also provided a forum for Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Bethune to educate members how best to use law to reform society.[18]

        The Rockefeller Republicans, the Republican faction to which Eunice Carter was loyal, began their courtship of African-American and white female liberals as early as April 1941, when Mrs. & Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller hinted to Bethune’s circle at a quid pro quo around women’s equality in exchange for their support of U.S. business interests in Central and South America.[19] Rockefeller support and Eunice Carter’s prominence in the NCNW were important to Mrs. Bethune, the principal black champion of the New Deal. Mrs. Carter already had been New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s go-between Republicans and Democrats, obtaining “unity pledges” for him from African Americans in either party.[20]

        In May 1942, Muna Lee of the State Department spoke before the National Council of Negro Women’s executive committee about what amounted to the Rockefeller Policy for Latin America. Her speech and an additional essay by Lee were published in the Aframerican Woman’s Journal. Lee called upon the NCNW’s leading body to unite with all of the people of the Americas, because all were tied together in common bond of “our Americanism, which is another word for democracy, which is another word for freedom.”[21] Rockefeller was interested in Latin America, and so, then was Mrs. Carter. In 1944, the National Council of Negro Women’s annual meeting had the theme of international relations. However, the only guests from Africa were from Liberia; other guests were from the Pan-American Union, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and others among the Allies. One of the three main speakers at the conference was Mrs. J. Borden Harriman.[22]

        In late 1943 and early 1944, the State Department invited the Non-Partisan Council, in which Mrs. Bethune was deeply engaged, to help determine foreign policy. The Non-Partisan Council suggested that the State Department establish an international exchange program that would include only integrated schools; and also, that State create “consciousness of world citizenship and individual responsibility for making a contribution to the new world order.”  The Non-Partisan Council was to claim credit for the State Department’s “assignment of specialists” to Latin America and Scandinavia.  Later in 1947, the State Department asked the Non-Partisan Council to recommend African Americans who would be good staff people in State’s Office of International and Cultural Affairs. That year also, the State Department and the Non-Partisan Council (still dominated by Mrs. Bethune and the NCNW, as well as by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority) co-sponsored a program on Integration on International and Intercultural Affairs[23]

        Congress revived its red-hunting Dies Committee as the standing House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1945, with authority to investigate any person or organization that its members deemed subversive. The new CIA and the State Department perforce cooperated with Congress. Very quickly, the anticipated United Nations seemed to be the best hope for economic equity, fair trade, and protection from the West for sub-Saharan Africans to concerned African American leaders.

        In April 1945, the National Council of Negro Women participated in regional meetings about the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for the United Nations. They steadily requested that the State Department integrate, but also, participated wholeheartedly in World Security Month (April) and a State Department representative participated in the event.[24]

        Never did the United States government need a united front around Africa more than during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1946, a gold miners’ strike could have allowed the United States to intervene quietly in South Africa, when the British Dominion government was succumbing to the Nationalist Party.  The Council on African Affairs was the only United States organization to have close ties with the African National Congress, the principal opponents to apartheid in South Africa. In 1946, the Council on African Affairs almost single-handedly prevented South Africa’s attempt to win United Nations approval for its annexation of Southwest Africa.[25] 

        In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, an old acquaintance of Paul Robeson, was arrested in 1953 and kept in jail for several years by the British colonial government there. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, was jailed because of his purported role in the Mau Mau rebellion. Jomo Kenyatta was not a Mau Mau, and had been falsely jailed because of his association with left-leaning Pan-Africanists.[26] An earlier release for Kenyatta might have clarified the divisions among the peoples of Kenya, but the U.S. government and the National Council of Colored Women were uninterested.

        In Sudan – controlled by the French out of Djibouti during the Truman era – the American left stayed in close touch with Diallo Abdoulaye, leader of the Sudanese trades unions, where Sudanese of different regions and ethnicities rubbed shoulders and cooperated, albeit through gritted teeth. The potential for unity was present in Sudan; but in 1946 the State Department and more importantly, the U.S. Congress and Truman administration were suspicious of trade unionism and still more, of anti-colonial leaders of Sudanese trade unions.[27]

        Meanwhile, the National Council of Negro Women was struggling under Truman to maintain its prominence in the Democratic Party.  The NCNW’s militancy within racially broader women’s groups faded. The U.S. delegation to the 1945 International Congress of Women  – which included over five hundred female delegates from countries around the world – arrived late to the Paris meeting, and NCNW delegates were nonplussed to realize that no women were present from the West Indies, the Philippines, Central America, French Equatorial Africa, Liberia, Ethiopia, or the Belgian Congo. Members of the National Council of Negro Women, who once had stared down Deep South Southerners, simply said that they would get in touch with representatives from the excluded countries after the meeting.[28]

        In March of 1946, writers in the NCNW’s Aframerican Woman’s Journal were optimistic about the Cold War and expressed little doubt that women of the world could unite for good whatever their political views, for they maintained that the Cold War was just about economics. Marjorie McKenzie Lawson wrote an article about African-American women’s responsibility to women of color in the world.[29] Lawson’s article recommended “government controls upon private interests when they attempt to stand in the way of public interest.” Her principal point was to direct the attention of the NCNW away from internationalism, because the ordinary American woman would not be interested in Jamaica or Haiti, for example, if they would not work against the poll tax or vote in the United States.[30]

        That summer, 1943, Margaret McDonald of the State Department, who was based in Liberia, wrote an article for Aframerican Woman’s Journal that praised the work of the Office of International and Cultural Relations was doing in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent.[31] In that issue also, Pauline Redmon Coggs wrote, “Negro women must mend out community fences,” for local political engagement was the “source of the ‘good life.’”[32]

        Between 1945 and 1957, HUAC held about 230 public hearings, at which three thousand people testified around the country. When called to testify before the Committee, a witness had an alternative. She could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which would destroy her life or else, be cited for contempt; or the witness could name names. Only 135 witnesses were cited for contempt, but Eunice Carter’s brother Alphaeus was one of them, and he would serve time in a federal penitentiary during the 1950s for refusing to name names.[33] In 1941, the National Council of Negro Women had supported a federal bill proposed by Congressman Marcantonio, a Communist Party member; had taken a public stand against the Couvert Committee’s investigation of public colleges teachers for communist sympathies; and had pledged support for “progressive labor.”[34]  Mary Bethune had faced down the Ku Klux Klan and red-hunters, but she could not grapple calmly with the post-war whispers that she was a traitor. She wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, one of her “best friends,” for assistance when a Congressman threatened to summon her to a HUAC hearing. Mrs. Roosevelt was cool, stating only that she had problems of her own, and Mrs. Bethune should ask someone else for help.[35] Mary McLeod Bethune stood to lose everything she had achieved for African American women and her own liberty. Eunice Carter was walking a thin line between betraying her brother or alienating Thomas Dewey and the Roosevelt Republicans.

        In late 1946, President Truman replaced Secretary of State Edward Stettinius with Jimmy Byrnes, a segregationist from the Deep South. Truman Democrats had plummeted in the mid-term elections, and the Republican Party and Deep South Democrats dominated the U.S. Congress. Republicans had won on the issue of subversion, and the Truman Administration determined to fight on the same ground.[36]  The Truman Administration realized that the race for the Presidency in 1948 would be a close contest. Mary McLeod Bethune could rally the African-American vote for the Democratic Party.  Payment was due in advance. President Truman issued an executive order creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1946 as in exchange for African-American political support. In 1946, Dean Acheson, the acting Secretary of State, wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Employment Practices Commission about the adverse effect that race discrimination in the United States had upon foreign policy.[37]

        George Kennan of the State Department would echo Acheson.  In 1947, Dean Rusk warned that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights sub-commission on the prevention of discrimination against minorities was about to raise awkward questions for the United States. Rusk carefully did not blame segregationists for this problem, but rather, he blamed this upon the USSR, which he said had insisted on the establishment of the subcommittee within the United Nations.[38]  Nevertheless, the State Department’s message about segregation and the Cold War was clear.  Truman demanded payment of African Americans, also: “an abandonment of militant action, especially in the arena of foreign policy,” as Gerald Horne points out.[39] In 1949, President Harry Truman spoke at the annual meeting of the National Council of Negro Women. He carefully distinguished the United States from the “old colonialism.” The intent of U.S. capital investment in other nations was to employ the hungry; still, he promised, when U.S. corporations invested in other countries, the countries first would be democratic nations.[40]

        The November 1946 annual conference of the National Council of Negro Women was glum. Channing Tobias and Estelle Massey Riddle, vice-president of the NCNW, spoke to the international situation by noting simply that if people of color in the world were not treated better, war might again break out. They urged support for the United Nations, which would fight for equality for all, internationally. The NCNW members were more concerned about recent outbreaks of racially motivated violence by fascists, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Talmadge dynasty’s camp in Georgia.[41]  Accordingly, the last issue of Aframerican Woman’s Journal for 1946 reflected a concern for the disfranchised of the United States. Immediately after the NCNW convention, Eunice Carter, Edith Sampson, Dorothy Ferebee, Mary Church Terrell, and four other women of the NCNW called upon U.S. Representative Joseph Martin of Massachusetts and handed him a four-point program “for the immediate attention of the majority party.” The National Council of Negro Women’s demands of the Republicans were enactment of a federal law guaranteeing equal employment opportunities, a voting rights act, a federal law for equal education, and a federal law against lynching.[42]

        Eunice Carter spoke to the NCNW’s customary internationalism in that issue. She wrote, “The United Nations at New York,” in which she described the new organization’s meetings at Hunter College in the Bronx.[43] In the article, she described Russia’s interventions in Iran as a source of conflict in the Security Council of the new United Nations – which then was meeting at Hunter College in the Bronx – and she de-romanticized the United Nations for her readers. In the Bronx, she wrote, “There are no fabulously costumed men and women, there are no gaping crowds,” but rather, “The eleven members of the Security Council with their advisors and secretariats” who were “working grimly day and night.”[44] The subtext was that Third World delegates were sensational, but they had nothing to do with the real work of the United Nations and implicitly, that of the National Council of Negro Women.

        The institution of a United Nations forum in which such issues could be resolved and world wars prevented was important to Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Bethune. Both women were determined to be part of the post-war resolution of democracy and civil rights for African Americans and for women generally. They and their colleagues had been disappointed earlier. Ralph Bunche was the only African American in the U.S. State Department’s delegation at the founding meeting of the UN in San Francisco in 1945. The only official observers who were African American at the San Francisco meeting were Mordecai Johnson, Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary McLeod Bethune, who slipped in at the NAACP’s insistence. Eunice Carter and Edith Sampson attended at least part of the two-month-long meeting, as advisors and assistants to Mrs. Bethune.[45]

        Another disappointment had occurred when the United States voted with England on the colonial question. This vote established that the United Nations would not be a vehicle to abolish colonialism and promote democracy in the world. About fifty African-American spokespeople, including representatives of the NCNW, attended a protest meeting three days before fifty nations signed the United Nations charter. All expressed anger at the shallowness of the commitment of the United Nations to de-colonizing Africa.[46]

        Otherwise, Mrs. Carter could be satisfied with the first days of the United Nations, for Mary Bethune, with her help, had established that African-American women had reason and right to be involved with the United Nations.[47] They believed that the more African American women who were nationally-recognized political figures, the better the status would be for the mass of black women.  And Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Bethune believed that “improving the status of women was essential to advancing the community as a whole.”[48]

        Truman launched his Cold War, and the National Security Council began. At the same time, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights published its report and for the first time in U.S. history, the executive branch called for desegregation of he Armed Forces; an end to the poll tax and to lynching; voting rights laws; a civil rights division in the Justice Department; and a permanent Federal Employment Practices Division.

        At the United Nations in 1947, however, the United States lost an important vote. The General Assembly bloc-voted with the USSR and censured South Africa. The noted Pan-Africanist from the Gold Coast, J.B. Danquah, wrote to the Council of African Affairs to congratulate them for “the whacking you gave to General Smuts and for the proper end to the South African ambitions at the United Nations Assembly.”[49]

        Still, the majority of African-American leaders had stopped speaking publicly about foreign policy by late 1947. Were one vocal about Africa, for instance, one might end up on Attorney General Tom Clark’s list of subversives, like the Council on African Affairs, and lose one’s influence and funding. HUAC members had not hesitated to declare that the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union were subversive.[50] The end result was, as DuBois wrote for the National Guardian in 1955, “One of the curious results of the current fear and hysteria is the breaking of ties between Africa and American Negroes.”[51]  Mrs. Bethune cut off her connections to the left, including those to her friends Doxie Wilkerson and Paul Robeson and ended all critical comments on the West in Africa, although she did continue to speak of her African roots.[52]  Mrs. Carter and her brother had a furious fight and ceased to speak to each other for years.[53]

        When Franklin Roosevelt died, the Democratic Party had slumped into crisis and it remained so until 1948.  Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey had contended for the support of African Americans after Roosevelt died. Truman realized in 1946 that he must “out-red” Thomas Dewey, to paraphrase George Wallace’s notorious comment. Black leaders to the left were unwelcome in the new Democratic coalition, but African American leaders like Mrs. Bethune were invaluable in an election that would be so hotly contested and, as it turned out, close.

        Mary Bethune had established a National Non-Partisan Committee for the Re-election of Roosevelt.  On this committee, she had worked closely with Doxie Wilkerson; Edith Sampson of the National Council of Negro Women; the venerable Bishop R. R. Wright; conservative journalist Roscoe Dunjee; Hugh Mulzac, a U.S. Navy officer; and radical publisher Charlotta Bass to line up forces, and she re-organized her forces to vote for Truman.[54]  Eunice Carter – a ferocious opponent of Roosevelt – had positioned herself as far away from Bethune as possible, for New York Governor Thomas Dewey was considering appointing Mrs. Carter to his Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Commission.[55] 

        The Republicans, Thomas Dewey and at his side, Eunice Carter, could point to the danger of the U.S.S.R. in an era of atomic weapons. Even the Rockefeller Republicans, no friends of Truman, implied that the Democratic Party, as reconstituted by Roosevelt, had encouraged communist infiltration of the U.S. government and in general, had been tainted by united front strategy during the war, which only had encouraged communists to try to take over the world. In fact, the USSR did overthrow the Hungarian government in 1947. In 1948, the USSR did establish a communist government through a coup in Czechoslovakia and apparently bore responsibility for Jan Msaryk’s murder. 

        In 1948, Truman narrowly won the Presidential election against Thomas Dewey, and Republicans and Cold War liberals took over Congress. With his mandate, such as it was, the President felt confident enough to desegregate the Armed Forces. The mutuality between the Truman Administration and Mesdames Bethune and Carter might have palled in light of circumstances in South Africa and Liberia, but the President in 1948 again called for an end to the poll tax and segregations in interstate transportation, and he publicly requested Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Truman also demanded integration of employment in the federal government and more federal attention to civil rights law and violations. However, in 1948, the Nationalist Party swept elections in South Africa and by 1949, legally had established apartheid, and in that case, the Russians were not involved, but the United States intended to be. The difficulty was Malan and the Nationalist Party, in winning the South African national elections in 1948, represented the first time since 1932 that fascists had won state power at the polls.[56]

        South Africa was the sticking point. The United States wanted friendly relations with the Malan government because South Africa had gold and industrial diamonds. Since Henry Ford’s heyday, major U.S. corporations had been intensely interested in South Africa’s resources, including its cheap labor, and in its potential for investment. Moreover the country offered strategic bases in a safely anti-communist nation.[57] The State Department knew that South Africa was volatile, but the United States’ corporate interests in South Africa were political and economic, not sentimental.

        Meanwhile, Liberia presented a particular problem for the State Department. Harvey Firestone had not been alone in seeing Liberia as a personal empire. Others companies and individuals deeply interested in exploiting Liberia included the Rockefellers; Lever Brothers; Sam Height of Mississippi, the U.S. Consul in South Africa; the Anglo-American Corporation, in a slightly westward move; American Transvaal; American Metal Company; DeBeers; the Villard interests; Edward Stettinius, who established Liberia Company for rogue companies to sail under Liberia’s flag; and Jimmy Byrnes, with Newmont Mining Corporation.  In early 1952, Mrs. Bethune would represent the United States at the presidential inauguration of William V.S. Tubman in Liberia. In his second inaugural speech, Tubman insisted upon a compulsory draft because, he said, “preparedness must become a reality within our borders in the shortest possible time.”[58] 

        As Mary Bethune turned her attention away from colonialism and its effect, she and Mrs. Carter became suspicious of each other. In February 1948, Mrs. Carter brought a message from the State Department to Mrs. Bethune. Chester Williams of the State Department brought her news of “a matter of most importance to us as Negroes.” Mrs. Carter delivered the message in person, for she was afraid to commit it to writing.[59] Undoubtedly, Mrs. Carter told Mrs. Bethune that the National Council of Negro Women would be among those chosen to defend the USA on the matter of civil rights people of color around the world, through the Town Meeting Tour of the Air, sponsored by the State Department and the American Broadcasting Company. Probably it was at that moment of sharing the invitation that Mrs. Carter understood that she would be Bethune’s choice as the NCNW’s representative on the tour. Mary Bethune was unable to attend the 1948 annual meeting of the National Council of Negro Women. Edith Sampson, sometimes a chum and sometimes a rival of Eunice Carter, gossiped to Mrs. Bethune about Mrs. Carter’s comment that the old people who could not be present could have learned much from the more efficient youth at the meeting. Mrs. Bethune had an asthma attack and blamed Mrs. Carter who, apart from political party choice, had been her loyal dogsbody for over a decade.[60]  Mrs. Bethune chose Edith Sampson to accompany Max Yergan, Ralph Bunche, Channing Tobias and Walter White on the Town Meeting of the Air tour. They traveled through Asia and Oceania, defending the United States as a democracy and insisting that African Americans lived well in the United States. When Edith Sampson was chosen instead of she, Mrs. Carter called Mrs. Bethune a liar, and the older woman hit the roof.[61] Other National Council of Negro Women members visited Haiti, British Guyana, Trinidad, France, Guatemala, Holland, Germany (which was Mrs. Carter’s particular purview), Italy, Russia and Cuba for the Town Meeting. Mrs. Bethune had visited Haiti, and so she contributed an article to the new periodical, “Haiti Was Wonderful!”[62] As a result of the Town Meetings on the Air, Mrs. Bethune wrote, the NCNW was then “able to open up opportunities for well-trained professional women in key government and industrial posts.”[63]

        Mrs. Bethune had begun to slip. The periodical of the National Council of Negro Women drifted from its original tough-mindedness into a Cold War model of a commercial woman’s magazine. The revamped periodical, Women United, was strikingly different from the original Aframerican Journal, in that it promoted fashions, home economics, and child rearing.[64]  At Mary Bethune’s last annual National Council of Negro Women meeting, the organization did condemn the South African Union and urged UN Trusteeship for Southwest Africa.  At this meeting, the NCNW also staged a United Nations night featuring folk dance and “native music,” for Mary Bethune had translated her concern for sub-Saharan Africa into cultural admiration.[65]

        Mrs. Bethune had not forgiven Mrs. Carter. She appointed Dorothy Ferebee to replace her as leader of the National Council of Negro Women. Mrs. Carter, who had been chair of the Board of Directors of the NCNW, was elected only to a member-at-large position.[66]

        Early in 1950, Mrs. Ferebee appointed Eunice Carter to represent the National Council of Negro Women before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Genocide Convention. The United Nations had voted unanimously in favor of the Genocide Convention in 1948, and representatives of forty-three governments, including the United States, had signed the Convention. The Convention represented a step forward in pursuing perpetrators of any more Holocausts, for its defined genocide as an international crime, more than simply an act of war. The convention would allow for the international legal prosecution of “denial of the right of existence of entire human groups” by “private individuals, public officials, or statesmen... whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political, or any other grounds.” However, twenty governments needed to ratify the Convention before it passed into international law. In January and February 1950, the U.S. Senate held public hearings to help them decide whether or not to ratify.[67]

        Public officials from the South such as Leander Perez, a district attorney, testified against ratification. Perez claimed that the Convention “would internationalize matters which are solely within our domestic jurisdiction,” and it would allow federal courts to hear cases that claimed genocide in the U.S. South, and thereby, violate states rights. He added that “the overhanging threat” of the Convention was “that citizens of our states someday will have to face an international tribunal.” The Convention, Perez insisted before the Senate, was a United Nations’ “conspiracy to destroy our American institutions.” The American Bar Association also opposed ratification, but two brave New York lawyers stood up to the powerful ABA: Dana Converse Backus and Eunice Carter.[68]

        Eunice Carter demonstrated that she had not forgotten about the world when she testified for the NCNW before the Senate on 24 January 1950:

        Firstly, we come here because we are women who are working with women throughout America and the entire world to bring about peace and security everywhere. Women and children, weak and defenseless, are usually the first victims of genocide. They are the keepers of the future of any race of people. With all of them, wherever they are found, we stand united to work for their ultimate security in the homelands of their birth or their choice.

        Secondly, we are members of a minority. The victims of genocide are minorities. There is no safety for any minority anywhere so long as their extinction goes unchecked and unpunished. The United States of America has an opportunity to give the minorities of the world new hope and new courage by ratifying this convention.

        Our third interest is that we are Americans. We have pride in our great Nation and in its leadership in world affairs. We voted for this convention. More, we were prominent in its promulgation, but we have not ratified it. ...The United states takes leadership in military and economic affairs, but it cannot maintain the respect and trust of nations or of peoples unless it takes leadership in moral courage.[69]

        Mrs. Carter and the National Council of Negro Women were concerned that Southern Senators would not vote to ratify the UN’s genocide convention if those Senators and their supporters would be subject to charges of genocide because of longtime racial violence in the U.S. South. To win Senatorial support for the proposed genocide treaty, Mrs. Carter provided an escape hatch for the U.S. South. She added to her statement, “Let me say that the National Council of Negro Women is under no impression as to the meaning of genocide or as to the implications of the Genocide Convention which is now before the Senate for ratification. The situation of the Negro people in this country is in no way involved. The lynching of an individual or of several individuals has no relation to the extinction of masses of peoples because of race, religion, or political belief.”[70]  The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention late in 1948. The U.S. Senate did not ratify the convention until 1988.

        Shortly before her death, Mary McLeod Bethune sent Jeanetta Welch Brown to a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, to request integration of the U.S. Department of State. The African Americans who attended the meeting with Jeanetta Brown noted that State hired fewer African Americans, except in custodial and clerical positions, than any other federal department. The group asked Acheson to assist the applications of promising African Americans to universities that prepared youth for Foreign Service jobs.[71] The elderly woman soon felt the hot breath of anti-communism on her shoulders. The Englewood, New Jersey, Anti-Communist League accused Mary Bethune of being a subversive in 1952, and the local school board excluded her from a meeting at Englewood Junior High School. At a quickly substituted site, a church, Mrs. Bethune was supported by Walter White of the NAACP who said at the talk, with no measure of irony, “Great resentment is stirring all the colored people of the world because of the myth of the generosity of the white man and because they control the greatest supply of raw materials.”[72]

        The far right took advantage of Mrs. Bethune’s age and fears. In 1954, Mrs. Bethune signed a petition circulated by a right wing group for a Christian Palestine.[73] Shortly after her death, a right wing religious group, Moral Re-Armament, produced a feature film about Mrs. Bethune’s life. Moral Armament members believe that shallow, greedy Americans (which is to say, trade unionists) and imperialists of Britain had caused communism.[74] After a lifetime of fantastic achievement and selflessness for African Americans and for all women, she was repaid with a tawdry biograph. Mary McLeod Bethune died in 1955, and Mrs. Carter did not attend her funeral.

        Eunice Carter went on to a golden career as an advocate for women’s rights with the United Nations and working for the U.S. military in Germany. Alphaeus Hunton spent his final years in Africa and traveling. Alphaeus Hunton and Eunice Carter died of cancer in January 1970. During the last year of his life, Hunton was traveling in the People’s Republic of China. By chance, he encountered Talitha Gerlack, a family friend. Ms. Gerlack gave him a secondhand message from Mrs. Carter. “Sometimes,” Eunice had said, “I think he took the right path.”[75]

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