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A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us about Teaching Soviet History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Brigid O'Keeffe
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Abstract

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 299 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1. “Black Youth Attending Russian School,” at gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/huldah-clark-the-14-year-old-negro-girl-from-newark-n-j-who-news-photo/515025336 (accessed April 28, 2021).

2. Blakely, Allison, “Foreword: Contested Blackness in Red Russia,” The Russian Review 75 (July 2016): 359–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, D.C., 1986), chapters 7–8; Carew, Joy Gleason, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McClellan, Woodford, “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (1993): 371–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maxim Matusevich, “Black in the USSR,” Transition, no. 100 (2008): 56–75; and Roman, Meredith L., Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937 (Lincoln, NE, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kate A. Baldwin has argued that scholars must “interrogate the continued attraction of Soviet internationalism for African Americans through and beyond World War II.” See her Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC, 2002), 7.

3. Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians, chapters 10–12; Matusevich, Maxim, “‘Harlem Globe-Trotters’ Black Sojourners in Stalin’s Soviet Union,” in Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G., ed., The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters (Baltimore, 2010)Google Scholar, especially 232–237; and Roman, Opposing Jim Crow.

4. Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 129–141; Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians, chapter 12; Hessler, Julie, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du Monde russe 47, no. 1/2 (January–June 2006): 33–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katsakioris, Constantin, “Burden or Allies?: Third World Students and Internationalist Duty through Soviet Eyes,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 539–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matusevich, Maxim, “An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and the Soviet Everyday,” Race and Class 49, no. 4 (April 2008): 57–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walke, Anika, “Was Soviet Internationalism Anti-Racist? Toward a History of Foreign Others in the USSR,” in Rainbow, David, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019), 284–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. See especially Lemon, Alaina, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism (Durham, NC, 2000)Google Scholar; Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54–61; Brigid O’Keeffe, “The Racialization of Soviet Gypsies: Roma, Nationality Politics, and Socialist Transformation in Stalin’s Soviet Union,” in Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race, 132–59; and Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca, NY, 2019).

6. See, for example, Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) and Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2002).

7. John H. Lavin, “Plainfield Among N.J. Cities That May Face Bias Charges,” Courier-News (Bridgewater, NJ), February 15, 1962, 5.

8. Edith Evans Asbury, “Newark Girl, Back from Russia, Says Soviet Schools are Better; Home on Vacation, She Says She Was Put Back from Ninth to Sixth Grade,” New York Times, December 24, 1961, 2.

9. “Yanks’ ‘Letters of Praise’ Published by Russ Papers,” Arizona Daily Star, October 2, 1960, 14.

10. Genrikh Borovik, “Vsegda nastupaet rassvet,” Ogonëk, October 16, 1960, 4.

11. “Two Negroes Have Talk with K,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 10, 1960, 4.

12. “Can’t Tut-Tut a Badge, Cleric Finds,” Daily News (New York, NY), September 4, 1958, 531.

13. “Circular letter from Committee for the Promotion of the Education of Negroes in Russia to W.E.B Du Bois, ca. August 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, at credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i068 (accessed April 28, 2021).

14. “Bitter Dad Sends Girl to Russia,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), September 23, 1961, 3.

15. Walter K. Lindemann, “Self-Styled Great Thinker Sending Daughter to Moscow,” The Herald-News (Passaic, NJ), September 23, 1961, 22.

16. “Bitter Dad,” Courier-Post.

17. Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2014), especially Chapter 2.

18. Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line, chapter 3; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, especially chapters 3–4; Cary Fraser, “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (April 2000): 233–64; and Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (New York, 2018), 33–37.

19. “Bitter Dad,” Courier-Post.

20. “Mother Says Girl Opposed to Red School,” The Times (Shreveport, LA), October 2, 1961, 20.

21. “RACE: She’s Integrated in an All-Red School,” Daily News (New York, NY), October 1, 1961, 504.

22. “In the Day’s News,” The News (Paterson, NJ), September 23, 1961, 18.

23. Mary Emma Weidner, “Russians Slow to Pay Except with Big Lies,” Dayton Daily News, January 9, 1962, 14.

24. “Daddy’s Little Girl,” Newsweek, January 8, 1962, 40.

25. “RACE: She’s Integrated,” Daily News.

26. Robert J. Korengold, “Bewildered American Girl Begins Studies in Russ Boarding School,” Terre Haute Star, September 27, 1961, 8.

27. “Negro Girl will Return to Russia,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, October 4, 1962, 3.

28. “Kholda Klark—vospitanitsa moskovskoi shkoly-internata,” Pravda, September 28, 1961, 6.

29. “Daddy’s Little Girl,” Newsweek.

30. “Strange Case,” Courier-News (Bridgewater, NJ), October 5, 1962, 22.

31. “U.S. Student in Russia Writes Home,” Miami News, February 26, 1963, 12C and Larry Smith, “The Furor Over Huldah Clark,” The Militant, October 9, 1961, 2.

32. “Clarks to Move to Russia,” Morning News (Wilmington, DE), April 12, 1962, 2.

33. Robert McDonald, “Jim Crow Foe Now Seeks to Live in Russia,” Daily News (New York), April 12, 1962, 259.

34. See for example, “Huldah Clark,” Lansing State Journal, July 9, 1962, 3.

35. “Integration Leader Denounced by Englewood Mayor,” The Scrantonian, August 19, 1962, 4.

36. “Girl Home from Moscow Hails Russia Schooling,” New Pittsburgh Courier, January 6, 1962, 3.

37. “Negro Girl Will Return to Soviets for School,” Chicago Defender, October 6, 1962, 3.

38. “U.S. Student in Russia Writes Home,” Miami News, February 26, 1963, 12C.

39. “K’s Co-ed ‘Protegee’ Returns to N.J., Likes Soviet School,” Philadelphia Daily News, June 23, 1962, 6.

40. “She Continues Red Education,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), October 4, 1962, 30.

41. “Negro in Russia Offers Help,” Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter 2, no. 1 (October 1963), 12.

42. Boris Efetov, “A Visit to A Boarding-School,” The Moscow News, April 11, 1964, 50–51.

43. “American Girl Glad to Be Back in USSR,” Bridgeport Post (Bridgeport, CT), January 14, 1962, 53.

44. “Arrest Huldah Clark,” Kansas City Star (Kansas City, MO), June 24, 1964, 32.

45. “Arrest Huldah Clark,” Kansas City Star.

46. “‘We Want Our Share of Town,’ Elizabeth Negro Rally Told,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), August 26, 1964, 3.

47. “A Disservice to American Negroes,” The Birmingham News, October 13, 1960, 16.

48. Asbury, “Newark Girl, Back from Russia,” New York Times.

49. “Daddy’s Little Girl,” Newsweek.