On a sweltering June day in 1950, NAACP convention delegates gathered inside a Boston ballroom to vote on a controversial resolution. Speeches were made. Shouting ensued. The headlines afterward told the story: delegates had voted, by overwhelming majority, to bar communists and banish infected chapters from holding membership or leadership positions. This was not just a procedural matter—NAACP leaders Walter White and Roy Wilkins championed the purge, believing it was the only way to preserve the organization’s legitimacy in an era of heightened suspicion. The Baltimore Sun reported the decision matter-of-factly, a measure aimed at safeguarding the organization’s reputation amid intensifying Cold War scrutiny.
This wasn’t an abstract beef. The heat of war and paranoia was no abstraction—it was everywhere, pressing down on every decision. In January of that same year, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in New York and sentenced to five years in prison. Days later, the former Los Alamos physicist Klaus Fuchs was arrested and charged with passing atomic secrets to the Soviets—an act that, once traced, exposed an entire spy network that included Harry Gold and David Greenglass and eventually led to the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One week after Fuchs’s arrest, Senator Joe McCarthy delivered his infamous Wheeling speech, waving a list of supposed Communists in the State Department. Though unsubstantiated, the charge ignited a four-year inquisition that fundamentally altered American politics. In no uncertain terms, the Cold War’s fuse had caught. And in the middle of all of this, President Truman announced to Americans the United States’ intention to develop the Hydrogen Bomb--a weapon orders of magnitude more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan five years earlier.. And then, two days after the NAACP vote, North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel, officially turning the cold war hot.
Within this charged climate, the NAACP’s decision to expel communists was both understandable and devastating. Understandable, because the price of association had become unbearable. Devastating, because what was lost was not just individuals but also an agenda that stretched beyond access to integrated schools and lunch counters, beyond the ballot box, toward wealth, housing, labor, and global solidarity.
The loss was made visible in the isolation of two towering figures. W.E.B. Du Bois, founder, scholar, and internationalist had already been expelled by the NAACP board the previous year because of his vocal support for Henry Wallace against President Truman. The expulsion left the now 82 year-old exposed, and the government took advantage, indicting and ultimately trying him for "failing to register as an agent of a foreign principal" under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Meanwhile, a new moderate liberal ground was being laid. In 1946, the Harvard historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., alleged that the Communist Party was “sinking its tentacles into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” A year later co-found Americans for Democratic Action alongside NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1949, Schlesinger Jr. published The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, where he argued that liberal democracy was besieged by two totalitarian extremes—fascism and communism—and could only survive by defending a vigorous, anti-communist “center.” The book became a beacon in 1950, making Schlesinger the father of a new liberal movement. Schlesinger had addressed the convention the night before the NAACP vote, stating “If totalitarianism can only succeed as it whips and enslaves minorities, democracy can only succeed as it protects and liberates them.”
At the same time, Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, contributed an essay to the international bestseller The God That Failed, describing his disillusionment with the Communist Party.
Sound familiar? This is the posture that intellectuals like Ezra Klein and Bari Weiss have taken and in so doing ridden to new media fame—and, I presume, riches. A centering maneuver in times of heat, offering a narrative of balance and reasonableness by disavowing radicals.
Pulling back to the present
This history surfaced during a conversation I had with a foundation board member while preparing for a session on what it means to support racial justice now. We were wrestling with the same questions the NAACP faced in 1950: what risks are tolerable, what lines are worth holding, and how do you sustain a coalition when outside forces are working overtime to splinter it?
I remember saying to the board member: history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it does echo. The NAACP leaders thought they were protecting the organization by narrowing their tent. In the short term, they may have been right. But in the long run, the broader movement lost something it never fully regained. Looking back at 1950 helps us hear those echoes today. It reminds us what’s at stake when we choose survival by exclusion over solidarity by repair.
And that, ultimately, was the conclusion the board member and I reached: coalition support isn’t optional, it’s the shield. Funders will always feel the instinct to guard their reputation and resources, but the real reputational risk is being remembered as those who walked away when movements needed them most. Memory is long. What seems like the logical choice in the moment—protecting money and tax status, staying out of court—can become the very thing history won’t forgive.
The civil rights movement pressed on, and the victories were real. Jim Crow fell. Access to integrated schools, public accommodations, and the ballot box expanded. A generation of Black Americans seized new opportunities in public life, education, and employment. Yet the demand for wealth redistribution, housing justice, and worker power never recovered from the split. Organized labor, weakened by its own anti-communist purges, retreated just as deindustrialization and urban disinvestment began to reshape Black life.
By the late 1960s, Dr. King returned to the unfinished business: calling for a Poor People’s Campaign, opposing Vietnam, and standing with striking sanitation workers in Memphis. He tried to rebuild the bridge that had been dismantled in 1950, insisting that racial justice and economic justice were one struggle. His assassination froze that agenda in its tracks.
Looking back with the benefit of 75 years of hindsight, both sides got things right and wrong
Moderate institutions
Got right: They secured durability, kept a national foothold, and carried forward disciplined legal and policy wins. They made it possible for the movement to withstand scrutiny and to score incremental gains at the federal level.
Got wrong: They attacked their former allies with vociferous condemnations, branding them as Reds and traitors. By narrowing the coalition and cutting ties to radicals, they sacrificed the broader economic and internationalist vision of justice.
Radical currents
Got right: They insisted on labor rights, redistribution, and international solidarity. They kept alive a horizon beyond access—an insistence that freedom had to mean more than formal equality.
Got wrong: In their justified rage at the U.S. government’s failure to protect Black life, they clouded their judgment in terms of long-term strategy. Many aligned themselves vocally with Soviet Russia and later Maoist China—alliances that proved shortsighted and vulnerable to attack. This stance left them open to the moderates’ condemnations and cost them broader public legitimacy.
The most consequential error was shared: allowing the wedge to become a canyon. Once factions defined themselves against each other, there was no bridge long enough to reach the other side. What had once been a coalition of difference became isolated camps lobbing grenades across the divide. This is the cautionary tale for us today.
Four Lessons Worth Considering
Name division as a tactic early. In 1950, anti-communism was a deliberate wedge. “Anti-woke” attacks, selective invitations, and reputational smears today work the same way. Recognizing division as a strategy of repression is the first step to resisting it.
Protect the radical flank. Robeson and Du Bois weren’t liabilities; they were assets who broadened the horizon of what freedom could mean. Every movement needs pragmatists and horizon-setters. The challenge is not to choose between them but to make space for both.
Invest in conflict infrastructure. Disagreement is inevitable. In 1950, conflict calcified into rupture. What was missing was the muscle of repair—the ability to fight and still stay in community. Philanthropy can help fund that capacity today.
Refuse respectability bargains. The NAACP secured institutional respectability at the price of a larger agenda. Coalitions today must resist trading unity and vision for access or short-term wins.
When I step back from that conversation, what strikes me is the possibility. If the NAACP’s choice in 1950 closed doors, funders today can choose to keep them open. A recent example is the “Statement on the Fundamental Freedom of Speech,” where more than 100 foundations joined together to affirm the importance of dialogue and dissent in a pluralistic democracy. It shows philanthropy can act as a coalition itself. The real question and test is whether that same spirit and principle will extend to the movements they support — especially when those movements say things that are unpopular or uncomfortable.
How Philanthropy Can Help
Resource Solidarity Maintenance. Fund coalition infrastructure: convenings, relationship-building, shared communications and legal support. Treat solidarity work as a core budget line, not a side project.
Create a Radical Flank Insurance Fund. When a coalition partner is attacked, help cover the costs—legal, security, communications, and bridge funding—so the whole movement doesn’t fracture.
Underwrite conflict and repair. Pay for trusted facilitators, restorative processes, and retreats where differences can be aired without threatening the coalition’s survival.
Operate as if your reputation is on the line. The temptation will always be to protect reputation and resources. But memory is long, and silence will be remembered as complicity. What is being given up without even a fight? Funders must recognize that their credibility is a form of cover, and when they withdraw it, coalitions are left exposed.
Coalition support as cover. Coalition work is not a luxury—it is the shield. Funders have the opportunity to help movements withstand wedge tactics by resourcing coalitions not just to win campaigns, but to survive assaults on their legitimacy.
The delegates in Boston thought they were saving the NAACP from destruction. In one sense, they were right; the organization endured and scored victories. But in another sense, they were wrong. By choosing survival through exclusion, they sacrificed breadth and possibility. The consequence was a civil rights movement that toppled Jim Crow but left its economic vision unfinished.
We cannot know what might have happened had those coalitions held together. But we can refuse to repeat the mistake. Today, when philanthropy is tempted to reward moderation and distance itself from radicals, it can instead choose to fund breadth, solidarity, and repair. The lesson from 1950 is clear: it is easier to split apart than to stitch back together. Philanthropy’s role is to make it safer, braver, and more sustainable to stay whole.
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