It is one of the enduring paradoxes of American racism that those black Americans most likely to exercise their full rights as citizens - to vote, to stand, to speak out - are the most likely to be branded as unpatriotic.

"Of course the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn't prove that he's a communist," said the chairman of a loyalty review board, one of the McCarthyite kangaroo courts that sat in judgment of possible communists, in the 50s. "But it certainly makes you look twice, doesn't it? You can't get away from the fact that racial equality is part of the communist line."

Assuming that African-Americans could not possibly work out that white supremacy was not in their interests by themselves, their detractors routinely accused them of acting under influences both foreign and malign. The FBI wasted millions of dollars and hours trying in vain to prove that Martin Luther King was a communist. For those who would not know their place and were not assassinated, the punishment was often the revocation of whatever rights of citizenship they had. Already denied the vote, freedom of movement and association, Paul Robeson was refused a passport in 1950 and confined to the US. When his lawyers asked why, they were told that "his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries". In 1963 the intellectual and activist WEB Dubois was similarly grounded without passport privileges and so moved to the recently liberated Ghana.

The struggle for racial equality in America has always essentially been a battle for full citizenship. In a country founded on the principles of the enlightenment and built on the backs of slaves, it has long exposed the tension between the country's promise and its practice. The founding fathers held both that all men were equal - and that a slave was worth three-fifths of a man. Sooner or later, the nation would implode under the weight of these constitutional contradictions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...laryclinton.usa