1. Many people in the U.S. today still imagine that the fight against slavery in the U.S. was mainly waged by white abolitionists in the North. However, historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Zinn, and others have shown that

a. Black leaders, newspapers, and organizations played an enormous role in the leadership and grassroots organizing of the abolitionist movement.

b. the enslaved population of the South turned the tide of the Civil War by carrying out a general strike against the Confederacy, reducing or even stopping their work and escaping Southern plantations — many times for Union Army barracks.

c. around 200,000 free Black people fought in the Union Army in the Civil War, including many former slaves who were first considered contraband, then employed as laborers, and then given weapons to fight as soldiers and free citizens, forcing the Union Army to take up the cause of emancipation — and not just restoring the union — as a strategic military necessity.

d. All of the above

2. Comparable to the MAGA–Trump anti-wokeness campaign, which attacks policies that help to promote equality and social justice as being part of an elitist status quo giving people of color an unfair advantage and discriminating against white people, defenders of slavery argued that slaves were better off than poor white laborers and that abolitionists were privileged hypocritical white people. In response to those arguments, escaped slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas responded by saying that

a. Black abolitionists should refuse to work with white abolitionists.

b. abolitionists should seek compromises with slaveholders and not oppose the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in order to stave off political attacks.

c. he never heard anyone who argued that slaves were better off than poor white people volunteer to become a slave.

d. abolitionists should support freeing the slaves and returning them to Africa.

3. Unlike the Socialist Party, which saw any focus on the oppression of Black people as a distraction from the class struggle, the Communist Party USA

a. focused on the struggle against all forms of racist oppression, and the history and culture of African Americans, as essential to the struggle for socialism.

b. fought against all manifestations of racism among white workers and for racially integrated trade unions.

c. established organizations like the International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress to fight against lynching and all forms of racism.

d. All of the above

4. The Communist Party was the first national political party to have African American candidates on its national ticket. Which one of the following was not a CPUSA candidate for President or Vice President of the United States?

a. Jarvis Tyner

b. James W. Ford

c. Angela Davis

d. Benjamin J. Davis Jr.

5. Anti-Communism has followed the patterns of anti-Black racism throughout U.S. history. An example of this today is

a. attacking DEI and other pro-equality and anti-racist measures and movements as being “Communist” or “Marxist” — similar to how those who defended Jim Crow segregation opposed “race mixing” (meaning integration) as being synonymous with Communism.

b. Trump and MAGA’s simultaneous attacks on Black history and Communist history, via book bans and legislation like Rep. Salazar’s “Crucial Communism Teaching Act” or Ron DeSantis’ “History of Communism” bill, which introduce anti-Communist curriculums into public school classrooms.

c. the right-wing attempt to erase Black people and Black history as well as Communists and their role in history, while simultaneously presenting both Black people and Communists as being an ever present danger.

d. All of the above

Answers here.

Comments