Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update

Old cover from the Monthly Review

This blogpost is preceded by 

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
3. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
4. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
5. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
6. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"

I just found an article Hoffman wrote after he retired that sheds some light on what happened at Allen University.  He spends the article reflecting on his academic career, and fills out part of the story about what happened.  Hoffman was from a Jewish family in New York, and he become committed to radical left-wing politics after his family experienced financial hardship during the Great Depression.  He was especially passionate about African American rights, and he applied for a position at Allen University with the goal of becoming of more involved in the civil rights movement.  Personally, I'm not sure if this reflects remarkable political commitment or breathtaking naivety.  In any case, his situation was different from that of people like Marion Davis who seems to have moved to Benedict primarily because the college was willing to hire Red Scare victims.  (I had a helpful email exchange with Davis's children: they said their parents were supportive of the civil rights movement, but they also don't recall them being actively involved at the time.  Judging from his publications, Marion's husband Horace seems to have been most passionate about labor issues.)

There are a few notable silences in article.  Hoffman says nothing about Toth desegregating the Allen students body (an event that made the news), and his discussion of his dismissal from Allen is as follows:

That two Northern whites [Hoffman and Rideout] and a Northern black [Wiggins] were never securely positioned in the Southern, African-American environment of Allen University was made evident by our third year there, when South Carolina's Dixiecrat Governor Timmerman, having a new A.M.E. bishop and a new college president to do his bidding, demanded our ouster as dangerous "reds." Since our only manifest subversiveness was opposition to every form of discrimination and bigotry, Allen's Board of Trustees refused to go along with the wishes of governor, bishop and president. The governor then deployed a powerful weapon, his decree that no graduate of Allen could be certified to teach in South Carolina's still segregated public schools until we were dismissed....  The trustees held out for two years then told us goodbye....

While I find Hoffman's political commitment very admirable, his use of scare quotes around the word 'reds" strikes me as disingenuous.  The Governor's accusation that he was a communist wasn't groundless: he made specific accusations of subversive activity (e.g. involvement in the American Students Union).  Moreover, Hoffman's very article in which the scare quotes appear supports the accusation: it is published in the US's longest running socialist magazine, the Monthly Review (in 1998 – 10 years after the fall of communist!).

More generally, Hoffman says nothing about his involvement with communism and little about his involvement with left political issues that are separate from African American rights.  For me, understanding the relationship between the civil rights movement and communism in the context of the Benedict and Allen controversy remains a challenge.