Community Book Shop, Chicago. July 31, 1950. Addressed to “Faculty Member” of the University of Chicago. Edgeworn.  Warning that “a gang of hoodlums” were terrorizing Blacks and Jews on East 55^th Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago:

“A gang of hoodlums who hang out nightly on 56^th St. corners had been terrorizing storekeepers, students, women walking alone, and anyone they suspect of being Jewish or Negro…their attacks have become more vicious. They now boast of help from the White Circle League, the Hate organization which fomented mob violence… For weeks the Community Book Store has prominently displayed leaflets, petitions and books dedicated to the cause of world peace. The War hysteria has given the hoodlums their excuse to smash our windows and attack our customers. Like Hitler’s stormtroopers, they have declared war on the word Peace and those who speak for it. Like the storm troopers they use their phoney patriotism to attack minorities….When neighborhood hoodlums threaten the right of my  bookstore to sell its book, it is likely if they win here that they will being the challenge the right of University of Chicago students and faculty member to read certain book and to discuss them….strongly reminiscent of…Europe in the days of Naziism…”

      Also includes a carbon copy of a letter by Paul B. Johnson of 5728 South Maryland Avenue,  Chicago, July 24, 1950, to the Governor of Mississippi, asking a pardon for Willie McGee, a Black man who was sentenced to death in 1945 after his conviction for rape of a white woman, his legal case becoming “a cause celebre that attracted worldwide attention as it was roundly decried as a miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow South.” Place’s bookstore no doubt promoted the campaign to secure a pardon for McGee who was, nonetheless, executed the following year.

Joan Place was identified as a Communist in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and while her bookshop was in the forefront of support for African American Civil Rights, its simultaneous emphasis on a “Peace Movement” one month after the start of the Korean War was in line with Russian Soviet Cold War propaganda.                                                     Three items