A Black Woman Who Had No Illusions About Communism

A Black Woman Who Had No Illusions About Communism 

By Lawrence W. Reed

“I would rather be a Negro in America than a citizen in any other land.” Can you guess who said that? Hint: She was a prominent American woman and the first black U.S. delegate to the United Nations.

If you guessed Edith Sampson, you’d be exactly right and, sadly, one of the very few Americans today who remember her. When the country needed someone like her to rebut communist propaganda, she stepped forward and did the job with great eloquence and effect.

A revealing 1996 article on Sampson by Helen Laville and Scott Lucas in the journal, Diplomatic History, summarized her remarkable rise from obscurity to prominence:

Born in 1901, one of eight children of a launderer in Pittsburgh, she attended the New York School of Social Work but decided in her twenties to change her profession. Married, raising two children left by a deceased sister, and working full-time, she obtained a law degree through evening classes at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. She failed the bar examinations but earned a master's degree at Loyola University and passed the bar on her second attempt. Quickly moving from probation officer to assistant referee in juvenile court to assistant state's attorney in Cook County, she finally established a successful private practice and, in 1934, became one of the first women to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In November 1933, the new administration of Franklin Roosevelt extended official diplomatic recognition to Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet dictator’s murderous Holodomor in Ukraine was well underway. The parade of Far Left “useful idiots” who journeyed to Moscow to praise the Soviets and cover up Stalin’s crimes (Lincoln Steffens being among the first a few years before) picked up steam in the wake of the American government’s recognition. One of them was the black musician, actor and activist Paul Robeson, who claimed he finally felt like a free man when he visited the USSR.

On tour in India on the eve of World War II, Edith Sampson earned headlines when she publicly denounced Soviet propaganda about America. When Robeson’s name came up, she said, “Unfortunately, Mr. Robeson had all his training in America, and he has forgotten that he owes a great deal to our democracy. He does not represent any organization—only a lunatic fringe in America.”

In its efforts to convince the world that the U.S. was an oppressed nation while the Soviet Union represented a bright and more promising future for mankind, Kremlin propagandists painted the darkest possible picture of race relations in America. This was worse than the proverbial pot calling the kettle black; the Soviets were the world’s most systematic practitioners of tyranny and genocide.

The President of the United States himself was a sucker for Moscow’s propaganda. In a 1939 conversation with Texas congressman Martin Dies Jr., FDR famously opined, “I don’t regard Communism as an evil. Some of my best friends are Communists. I think Russia is a fine, great country and I admire Stalin.” This was in the same year that Stalin secretly connived with Germany’s Adolf Hitler to invade Poland and start World War II.  

When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, America needed level-headed American patriots like Edith Sampson more than ever. As a black woman, and a Democrat, she could answer Soviet propaganda with special authority. She knew that the evils of segregation and Jim Crow paled in comparison to the despotism of what Ronald Reagan would later label “the Evil Empire.” Foreshadowing the civil rights movement, she had faith that the wrongs that lingered in America could be remedied in time. She welcomed many opportunities to defend her country, a fact that caught the attention of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman.

In 1950, President Truman named Edith Sampson U.S. delegate to the United Nations. In doing so, he was celebrating a great American patriot and sticking it to the Soviets at the same time. Unlike his naïve predecessor, Truman had his head on straight when it came to the Soviets and their heinous nature and intentions.

The Chicago Defender applauded the appointment: “In naming Mrs. Edith Sampson of Chicago to the American delegation at the United Nations,” noted one of its editorials, “President Truman could hardly have chosen a more able foe of the Communists or a more courageous fighter for a just cause.”

Her time as a diplomat didn’t prompt Sampson to mellow. She labeled the USSR a prison state that even enslaved prisoners-of-war in labor camps during World War II. She reportedly told Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik to his face, “We Negroes aren’t interested in Communism... We were slaves too long for that. Nobody is happy with second-class citizenship, but our best chances are in the framework of American democracy.” A decade later, she became the first black American representative to NATO.

Years later in a college commencement address, Sampson told students, “We learned that you can work within the establishment, the system, without necessarily knuckling under to it. You can change the system, little by little, without destroying it completely. Democracy really is better than the chaotic anarchy that some New Left fanatics advocate.”

She died in October 1979, five days short of her 78th birthday.

As socialist and communist sympathizers threaten to take over the Democratic Party, it would be a good thing if its leadership could muster some of the common sense and courage of one of their own, Edith Sampson.

For additional information:

The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African American Identity in the Cold War by Helen Laville and Scott Lucas

Lincoln Steffens, Muckraking Journalist Seduced by Bolsheviks by Lawrence W. Reed

Gareth Jones, Hero of the Holodomor by Lawrence W. Reed

(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia.)