Introduction

This project seeks to employ the digital methods established by “The Florida Alligator: A Macroscopic View of Social Change at the University of Florida” and develop them further by studying a different aspect of social change at the University of Florida, engaging in close reading, and conducting statistical analysis. The group project concludes that computational methods, particularly word frequency, supports prior literature on the protracted, student-driven nature of social change in universities. The project also provides the python code and database to conduct word searches of The Alligator, encouraging further research. As an author of “A Macroscopic View,” my individual project will develop on many themes from that article.

During my research for the group project, I encountered an assertion that opponents of integration employed the rhetoric of anticommunism to justify their opposition to racial equality. Jessica Clawson argues, “At the grassroots level, many white southerners saw rights movement as a communist conspiracy…Believing the civil rights movement was a communist conspiracy allowed these segregationists to more easily justify their opposition to it” (Clawson 2011, 349).  Clawson’s argument presents a ripe opportunity to employ the word searching program my group developed for The Alligator. Her argument — that anti-integration and anti-communist rhetoric correspond to one another — is a claim that can be quantitatively interrogated through word frequency. It also presents an alternate perspective into the nature of university social change, examining the rhetoric of its opposition. 

Literature Review & Framing Questions

Civil Rights and Anticommunism

Two interpretations compete regarding the nature of anticommunism and civil rights. One interpretation, dominant in legal scholarship, is that anticommunist ideology encouraged racial equality because Jim Crow presented an international embarrassment for the United States (Briker and Driver 2022, 451).  The theory of “interest convergence” claims that Cold War interests to protect America’s image in the Third World coincided with domestic interests to end Jim Crow (Briker and Driver 2022, 459). Accepting civil rights domestically better positioned the United States internationally in the fight against communism.

Another interpretation, dominant among historians, is that anticommunism played a key role in the opposition to integration. Segregationists believed civil rights threatened “federalism, separation of powers, and small government,” encouraged domestic unrest, and that communist conspirators infiltrated the fight against Jim Crow (Briker and Driver 2022, 464). When the NAACP put forward to the United Nations “An Appeal to the World” — a pamphlet detailing racial discrimination in the United States — segregationists denounced the move as an attempt to provide the Soviet Union with anti-American propaganda (Berg 2007, 82-83). The opposition to school integration, in particular, employed anticommunist rhetoric. After Brown v. Board of Education, segregationists derided the justices as communists expanding government power based on communist-generated social science evidence (Briker and Driver 2022, 474-475). In Florida, opposition to civil rights and communism coalesced around the Johns Committee.

Red Baiting and Anti-Blackness at the University of Florida

The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, also known as the Johns Committee, emerged in 1954 as a reaction to Brown v. Board and the growing civil rights movement (Schnur 1997, 132).  The Johns Committee’s first target was the NAACP, aiming to tie the organization to communism (Graves 2009, 4).  After failing to find ties, the committee turned its attention to universities and homosexuality (Schnur 1997, 134),  firing twenty-two University of Florida employees and expelling numerous UF students in the early 1960s (Clawson 2011, 355-356).  

UF presidents at the time, such as John W. Reitz and Stephen O’Connell, embraced a moderate position on segregation in tandem with staunch anticommunism (Clawson 2011, 250).  President Reitz saw the university as an “agent against communism” (Clawson 2011, 355-356).  However, UF’s integration process met with little opposition. UF quietly desegregated its undergraduate colleges in 1962 and averted any violent backlash (Clawson 2011, 358).  Only in the following years, as black students demanded more resources from the university, did the issue of civil rights gain more salience.

Framing Questions

The literature on the convergence of anticommunism and opposition to civil rights splits on whether anticommunism motivated opposition or support for Jim Crow. UF presents a unique convergence of both issues through the Johns Committee in the early 1960s and black student activism throughout the 1960s. The framing question for this project will examine the claims of the literature:

• Does a quantitative analysis of The Alligator show a correlation between discussions of communism and integration?

• Does a close reading of The Alligator reveal that columns deployed anticommunist rhetoric against or in support of integration?

• Was this language employed predominately by students or non-students?

Findings

Word Search

To diversify my findings, I brainstormed a “basket” of three words for integration and communism. For the communism basket, I searched for the topic itself, “communism,” and adjacent terms such as “red menace” and “commie.” For the integration basket, I included “integration,” “Jim Crow,” and “NAACP.” By searching for multiple words representing each topic, I hoped to gather more evidence for any conclusion regarding a correlation. 

Data Analysis

I ran the word counting program of The Alligator for each word from 1940 to 1980, recording the data in an excel table (Fig. 1). Line graphs of both word baskets are represented in Figures 2a and 2b. Surprisingly, the frequency of each word within the basket did not strongly correlate with one another. “Communism,” for example, peaks in usage in the early 1960s while “commie” and “red menace” peak in the late 1960s. “Integration” also experiences a dramatic increase in the mid 1950s, while “Jim Crow” and “NAACP” only mildly increase in usage by the 1960s. 

To double check the findings of the basket, I also produced a scatter plot of the frequency of “integration” and “communism” themselves. Figure 5 represents this diagram and shows a similar positive correlation with an R2 value of 0.4355. Although the relationship is weaker, both graphs show a moderate positive relation between discussions of communism and integration.

Conclusion

The findings of this project produce the following answers to the initial framing questions:

• Quantitative analysis of The Alligator supports a moderate positive correlation between discussions of communism and integration.

• Close readings of The Alligator connects anticommunism with opposition to integration.

• Both students and non-students employed anti-communist and anti-integration rhetoric.

This project contributes to the broader literature on anticommunism and anti-integration literature by providing quantitative evidence supporting a connection between the two. The R2 value 0.5279 between the basket of communist-related words and integration-related words reveals a positive moderate correlation between discussions of communism and integration. This project also provides evidence against the “interest convergence” theory. Rather than employing anticommunist rhetoric to support integration (i.e. integration would lead to less embarrassment for the U.S. on the international arena), close readings support the idea both opponents and supporters of integration saw anticommunism and anti-integrationism as inextricably linked. Finally, close readings reveal that anticommunist opposition to integration included both statewide politicians and regular students, supporting Clawson’s assertion that this belief existed at the grassroots level.

The conclusion of this article proves the utility of the larger group project. I employed The Alligator word counting program, developed in the group project, and used quantitative macroscopic analysis to intervene in the literature. I also employed close reading to produce more evidence for my conclusion, synergizing traditional and digital methods of history. By providing a proof-of-concept for macroscopic analyses of The Alligator, this project hopes to inspire further digital humanities projects using the same research tools.