Christopher Paul Curtis certainly makes a point of talking about class in his telling of the Watsons' story, but beyond this, The Watsons Go to Birmingham makes more direct allusions to specific Marxism. The novel tells a snapshot of the Watson family's life in Flint, Michigan, up to and including their summer trip to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The trip coincides with the historic bombing of a black church, a catastrophic tragedy that resulted a critical impact on the world. Civil rights movement. Curtis writes the story in a way that seems to naturally carry Marxist undertones, not necessarily in a sense that supports Marxist ideology but, rather, in a sense that more deeply illustrates the complexities of White America's angst in the struggle of race relations . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The novel is set in 1963, and this year arguably marks the dead end of a period in American history in which both citizens and government were madly concerned about the threat of communism, which is a socioeconomic ideology inclusive of Marxism and several other schools of thought (e.g. anarchism, general anti-capitalist perspectives, etc.). From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI special program, COINTELPRO, worked to "secure financial and public support for the FBI" under the guise of pursuing the deliberately exaggerated threat of American communism (Time Archives). This is a period in American history retrospectively nicknamed the “Red Scare” and greatly influenced the historical episteme of the era; that is, the language people used and what they chose to talk about were influenced by the FBI's heavy anti-communist propaganda campaign. There were many African Americans before this who had embraced aspects of communism because capitalism had not served them economically as a people. Some as early as Booker T. Washington wrote radical essays on the subject, advancing the idea that blacks should be supporters of communism. It can be argued that the backlash from these events manifested itself in events very similar to Hoover's impetuous campaign and, more tragically, the church bombing around which Curtis' novel centers. There is evidence throughout the book of the ideological influence of this propaganda as well as that of the Cold War, such as Byron's fake film: “Nazi parachutes attack America and are shot down over the Flint River by Captain Byron Watson and from his flamethrower of Death” (Curtis 64). It's a rather playful chapter as the title is comically long and Byron is simply playing with toilet paper; however, this scenario, just like many others throughout history, speaks to the common American civilian's concern with the evils of Eastern Europe, so to speak. These are indicators of an ideology, and ideology is a concept on which Marxism hinges. Another concept that serves as a cornerstone of Marxist theory is called dialectical materialism, “the theory that history develops as a struggle between contradictions that are ultimately synthesized” (Dobie 87). It originates from The German Ideology, Karl Marx's 1845 publication. To an observable extent, this is a concept that holds true in many contexts, particularly that of the Civil Rights Movement. The struggle between the violent and nonviolent methods of the movement – ​​between the early Malcolm As comforting as it is to imagine that leader.