In 1950 Du Bois was named chairman of the Peace Information Center (PIC), an antiwar and nuclear nonproliferation organization headquartered in New York. Its main activity was publishing a newsletter to inform its substantial mailing list about international peace movements in order to foster global cooperation. (They also sent out stickers for kids to wear.) The PIC soon circulated the Stockholm Appeal, a petition launched by the Nobel Prize–winning chemist and French communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. It was signed by such notables as Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, and the future French president, Jacques Chirac. It received 2.5 million American signatures, nearly 3 percent of the voting-age population at the time.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson took to the pages of The New York Times to call the petition “a propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union.” Du Bois responded in the Times that “regardless of our other beliefs and affiliations, we [formed the PIC] for the one and only purpose of informing the American people on the issue of peace.” Du Bois was speaking for himself, he argued, as an American.
The Justice Department disagreed. Federal prosecutors charged him under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, arguing that he and the PIC had to register as agents of a foreign power because their petition began in another country. If convicted, Du Bois and the PIC’s other board members, Kyrle Elkin and Abbott Simon, along with former board member Elizabeth Moos who voluntarily agreed to stand trial and the PIC’s stenographer Sylvia Soloff, faced five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. For the eighty-three-year-old Du Bois, it might as well have been a life sentence.
The government’s principal aim was to silence the PIC and discredit Du Bois, just as the House Un-American Activities Committee forced leftists to recant or go underground. In the court of public opinion, the accusation itself had already accomplished that goal, so prosecutors offered to drop the case if Du Bois pled no contest. The PIC’s goal was to publicize antiwar activism, though, and so in spite of the personal risk, Du Bois chose to fight the charges against him publicly in court.
He knew it would be an uphill battle. In 1950 he had run for senate as an American Labor Party candidate to publicize his antiwar views. He gave speeches to tens of thousands of people and received an impressive two hundred thousand votes. During his campaign, he discovered the role of big money in politics: it cost a fortune to buy ad time in the press, on the radio, and on the new medium, television. In 1951 he knew his legal defense would cost him, too. Justice was not cheap.