Christopher Paul Curtis certainly makes a point of addressing class in his telling of the Watsons story, but beyond that, The Watsons Go to Birmingham contains more direct allusions specifically to 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 church noir, a cataclysmic tragedy that had a critical impact on the lives of the Watson family. Civil rights movement. Curtis writes the story in a way that naturally seems to carry Marxist overtones, 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 for race relations. no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayThe novel is set in 1963, and that year arguably marks the dead end of a period in American history when citizens and the government were madly worried about the threat of communism, which is a socio-economic ideology including Marxism and several other schools of thought (e.g. anarchism, general anti-capitalist outlook, etc.). From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, J. Edgar Hoover's special FBI program, COINTELPRO, aimed to "ensure financial and public support for the FBI" under the guise of pursuing the deliberately exaggerated threat of communism in the United States. (Time Archives). This is a period in American history retrospectively nicknamed the "Red Scare", and it greatly influenced the historical episteme of the time; that is, the language people used and what they chose to talk about was affected by the FBI's heavy anti-communist propaganda campaign. Before that, many African Americans had adopted aspects of communism because capitalism had not served them economically as they had. a people. As early as Booker T. Washington, some wrote radical essays on the subject, advancing the idea that black people should be supporters of communism. It can be argued that the aftermath of these events manifested itself in events very close to Hoover's impetuous campaign and, more tragically, the church bombing on which Curtis's 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 the fake Byron film: "Nazi parachutes attack America and are shot down over the Flint River by Captain Byron Watson and his flamethrower of Death” (Curtis 64). This is a rather playful chapter in that its title is comically long and Byron is simply playing with toilet paper; However, this scenario, much like several others throughout history, speaks to the common American civilian's concern with the ills of Eastern Europe, so to speak. These are markers of an ideology, and ideology is a concept upon which Marxism is based. Another concept that forms the 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 comes from The German Ideology, Karl Marx's own publication from 1845. To an observable extent, it is a concept that applies to many contexts, including that of the civil rights movement. The struggle between the violent and non-violent methods of the movement – ​​between early Malcolm..