After his discharge from the army, Keith Eickman returned to Local 6, moved from the YCL to the CP, and attended CLS classes. He was expelled or dropped from the CP in 1953, during the white chauvinism campaign, which he later called “a hysteria within the CP.” The charge against him was that in a meeting of union stewards he had disagreed with a Black steward who, Eickman later said, was and remained a close friend. Regarding the white chauvinism campaign, Eickman later said, it “was useful . . . to some people who wanted to get rid of some of the others.” He added, “They probably did me a favor. . . . It would have been difficult for me to voluntarily separate myself from the CP.”

Dorothy Ray Healey added, “One of the great ironies of the white chauvinism campaign is that we lost a large number of Black members. . . . They were just contemptuous of the whole thing because it had so little to do with fighting racism in the real world.”