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Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights

by Glenda Gilmore

  1. People / Organizations:

    • Howard Odum - Sociologist

    • Josephus Daniels - Secretary of the Navy

    • George Freeman - Black Musician

    • Lester Young - Black Musician

    • Coleman Hawkins - Black Musician

    • Von Freeman - Black Musician

    • George Benson - Black Musician

    • Grant Green - Black Musician

    • Charlie Parker - Black Musician

    • Kenny Burrell - Black Musician

    • Booker T. Washington - Activist

    • George Washington Carver - Activist

    • Jacques Roumain - Haitian Writer

    • James Weldon Johnson - NAACP Secretary

    • DuBose Heyward - Novelist

    • Paul Green - Novelist

    • Julia Peterkin - Writer

    • Eugene O'Neill - Writer

    • Marc Connelly - Writer

    • Robert Minor - Cartoonist of "Exodus from Dixie" [22-Exodus-from-Dixie-Red-Cart-1926.pdf (marxists.org)]

    • Lovett Fort-Whiteman - African American Communist [The Life and Death of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the Communist Party’s First African American Member (jacobinmag.com)]

    • A. Philip Randolph - Activist [A. Philip Randolph | AFL-CIO (aflcio.org)]

    • Cyril Briggs - Activist

    • Sen Katayama - Activist

    • William Green - AFL President

    • Paul Crouch - White Southern-Born Communist

    • Ella May Wiggins - Activist

    • Carter Godwin Woodson - Writer / Historian

    • Maurice Victor Barnhill - Judge

    • Langston Hughes - Poet

    • James W. Ford - CP VP Candidate

    • Alain Locke - Scholar

    • Ralph Bunche - Scholar

    • Countee Cullen - Writer

    • Zora Neale Hurston - Writer

    • Angelo Herndon - African American Communist

    • Jesse Owens - Black Athlete

    • Ben Johnson - Black Athlete

    • Frank Porter Graham - UNC Professor

    • Pauli Murray - Activist [The Many Lives of Pauli Murray | The New Yorker]

    • Sterling Brown - Black Intellectual & Poet

    • League of Young Haitian Patriots

    • Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC)

    • Tuskegee Institute [Tuskegee University Archives – documenting the history and growth of Tuskegee University]

    • Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

    • Communist Labor Party of America (CLP)

    • Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

    • Communist Party of America (CPA)

    • Workers Party of America (WPA)

    • African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) (pg. 37)

    • American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC)

    • Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) - a trade union among African American workers (pg. 52)

    • American Federation of Labor (AFL)

    • Communist National Textile Workers Union (NTWU)

    • Communist International Labor Defense (ILD)

    • National Negro Congress (NNC)

    • National Urban League (NUL)

    • Workers Defense League (WDL)

  2. Quotes:

    • "He has little conception of the meaning of virtue, truth, honor, manhood integrity. He is shiftless, untidy, and indolent." - Howard Odum writing about Blacks (pg. 20)

    • "The Russian Revolution shortened the distance between the South and the Soviets and built a bridge that beckoned those who deplored Jim Crow." - Author (pg. 31)

    • "If once they had thought they might die of hard work on the farm, now they thought they might die of no work in the city." - Author (pg.107)

    • "Scottsboro became central to the CP's recruiting strategy among African Americans." - Author (pg. 124)

    • "Law is a tedious method of fighting social issues" - Pauli Murray (pg. 326)

    • "Riding the bus was a free-for-all that often erupted into violence, and it hampered the war effort because it delayed defense workers" (pg. 376)

    • "Passive resistance must be endless, matching one's ability to suffer against an opponent's ability to inflict the suffering. Passive resistance is not resignation; it is not submission; it is bold, aggressive, and revolutionary. It invites attack, meeting it with a stubborn and non-violent resistance that seeks to recondition the mind and weaken the will of the oppressor." (pg. 386)

  3. General Notes:

    • The Great Migration of the 1910's and 1920's

    • League of Struggle for Negro Rights [southcomesnorth.pdf (msu.edu)]

    • The Negro Question - What do African Americans need to do to acquire full equality before the law and whites? Is migration towards the North the appropriate answer, or is building up the rural South more effective in promoting justice and equality? How does the spread of Communism fit into the picture?

    • The Loray Mill

      • "The mill had a reputation for handing down the harshest of hard rules. Young women tended mill machinery for twelve hours each night, with no supper break. The workweek lasted sixty hours. All of Gastonia's people, black and white, rich and poor, depended directly or indirectly on the mills for their living. The mill owners owned more than the factories; they owned the town's commerce, its preachers, and its police force." (pg. 76)

    • Gastonia Mill Strike [LorayMillEllaMay.pdf (unc.edu)] (pg. 81)

    • The Scottsboro Boys [The Saga of The Scottsboro Boys | American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)] [Scottboro Boys (umkc.edu)] [The Scottsboro Boys: Injustice in Alabama (archives.gov)]

    • "The Communists were in the South, and many people wanted to know more about them. [They] ran for office, helped hungry people, and weren't afraid to take on a rape trial to save the lives of nine black men. The publicity surrounding the Scottsboro case meant that every Southerner heard about Communism." (pg. 133)

    • The Herndon Case - could a black communist exercise constitutionally protected free speech in Atlanta? (pg. 161)

    • "By 1937 Germans imagined the Klan as the perfect Fascist launching pad in the United States. That year Baron Manfred von Killinger directed a woman using the alias Mrs. Leslie Fry to buy the Klu Klux Klan outright. She planned to unify domestic fascist groups under the KKK cross and recruited a member of the Silver Shirts to approach the KKK's Imperial Wizard. The FBI Chased her out of the country before she could succeed." (pg. 172)

    • FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act [Introduction - National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the New Deal: A Resource Guide - Research Guides at Library of Congress (loc.gov)]

      • "African Americans remained generally skeptical of the NRA since it didn't apply to many of the jobs that they held." (pg. 179)

    • Data Resources:

    • October 3, 1935 - Italy invades Ethiopia (pg. 183)

    • April 26, 1937 - the Supreme Court declared Georgia's insurrection statute unconstitutional (pg. 195)

    • "By 1937 one could see a new spectrum of opinion on race relations in the American South. At one end the Communist Party advocated immediate social, economic, and political equality. Closest to it was a group of activist black and white progressive southerners, Vann Woodward among them, who foresaw full labor and civil rights and thought that mass action might be necessary to change the system. Standing next to them, but apart, was the NAACP, which garnered criticism and support from progressive activists as it sought change primarily through the courts. CIC members began to split. Some supported black voting rights and limited integration; some migrated even further left. Others, like Howard Odum, who became the CIC president in 1937, found themselves in the fraught position of fostering gradualism while they argued that white southerners were not ready for integration. The south was anything but solid." (pg. 204)

    • The Intimate Bookshop in NC - a place for the local intellectuals to gather and discuss issues.

    • Langston Hughes' "Christ in Alabama" Poem "inverts the story of the Virgin Birth to replace Mary with a silenced black women, raped by her white master, who bears a different kind of Christ child, one who will be crucified by lynching." (pg. 208)

    • The Ericson Case at UNC - Professor Eston Ericson (white) dined with James Ford (a black keynote speaker at a student-labor conference in Durham) in his hotel suite. "To save Ericson, the Southern Committee for People's Rights blanketed the campus with leaflets repudiating "utterly the doctrine that no white person may eat with a Negro without lowering himself in some way". This simple statement shook the cornerstone of Jim Crow. To southerners, eating was a familial act, not a public one. Because it embodied both intimacy and equality, those who ate together were practicing social equality. In the minds of some southerners, that was just one step away from interracial sex." (pg. 223)

    • Woodrow Wilson Shropshire & Robert Barnes Case (pg. 224)

    • The Pauli Murray Case [Pauli Murray’s Indelible Mark on the Fight for Equal Rights | American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)] (pg. 264)

    • July 5, 1935 - The Wagner Act (pg. 308)

      • The Wagner Act established the rights of employees to organize, join, or aid labor unions and to participate in collective bargaining through their representatives.

      • one of the most dramatic legislative measures of the New Deal. Not only did the legislation indicate that the federal government was prepared to move against employers to enforce the rights of labor to unionize and to bargain collectively, but it imposed no reciprocal obligations on unions.

    • Pauli Murray and the Greyhound Case [Pauli Murray and Genna Rae McNeil, conducted by Oral History Interview with Pauli Murray, February 13, 1976. Interview G-0044. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). (unc.edu)] (pg. 318)

      • She and her friend, Adelene McBean, were arrested for violating segregation statutes and creating a public disturbance on a Greyhound bus in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1940.

      • "[they created] the beginning of a new type of leadership - a leadership that will not cringe and crawl on its belly merely because it happens to be faced with prison bars in its fight for the right." - Louis Austin (pg. 321)

      • Pauli Murray speaking on her case…"the power of truth, love, and nonviolence…the fundamental issues themselves may be lost through quips and quirks of the judge or the way the case is filed." (pg. 326)

      • Opportunity : Journal of Negro Life. Vol. 18, no. 5 (May, 1940) by Harold Garfinkel.

    • Opportunity - An African American magazine by the Urban League (pg. 322)

    • Irene Morgan v. Virginia - Supreme Court Case of 1946 [MORGAN v. COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA. | Supreme Court | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute (cornell.edu)]

    • Odell Waller Case (pg. 329) [Waller v. Commonwealth, 178 Va. 294 | Casetext Search + Citator]

    • The Poll Tax system of Trial was a system in which states chose jurors based on their record of paying a state tax, most of which excluded lower income white families and most African American families (pg. 336)

    • The March on Washington Movement (MOWM) came to fruition by A. Philip Randolph (pg. 359)

    • June 25, 1941 - FDR issues executive order 8802. (pg. 360)

    • "Jim Crow rested on 2 fundamental beliefs: maintaining the 'integrity' of the white race and maintaining the southern labor system, which depended on a base of underpaid black labor to keep wages down for all. All else - political repression, segregation, degradation, lynching, and a poor educational system - existed to keep those two pillars in place. When the federal government condemned employment discrimination, it struck at the heart of white supremacy." (pg. 361)

    • January 25, 1942 - White Mob Lynches Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Missouri. "a crowd of 300 white people took a black man from jail [and] dragged him behind a car throughout town, poured gasoline on him, and burned him alive." (pg. 364) Following this event, Pauli Murray saw the MOWN as the only available vehicle for mass protest. Murray believed that ending segregation 'demanded forceful action' (pg. 365). A. Philip Randolph suggested a series of meeting "to protest…flagrant, outrageous, and indefensible discriminations against the Negro" (pg. 365). Together, "they would focus on reversing the Red Cross's decision to segregate the blood supply, desegregating the military, protecting the black soldiers from southern mobs, and increasing black representation in the federal government." (pg. 365)

    • October 20, 1942 - the Southern Conference on Race Relations (SCRR) was held in Durham, North Carolina with more than 50 prominent African American leaders of the South to discuss solutions for inter-racial cooperation. The Durham Manifesto was a byproduct of this meeting (pg. 370) [Southern Conference on Race Relations, Durham, N.C., October 20, 1942 : statement of purpose .. (archive.org)]

      • "The war has sharpened the issue of Negro white relations in the United States, and particularly in the South" (pg. 5)

      • "We regard the ballot as a safeguard of democracy. Any discrimination against citizens in the exercise of the voting privilege, on account of race or poverty, is detrimental to the freedom of these citizens and to the integrity of the State. We therefore record ourselves as urging now: a.) The abolition of the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting. b.) The abolition of the white primary. c.) The abolition of all forms of discriminatory practices, evasions of the law, and intimidations of citizens seeking to exercise their right of franchise." (pg. 6)

      • "The Manifesto was one of the most significant Southern documents of the 1940s. It addressed the dichotomy between African American soldiers fighting overseas in the name of democracy while in the U.S. they were facing racial violence and being denied basic human rights. It also established a blueprint for the strategic struggle for African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s." [Oct. 20, 1942: Durham Manifesto | Zinn Education Project (zinnedproject.org)]

    • [Negroes and the War (si.edu)]

  4. Further Readings:

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights: Text
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