Defying Dixie : the radical roots of civil rights, 1919-1950

The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin--in Russian--to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.

• List of Illustrations p. xi
• Introduction: Sunset in Dixie p. 1
• Part 1 Incursions
• 1 Jim Crow Meets Karl Marx p. 15
• The Southern Solution
• Snapshots from Jim Crow's World Tour
• The Communist Solution
• From Tuskegee to Moscow
• The "Reddest of the Blacks"
• Agitating the Uplifters
• Race as Class in the USSR
• Learning to Be Black Bolsheviks
• Building a Black Communist Base
• The Conundrum of Race, Class, and Nation
• Self-Determination for the Black Belt
• 2 Raising the Red Flag in the South p. 67
• From Comintern to Cotton Mill
• Black Equality, Red Scare
• Saved by the "Crackers"
• "We Will Never... Let Our Leaders Die"
• Setting Down Communist Roots
• From Cotton Mill to Comintern
• 3 From the Great Depression to the Great Terror p. 106
• The Politics of Hunger on the Right
• The Politics of Hunger on the Left
• Derailing the Rape Myth in Scottsboro
• Sons and Daughters of Scottsboro
• Seeking Solutions in the USSR
• Finding the Great Terror
• Part 2 Resistance
• 4 The Nazis and Dixie p. 157
• The Trials of Angelo Herndon
• Fighting Fire with Fire, Adolph Hitler, K.K.K.
• Homegrown Radicals
• Georgia Officials Ape Hitler Terror
• African Americans Confront Fascism
• A Southern Popular Front
• Fair Play and the Fascists
• What Else Are Jim-Crow Laws but Fascist Laws?
• Intimations of the Holocaust
• 5 Moving Left from Chapel Hill to Cape Town p. 201
• Liberals Meet the Left
• Outside Agitation and Southern Conversions
• Building a New Left in the New South
• The Bankruptcy of the Interracial Cooperation Model
• Southern New Dealers Imagine a New South
• Interracialism's International Crisis
• 6 Imagining Integration p. 247
• North Carolina's Daughter
• Storming the Ivory Tower
• Pauli Murray, Applicant
• Frank Porter Graham's Dilemma
• Not Waiting for Roosevelt
• Rah, Rah, Carolina ... lina
• Plaintiff Pauli Murray
• Fred and Red Come Home
• Part 3 Rebellion
• 7 Explosives in Democracy's Arsenal p. 297
• African Americans and the Nonaggression Pact
• Randolph, Yergan, and the National Negro Congress
• Is This My People's War?
• Greyhounds, Guts, and Gandhi
• Sharecropping and Justice
• The Poll Tax as a National Problem
• Exposing Sharecropping and the Poll Tax
• 8 Guerrillas in the Good War p. 346
• Snatched from the Jaws of a Red Scare
• Taking It to the Streets
• Pauli Murray's March on Washington
• "The South" under Siege
• What Does the Negro Want?
• The Agony of White Southern Liberals
• Pauli Murray's Sit-Ins
• I Am an American, Too
• 9 Cold War Casualties p. 400
• Lessons of the Holocaust
• The U.S. in the UN
• Presidential Civil Rights
• Civil Rights, Anti-Communism, and the Election of 1948
• Breaking Frank Graham
• Tipping Junius Scales
• Turning Max Yergan
• Being Pauli Murray
• Acknowledgments p. 445
• Notes p. 453
• Works Cited p. 559
• Permissions p. 621
• Index p. 623