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Introduction In the autumn of 1946, it was not yet clear that coalitions organizing for African American civil and labor rights, which had been built during the Great Depression years and flourished during the war, would soon be under attack. The year 1946 held promise. The Four Freedoms had not been forgotten nor had the Atlantic Charter or the idea of a Double Victory.The opportunity existed to defeat racism and colonialism in the manner that fascism had so recently been overpowered. Perhaps nowhere was this promise better illustrated than at the national conference held by the Southern NegroYouth Congress (SNYC) that year. “It is written all over the horizon: now or never,” Louis Burnham extolled the delegates and attendees in Columbia, South Carolina. He envisioned moving forward with a strong and “truly democratic” organization comprised of “students, labor and civic leaders” who would wage a war against inequality and injustice.1 The local black newspaper, the Lighthouse and Informer, estimated that upwards of five thousand left-wing activists and sympathetic spectators had made their way to the interracial SNYC gathering .2 The capital of South Carolina, long known as a bastion of segregationism , became for a moment a stronghold for progressivism. One of the highlights of the three-day conference was undoubtedly the tribute to the venerable W.E.B. Du Bois on Sunday evening. The delegates to the conference, members of the youth congress, and people from the local community honored the doctor who by 1946 had been part of the “principled struggle . . . on behalf of the Negro people of the United States and the unfree peoples of all the world”for nearly a half century.3 It was the closing session of the meeting,but the chapel at Benedict College held a capacity crowd for the presentation honoring Du Bois and for his speech that 1 2 · The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World followed. Admirers stood in the aisles, and when all the standing places were taken, eager listeners assembled around loudspeakers outside the packed hall. “A hush fell over the audience as youth prepared to express their‘great obligation of reverence and respect’”for“the senior statesman of the American Negro’s liberation struggle.”4 Against the organ notes of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a voice artfully recounted Du Bois’s birth in “frosty New England,” his call to the Talented Tenth and his journey “down from the Ivory Towers” to mingle with the workers of the fields, mines, and factories whom he joined in“the great struggle for Equality.”5 The crowd’s excited applause filled the hall when Du Bois received a“book of reverence” that was signed by all of the delegates to the SNYC conference. His speech that night offered an assessment of the economic and social position of black Americans in the South and challenged the youthful generation to oppose the forces of white supremacy. He did so“with the full force of his great intellectual and combative powers”in“language whose grandeur and simplicity explain why Dr. Du Bois is regarded as one of the great literary stylists of our times.”6 Thanks to the thoughtfully detailed rendering of the ceremony for Du Bois in a pamphlet published by the Southern Negro Youth Congress, readers can envision the proceedings clearly. This was a significant moment for SNYC as a“black-labor-left” alliance that was inaugurated in the 1930s.7 Having weathered World War II, the youth congress chose this crossroads moment to venerate Du Bois, who was an activist of the previous generation but who embodied the values of their organization. He was a leader among the agitators who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the early twentieth century. He was also an esteemed scholar and not only active in the Council on African Affairs but also a father of the Pan-African Congress movement of the early 1900s that had been recently reinvigorated in 1945. Du Bois, thus, represented the activism,theorizing,and internationalism that inspired the generation that founded SNYC. But the young people of the youth congress, while motivated by the struggles of Du Bois’s generation, were also influenced by the specific circumstances of their lives. They came of age during the worst economic crisis in U.S. history, and they had just fought in a global conflagration. Du Bois’s speech, then, correlated all of these interrelated elements. He [3.129.249.105] Project...

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