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  • Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950
  • Michael Dennis
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore New York: W.W. Norton, 2008, vii–xii + 1–642. 978-0-393-06244-1, $39.95.

A challenging reinterpretation of the civil rights movement is emerging from the pens of historians who are casting their gaze back to the period before the landmark events of the 1950s. Driven by the conservative backlash of the late twentieth century, which sought to domesticate, defang, and deny the accomplishments of the civil rights movement, propelled by the frustrating limits of the movement itself in the era of Great Society liberalism, and exasperated by the nagging evidence that, in some respects, Martin Luther King’s dream is more elusive today than it was in 1963, historians have rediscovered a movement that pursued a broader vision of racial equality than the one that seemed to emerge from the 1950s. Gilmore’s magnum opus follows the work of historians John Egerton, Patricia Sullivan, Martha Biondi, Robert Korstad, and perhaps most importantly, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. It was Hall who explicitly called for a more expansive vision of the black freedom struggle, one which extended back to the era of the Popular Front of the 1930s.1

In that tumultuous period, African Americans activists, communist agitators, and New Deal liberals frequently stood shoulder to shoulder in campaigns for social justice. Despite ongoing ideological and sectarian divisions, they joined a common cause that made little distinction between labor rights and civil rights, fascism abroad and fascism at home, economic democracy and political enfranchisement. Exploring the lives of key individuals and moments in the development of the southern “popular front,” Gilmore humanizes our understanding of this period and roots it in a specific context. By connecting its emergence to the national scene and to international currents, she demonstrates a new and refreshing approach to the fields of southern history, civil rights, and American radicalism. By uncovering the remarkable rebelliousness of little-known activists inspired by international movements for social justice, she illuminates a radical South that was anything but provincial.

Gilmore wrenches us out of comfortable assumptions about southern exceptionalism by arguing that the region participated in a world-wide cultural exchange in which the “race question” was the common currency. The South [End Page 172] was a major exporter in this trade, offering up a Jim Crow “solution” tested at home and in recent colonial acquisitions. It’s against this international backdrop that Gilmore introduces the communist “solution.” It offered an international challenge equal to the insidious racial “uplift ” of Jim Crow. Its breathtaking vision of racial equality and the emancipation of labor appealed to African Americans defiant and independent enough to act on its promises. One of those was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a failed actor turned revolutionary who becomes Gilmore’s embodiment of the liberating promises of communism. Taking the familiar route from socialism to communism, Fort-Whiteman entangles himself in the factionalism that would split the American Left and eventually lead to his own demise in a Soviet gulag. Although Gilmore is more than willing to concede that “southern Communists failed to fathom the increasingly dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime or to acknowledge that Joseph Stalin applied arbitrary and institutionalized police power to enforce it” (30), she is more interested in exploring how a Fort-Whiteman could devote himself to a cause that would eventually consume him. Ford-Whiteman’s eccentricities may have set him apart—he was fond of walking the streets of South Chicago dressed as a Russian peasant—but what linked him to a generation of black radicals was his transformative experience in the Soviet Union. Participating in the Fifth World Congress of the Third International, he discovered a country where the racial animosities that haunted the United States seemed to have simply disappeared. The experience would prove intoxicating for the Tuskegee graduate.

It was no less so for writer Langston Hughes, journalist Henry Lee Moon, and the twenty other African Americans who joined Ford-Whiteman as the cast of a film to be shot in Moscow about the experience of black workers in the...

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