Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights by Erik S. Gellman (review)

This important book constructs the significance of the National Negro Congress (nnc) and its independent youth affiliate, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (snyc) within the “long civil rights movement” connecting the Depression and the 1960s. Active between 1936 and 1949, these organizations built radical, interracial, labour-based coalitions in which women figured prominently. Many early members were active in pressuring the Roosevelt administration’s weak stance on race. As later Popular Front and New Deal supporters, they defined activism in an avowedly international context, stressing the links between fascism, colonialism, and disfranchisement; activism, they insisted, was responsibility to humankind. Above all, these militants stressed labour inequality and economic slavery as the font of racism – later activists, by contrast, typically underscored racism’s moral and psychological dimensions. nnc and snyc members shared common philosophical and activist ground with their Reconstruction forebears, whose contributions to American democracy they routinely emphasized and celebrated. While they did not deliver the death blow to Jim Crow – the title derives from their motto – they struck some vulnerable underbelly and laid the tactical foundation of the modern movement, utilizing boycotts, strikes, marches, and cultural reinvigoration. Largely forgotten because of close relationships to or membership in the Communist Party (cp) and the redbaiting that eventually destroyed them, they nonetheless successfully created greater interracial working-class unity and pushed the labour movement towards recognizing its stake in protecting Black workers. The resurrection of their history uncovers a less linear, more complex path between the movements of the Depression and World War II years and later decades.

Gellman analyzed five locations where the nnc and the snyc had particular influence: Chicago, Richmond (where the snyc was especially active), Washington, DC, (where the focus was on police brutality and lynching), Columbia, South Carolina, (the vanguard state of southern activism in the 1940s), and New York City, home to nnc headquarters after 1940. They also worked in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. In these diverse yet overlapping settings, the nnc organized laundry and domestic workers, and tobacco, steel, and meatpacking industries, meeting with notable successes and not a few failures. Women, both as workers and organizers, played central roles in these campaigns. Particularly in New York after 1940, a group of young, college educated women teachers kept the flame of economic inequality as the root of racism alive at a time of increasing internal divisions occasioned by World War II. They championed revisionist histories of emancipation, demonstrated the political power of creating a national African American cultural and artistic awareness, entered into electoral politics, and stressed race as a social and therefore political construction.

The snyc was active in forging ties with such groups as the Highlander Folk School, and in South Carolina in early 1946 they sponsored a Leadership Training Conference that provided instruction in public speaking, interacting with the press, and organizing. Their efforts coalesced in a pivotal October 1946 conference, the Columbia Youth Legislature. There, the snyc convened over 800 southern delegates to define activism in an international context and to hear the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Paul Robeson applaud and advise their work. Laying great stress on Reconstruction’s legacy, particularly its interracial efforts, they hung portraits of emancipation-era Blacks elected to federal office on the walls of the auditorium. Howard Fast, the author of a 1944 novel entitled Freedom Road, which told the story of a Black Union army veteran’s political efforts and stressed that Reconstruction ended through white terrorism, told delegates that that counterrevolution against democracy and economic justice would itself be overturned as a result of activists like those in the snyc. In the months after the conference, snyc members fanned out across the state and were active in local, national, and international politics. But they largely failed to create strong ties with labour organizations, particularly with their sometimes ally, the Congress...