The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955 by Lindsey R. Swindall (review)

In The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955, Lindsey R. Swindall provides a detailed examination of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) to situate these black-labor-left coalitions as part of the long civil rights movement. The text has a chronological organization that addresses the organizations’ Depression-era beginnings, continues through World War II, and ends with the early Cold War, showing how they were “ruptured by Cold War pressure” (11). Swindall’s goal is to historicize and contextualize the global, Pan-African vision of these groups, while illustrating the collaborations between and among progressive activists, as well as revealing the significance of intergenerational cooperation and organizing. The text provides a historical context for how ideas and themes—and, in some cases, persons—from this early phase of the freedom struggle became part of the later “classical phase” of the civil rights movement. Swindall draws from SNYC’s archival materials and its newspaper, Cavalcade. She also makes significant use of the organizational files of the CAA and the newspapers Freedom, Freedomways, People’s Voice, and New Africa, as well as other newspapers.

After the introduction provides the groundwork for positioning SNYC and CAA in the context of the long civil rights movement, the first chapter focuses on the origins of the two groups, addressing the ways in which both were centered in an understanding of the historical context of racial inequality and attempts to combat it. The chapter presents an argument for the significance of intergenerational relationships to civil rights struggles; additionally, it historicizes and contextualizes collaborations between the Communist Party and civil rights groups, attributing some of the growing interest in international affairs to the global focus of the Communist Party. Chapter 2 discusses how the war affected CAA and SNYC, including a detailed discussion of how civil rights activists, including SNYC, used FDR’s Four Freedoms to argue for racial equality at home and anticolonialism abroad. Here, particularly with regard to CAA, the connection between U.S. civil rights and an anticolonialism centered in Pan-Africanism becomes clear. The third chapter begins by discussing the Freedom Train exhibit and goes on to discuss the increasingly anticommunist nature of public (and government) opinion as the war ended and the Cold War began. Chapter 4 expounds further on this topic, focusing on local and federal harassment of the organizations in a society where “the idea of freedom was becoming linked with... national loyalty” (146); both organizations eventually crumbled under external pressure and internal conflict over how best to resist such pressure.

Swindall’s book joins other scholarship focused on the ideological and material contributions of specific groups to the civil rights struggle, including Adam Fairclough’s 2001 To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr.; Touré Reed’s 2008 Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950; Patricia Sullivan’s 2010 Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement; and Wesley C. Hogan’s 2009 Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America. However, the purpose and argument of this text are less clear than those of its fellows. Although the title suggests a focus on “anticolonialism,” the cover copy refers to the groups’ “vision of a global African diaspora,” which is more accurate; the text does not address the United States as colonizer regarding indigenous peoples in the Americas.

The significant reliance on sources from SNYC and CAA is at times problematic, as the text grants full credibility to potentially self-aggrandizing or self-serving accounts, sometimes providing little critical analysis or alternative interpretations of archival materials and events. At...