Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) - Hardcover

Gellman, Erik S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807835315 ISBN 13: 9780807835319

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Synopsis

During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and all members of the working class, establishing civil rights as necessary for reinvigorating American democracy.
Much more than just a precursor to the 1960s civil rights movement, this activism created the most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction, one that sought to empower the American labor movement to make demands on industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before. By focusing on the complex alliances between unions, civic groups, and the Communist Party in five geographic regions, Gellman explains how the NNC and its allies developed and implemented creative grassroots strategies to weaken Jim Crow, if not deal it the "death blow" they sought.

About this title

Book Description:

"This book immeasurably strengthens our understanding of the 'long civil rights movement,' starting it decisively in the 1930s as labor's left in the Popular Front and a broad-based movement in the African American community fought to overthrow Jim Crow and organize workers. It is a spectacular addition to the literature on civil rights unionism and African-American history."--Michael Honey, University of Washington, Tacoma, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King's Last Campaign

About the Author:

Erik S. Gellman is associate professor of history at Roosevelt University.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807835315
• ISBN 13: 9780807835319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368