Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights: 1919-1950

by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

A groundbreaking history of the Southern movement for social justice that gave birth to civil rights. The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin―in Russian―to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History, Politics, African American, Social Justice

656 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2008

About the author

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book on the early history of the Civil Rights movement. I'm almost ashamed that it took me nearly a full year to read.

Reading books of this nature always makes me quite proud to be a Leftist, a Marxist, a Communist, a Socialist, a Progressive. People just like me were fighting the good fight before it became popular, before it became political expedient, before it became "necessary". Leftists throughout the South were fighting for equality and integration 50 years or more before it was embraced by the mainstream...and what did they get for it? Imprisonment and punishment, especially after WW2, when the "red scare" became the rallying cry of the ignorant.

Stay strong, my friends.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first became familiar with Gilmore's work in college--her Gender and Jim Crow just about changed my life. At the very least, it changed the way I think about history.
Defying Dixie is a much longer, more complicated volume, but well worth the effort. It's the story of how the far left (mainly, Communists) helped get the Civil Rights movement going, long before the "official" civil rights movement. You'll meet some amazing people--I am completely in love with Pauli Murray, and the book is worth reading just for her story.
Much of the story is centered around North Carolina (where Gilmore is originaly from), so from my 2 years studying history in the state, I ran into some familiar names.
This book is not a history for everyone, though I think everyone should read it. These ideas that most of us take with no second thoughts were once completely unheard of--this is about those people, black and white, that started to work for these ideals.
Recommended to everyone with an interest in the story of Civil Rights.

[Stacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gilmore succeeds in her basic goal of expanding the story of the long Civil Rights movement, and her use of recently opened Soviet archives allows her to convey the linkages between international communism and the Civil rights movement of the interwar years. Although at their essence these points are certainly not new, Gilmore's book is a welcome addition to the field, particularly as it gives a more international context to a story that is often presented as uniquely American.

Throughout the book she brought ideas and events to life by presenting events through the life stories of various historical figures, most of whom are known to scholars of 20th century southern history but not to a more general audience. I found her discussions of Pauli Murray to be the most compelling and central to her story. Others, however, fell a bit flat and this approach may have resulted in a book that is unduly long.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me ages to read this book, but it was worth it. It’s dense, full of very detailed information about the civil rights struggle in the Southern US between 1919 and 1950. It really debunks the myth that the civil rights struggle sprang full-blown from the forehead of Martin Luther King. What we see instead is decades of patient work, some of it exactly the same as the civil disobedience in the 60s.

Mostly, the problem was that it wasn’t picked up by the white press. Television helped a lot in upping the visibility of this struggle. But there was also a gradual softening through the years, thanks to many organizers, writers, journalists, lawyers, and educators. During the WW2 years, there was a concerted effort to link Fascism abroad with White Terrorism in the US, and it worked. The connection was made. And of course, the US needed African-Americans to fight, to work in factories, and to generally cooperate with the war effort, and this gave them some leverage.

There’s so much that I didn’t know. The book begins with the Communist Party’s efforts to organize in the American South in the 20s, at a time when the Communist Party was absolutely and actively anti-racist. It’s no wonder that a lot of African-Americans signed on. Some stuck with it till the end, but many were very disillusioned later, during the Stalin years, when the CP doffed a lot of its idealism.

I occasionally fell asleep over this book, as it dwells a great deal on subtle political infighting. The white Southern resistance to democracy involved ongoing machinations, which had to be constantly countered. The struggle was often a chess game.

But the characters were the best part of it, and I met some fascinating people in these pages. The most interesting was Pauli Murray, and she figures large in this book. I have to go find her autobiography; I want to know everything there is to know about her. From her beginnings, trying (but failing) to integrate the graduate program at the University of North Carolina, to her later years when she was ordained as a minister, she consistently fought against all restrictions around race and gender. What a shining light she was.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book randomly when I saw it in the library, and it turned out to be a worthwhile read. Gilmore, a white female professor from North Carolina, surveys the "radical roots of civil rights" through the efforts of the Communist Party in the South during the 1920s through 1940s.

Gilmore tells the story by focusing on a few individual black radicals who have been forgotten by history, especially Lovett Fort-Whiteman and Pauli Murray.

Whiteman, an extravagant early supporter of the Soviet Union, founded some of the first communist organizations for African Americans, before being scared out of the country by the feds, becoming a darling in the Soviet Union, then ultimately winding up in one of Stalin's gulags in Siberia, where he worked/starved to death.

Murray had more luck, despite being a transgendered black woman in the South in the 1940s. With a bold attitude, she attempted to integrate various institutions, like the University of North Carolina Law program, and although she herself was not successful in these efforts, her example paved the way for future victories within the Black Freedom Movement.

We also learn quite a bit about Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Max Yergan, and many other heroic characters who fought early and often for equality in the apartheid South.

More interesting to me though was what I learned about movement strategy, for example we explore how the first integrated unions in the South scared the bejesus out of the capitalists, or what it meant for the Communist Party to bring the country's attention to the case of the Scottsboro "Boys", or how the "Popular Front" strategy of allying with liberals succeeded, and failed.

The writing is interesting, but could be more purposeful. Defying Dixie focuses probably too much on the Communists, and not on other radicals, but still this book really clarified for me important stuff like the Depression, the South in the 1930s, and the early Civil Rights Movement.

[Taylor Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such a well written and researched book, yet one that fails to live up to it's introduction's arguments - that their were radical roots to the long civil rights movement. While I appreciate her attempt to drag the civil rights movement out of the 1950s and 1960s, her main characters either have little success in their endeavors or they pursued civil rights by unradical means. The communists in the first part of the book don't get very far before more or less disappearing, while the second sections focuses the attempts of Pauli Murray to desegregate the university of North Carolina Chapel Hill by using the courts. Gilmore's research on Murray is fascinating, but her obvious love for her subject seems to have led her to overestimate Murray and the "radical lefts" importance in ending Jim Crow.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

The research for this book is superb. I was particularly impressed at the work she (and her research assistants) did to tell the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman. As left history, it's also remarkable because it deals with multiple political organizations and tendencies and is quite even-handed.

[RUSA CODES · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the 2009 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...

[Valorie Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore redefines the standard chronology of the Civil Rights movement, popularly known for its post-WWII activity. Post-WWII civil rights action would culminate in achievement with Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 and 1965 Acts of President Johnson. As the title of the book indicates, and according to Gilmore, civil rights in fact had far earlier and far more radical origins in Communism, labor, Fascism and anti-Fascism, and the Popular Front. She substantiates her thesis by tracing the activity of these movements, and by placing within them the African Americans and whites involved who both worked together and in opposition to one another to end or continue Jim Crow. The issue of black civil rights is typically isolated to the United States and is considered to be historically a distinct American problem. By highlighting the involvement of radical movements that found their roots in Europe, Gilmore places African American civil rights on an international stage and redefines it within the context of what the world was experiencing and how this weaved into American culture. Gilmore shows that in America there was an active Communist Party that was focused on illuminating how racism created class differences, and had a purpose to overcome this class inequality by organizing Southern black laborers into a force white supremacists could not reckon with. The CPUSA would become a major player in calling for an end to Jim Crow and white supremacy, and would operate at the same time of the NAACP, whom the communists considered too conservative and bourgeois. The distinction between the two is one where the Communist Party favored direct action and the NAACP preferred legal means to solve issues, and Gilmore states that when placed alongside Communism, the conservative nature of the NAACP is stark (7). In emphasizing this simplistic distinction between the two, Gilmore slights the NAACP of some of its own influence and early contribution. Though less radical in comparison to a system like Communism, the NAACP nevertheless operated within a legal system that was hostile to them. When placed within the cultural context of America in the early 20th century, the NAACP was also radical in its own way because it defied the "place" of the African American, and the organization enjoyed many successes of its own. For example, the NAACP played a major role in the 1923 Moore v. Dempsey decision that strengthened due process and African American's Constitutional rights. It was not only the Communist Party that took an interest in labor either, though Gilmore makes it seem as if labor was a CPUSA concern only and does not mention that the NAACP was involved in the creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African American labor union (52). Though these successes are certainly not as radical as labor marches through the streets of Gastonia, they are still significant to early civil rights radicalism. In keeping with the international scope of civil rights and the importance of the Communist Party, Gilmore brings to light that Africa Americans even went to Russia, had audience with Stalin himself, and many even let out sighs of relief to be in a country where they could, for the first time, enjoy life without fear. African American civil rights and Communism are two movements not typically linked together. In placing them together, Gilmore effectively rewrites civil rights history to include world wide involvement. She does similarly with Fascism in the United States. Gilmore reveals that Fascist ideology was intertwined with white supremacy (106), yet Gilmore does not adequately make the connection between the ideologies of Fascism and white supremacy to explain how white supremacists co-opted Fascism into their beliefs. Additionally, Gilmore splits up the influence of Fascism into two different sections, one in which she describes how some Americans embraced it early on, and then how later Fascism became linked with Communism and Nazi policy, and was thereafter largely rejected within America. Gilmore skips from one to the other without describing the intermediate years and how white supremacists that were once Fascist came to reject the ideology. Gilmore makes it clear why they did, but does not trace how or what happened to the former Black Shirt white supremacist American Fascists. Gilmore focuses her narrative on select people and groups, which allows her to make her points without filling pages with names and events that would have made the monograph dense and less fluid. Through the experiences of her select characters, Gilmore documents the progress of movements and is then allowed to move on with her point made by their examples. As she admits in her introduction, she leaves out a significant portion of people in the South who played major roles in the Civil Rights movement (11). As reviewer Michael Dennis points out, the people ignored precisely the kind of political linkages that defined the popular front and did a good deal more grass roots organizing in the South than Fort-Whiteman. While leaving out these groups of people and their contributions does not weaken the argument Gilmore is trying to make, adding them would have strengthened her narrative by illustrating the scope of the work the Popular Front involved itself in. While she leaves out some groups and people, she includes other often overlooked players such as Truman's committee on civil rights, adding another layer to the retelling of conventional civil rights history (409). Gilmore's limited focus allows her to incorporate an element of familiarity that makes her story easier and more enjoyable to read. The people involved in the movements she writes about become more than just names, but people with personalities. The emotional connection forged with these people give the book a sense of intimacy. Much like in her previous book, Gender & Jim Crow, Gilmore uses this feeling of familiarity to make assumptions about people's feelings and motivations that cannot be supported by evidence. For instance, Gilmore assumes that Louise Thompson must have been hiding something about her feelings for African American Communist Lovett Fort-Whiteman (143). She does the same when she attempts to psychoanalyze the reticence of Alain Locke and attributes it to an attraction to the charismatic Langston Hughes (137). These are things that Gilmore herself simply cannot know without personal testimony. In some cases, Gilmore is able to more successfully pull off her personal narratives. When she describes the death of Fort-Whiteman, she adds a touching reflection of his last moments that closes up the extraordinary life of this very unique man (154). It is in moments like those that Gilmore fosters a true emotional connection between her book and the reader. The combination of humanization and the personalization of events with a unique historical interpretation make Defying Dixie an essential book on the civil rights movement. Defying Dixie adds a new layer to the understanding of how the civil rights movement progressed, and what influenced the later movement. While it does not rewrite the entirety of the movement, it inserts a new level that should not be overlooked.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilmore argued that the story of the Civil Rights movement does not begin in the 1950s-60s, but was in fact a continuation from struggles by black and white Southerners which began after World War One to challenge “Dixie” or the racial and economic order of the South. This included multi-racial labor organizing, Communist Party alliance building against lynching, the Scottsboro Boys trial, anti-fascism Popular Front, and pushing the New Deal to the left to push for anti-Segregation clauses. This left organizing brought Communist Party led organizations into alliance with liberal groups, which compared to Dixie were radical, such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and Black churches, against the rising tide of fascist organizing in the 1930s, which sought to build alliances between the KKK and European fascism. The organizing accomplished, which was eventually crushed in the post-War Red Scare of the late 1940s that saw Anti-Communist hysteria specifically target radical leftists in the South, leaving mostly only more cautious liberal groups left by the 1950s, though by the standards of Dixie they were still radical. During the interwar period, both black and white radicals had regular contact with the Soviet Union, which helped build an internationalist consciousness, although some of them ended up in Stalin’s gulags. Gilmore focuses on North Carolina and Alabama, which had the largest Communist Party presence, and individuals such as Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black pro-Stalin Communist who died in Siberia, and Pauli Murray, a black transwoman Communist oppositionist who tried to desegregate UNC’s law program. These movements fought against direct fascist organizing, which unfortunately, meant that by the time of Brown v Board of Education, the left in the South was fragmented and cautious, which meant that the implementation of the law depended on civil rights organizations with the federal government.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Civil Rights did not begin with middle class black men in suits, but by labor organizers working with Communists to build multiracial or all-black unions.
-Race was a double edged sword for the Communist Party, since it was a way to chip away at capitalism by pointing out the prescense of Jim Crowism, but at the same time building around race complicated their message of building working class power.
-Anti-Communist reaction was aimed at any threat to racial and economic orders of Dixie.
-Dixie was Jim Crow and anti-union South, with heavily rigid race and class structure. It needed to heavily enforce its borders to maintain the order, which led to generation and generation of dissenters against segregation to leave, and to the Great Migration. It also heavily was suspicious of any foreign influence, domestic or international.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect supplement to more mainstream books about the later civil rights movement (mlk, parks, etc). Gilmore examines the long years of struggle from the first world war through the post war era. Special attention is paid to many individuals who played vital roles in the struggle that none of us are familiar with. As the subtitle would make you think, Gilmore examines the roles that communism, labor, and the more radical domestic & international movements played in furthering the fight for equal rights.

[Dorotea]

Always happy to see works on the "radical roots" of something, like radical roots of the women's movement or the radical roots of queer rights movement, etc. Even social work, seen mostly as charitable or welfare work, has radical roots. So, Defying Dixie promises to be an interesting read. We shall see. I'll post my review when done. The NYTimes has a review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/boo...

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really engaging, and I learned a huge amount about the underpinnings of what we think of as the "civil rights movement" of the 1950s and 60s...the struggle was longer, more complicated, and more filled with interesting personalities than we are ever taught in standard history courses. The organizing tactics, and the many decades of failures and successes gave me a lot of perspective on the social justice work I do now.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating information about the history of the African American left, but there's no argument and it's very difficult to get past the flowery language. It seems like she's trying to write for a popular audience by condescending to them with creepy cliches. Very strange.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

An underappreciate period of our history, well worth attention. While full of great details, the book never really finds a narrative arc to bring it together, meaning this worthy topic might frustratingly not find an audience with this book.

[sheena d! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dope analysis of the civil rights movement's wild love affair with communism. Intriguing and informative review of just how much faith black leaders had in the USSR, and how, for awhile at least, the USSR valued, earned and wanted that black following.

[AJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this b00k rulez!

[Cwelshhans · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic is interesting because I have never seen it covered, but I did not find the writing, organization, or book itself as interesting as I had hoped.

[Doris Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great. Book

[Jim Swike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book works best as a reference book. It is not a great read, thought I would learn more. Maybe you will feel differently. Enjoy!

[Lucas Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been on my shelf since 2012. It is undeniable, big, important, massively researched, and written in a way that stays engaging. There were also several points that I questioned whether I would ever get through it. Gilmore is a gifted storyteller who is clearly at her best when she anchors her arguments in biography, and the capsule biographies in the book are what really stood out to me. Lovett Fort-Whiteman at the start of the book and Pauli Murray in the second half of the book were the most engaging to me. Howard Odum makes for a good antagonist for a big chunk of the text, but the characters in the central two hundred pages didn't connect the same way. That being said, this book is important and convincing regardless of how easy the reading is. A necessary addition to any collection of African American studies or history of the Civil Rights Movement

[Charles Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great grandmother, uncles I never knew, and no doubt other ancestors worked under squalid and oppressive conditions in the Atlanta and Birmingham factories Gilmore describes.
If you are Black, Indigenous, Brown, undocumented the book holds truths that will unsettle you even now. It is a powerful book, not just because it tells the stories that hit close to memory, but because it speaks to what is unfolding now.

[Michelle Merlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meticulous chronology of the fight before the fight, when the groundwork was being laid by Black organizers who rose to leadership in a time when to do so was to risk imprisonment, violence, or death. This is one of those heavy reads that I know will continue to shape my academic career as a historian of Black radical movements.

[Tatum Kirschenheiter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most eye opening books I've read. The power of women is so important within this book. I read this for a class and the amount of information and small details that make this book so vital