Death Blow to Jim Crow

The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

Erik S. Gellman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781469618999, 9780807835319
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869932
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

• Abbott, Robert, 23, 28
• Abner, Willoughby, 258
• Abolish Peonage Committee, 131
• Abyssinian Baptist Church, 194, 205
• Acheson, Dean, 240, 241
• Addes, George, 258
• Aiken, Leroy, 245
• Allen, Frederick Douglass, 26
• All India Trade Union, 228
• Alston, Christopher Columbus: and SNYC, 72–73, 77;
  • and tobacco workers, 79;
  • and TSLU, 82, 83, 86;
  • and NNC, 87;
  • and Tobacco Organizing Committee, 98;
  • and UAW, 103, 135
• Amachree, Godfrey K., 227
• Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 96, 98, 100
• Amalgamated Meat Cutters, 31, 51
• AME Ministerial Union, 123
• American Civil Liberties Union, 126
• American Consolidated Trades Council, 50
• American Crusade to End Lynching, 238, 243
• An American Dilemma, 214, 262–64, 265
• American Federation of Labor, 10, 26;
  • 1935 conference, 15–16;
  • and CIO, 36, 50, 54, 84, 159;
  • critics of, 42, 51, 163;
  • and racism, 54, 59, 83, 84, 85, 163;
  • and NNC, 127
• American League for Peace and Democracy, 126
• American Missionary Association, 181
• American Steel, Tin, and Plate Metal Company, 36
• American Student Union, 71
• American Tobacco Company, 67, 76, 88–89, 100, 101, 102, 248
• American Youth Act, 75
• Amsterdam News, 97, 163, 168
• Anderson, Marian, 129, 136, 182
• Anderson, William, 191–92
• Andreas, Lewis, 45
• Andrews, Elmer F., 99
• Anglo-American Society, 228
• Antilynching campaign, 6, 53, 61, 105, 134, 144, 146, 151, 156, 158, 204, 266
• Anton-Fisher Local (TWIU), 83
• Aptheker, Herbert, 173, 233, 245–46, 248
• Arcade Sunshine Laundry, 128, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• DEATH BLOW TO JIM CROW
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PRELUDE Let Us Build the National Negro Congress
• INTERLUDE Black and White, Red, and Over?
• CONCLUSION Gone with What Wind?
• Notes
• Index