[R-G] [Review] Forgotten Revolutionaries: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

[Richard Menec]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/10/AR2008011003462.html

Forgotten Revolutionaries
How Southern communists, socialists and expatriates paved the way for civil 
rights.

Reviewed by Raymond Arsenault
Washington Post, Sunday, January 13, 2008; BW03

DEFYING DIXIE

The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Norton. 642 pp. $39.95

Willful amnesia has been a chronic problem in American historical thought. 
Many of us, it seems, have preferred a simplified and sanitized version of 
national history, one that smooths out the rough edges that might complicate 
comforting visions of harmony and progress. This mythic approach to the past 
was especially popular during the two decades following World War II, when 
patterns of violence, extremism and political discord were either ignored or 
discounted. Politics, in the two-party context of American exceptionalism, 
had been reduced to a mere quibbling over details. In this fulsome view of 
the great American success story, there was no room for radical dissent, no 
place for systemic failure.

Recent decades, of course, have witnessed a withering assault on this 
attitude by an increasingly diverse cadre of professional historians, many 
of whom have shown a special interest in the evolution of social and 
political movements and the history of marginalized groups such as African 
Americans, women and the poor. Shining a light on the darkest recesses of 
U.S. history, revisionist scholars have challenged the presumptions of 
American exceptionalism. In the process, they have fostered a greater 
appreciation for the power of dissent and disorder, uncovering the radical 
roots of everything from the American Revolution and abolitionism to 
populism and organized labor. In the burgeoning field of civil rights 
studies, such an appreciation has been an important undercurrent for at 
least a decade. But with the publication of Glenda Gilmore's remarkable new 
book, Defying Dixie, the left-wing origins of the civil rights movement have 
risen to the surface of historical debate.

Gilmore, a North Carolina native and Yale history professor, transformed our 
understanding of the Southern progressive movement with her first book, 
Gender and Jim Crow, published in 1996. Defying Dixie promises to do the 
same for the emerging freedom struggle of the post-World War I era. The 
early stages of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has aptly labeled "the long Civil 
Rights Movement" have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent 
years, so much so that most historians no longer feel comfortable with 
accounts of the movement that begin in the mid-1950s with the Brown decision 
or the Montgomery bus boycott. But even the most enlightened civil rights 
historians will find new material and much to ponder in Gilmore's richly 
textured study of the Southern communists, socialists and expatriates who 
challenged Jim Crow during the three decades following the Bolshevik 
Revolution.

Gilmore makes a strong case that Cold War insecurities have promoted the 
false impression "that middle-class black men in ties radicalized the 
nation." Those mid-century men in ties, religious leaders with strong 
connections to the established black community, fostered increasingly 
militant local and national movements that insisted on "freedom now" and 
"liberty and justice for all." But they were hardly Soviet-style communists, 
no matter what Red-baiting white supremacists thought or said at the time. 
By ignoring the movement's radical origins in the ideologically charged 
political and economic struggles of the early 20th century, she insists, "we 
discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 
1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle class, and male roots." 
Misled by conservative politicians and the mainstream media, we have 
accepted a truncated and distorted version of civil rights history. "In the 
simplified stories that the media told of the movement," Gilmore writes, 
"civil rights came to mean school integration, access to public 
accommodations, and voting rights. This view erased the complexity of a 
drive to eliminate the economic injustices wrought by slavery, debt peonage, 
and a wage labor system based on degraded black labor. It took residential 
desegregation off the agenda, apparently once and for all. It swept away 
connections among civil liberties, labor rights, and civil rights that 
liberals and radicals had carefully forged from the mid-1930s onward."

As Gilmore demonstrates, the real and infinitely more complicated history of 
the modern civil rights struggle "begins at the radical edges of a human 
rights movement after World War I, with communists who promoted and 
practiced racial equality and considered the South crucial to their success 
in elevating labor and overthrowing the capitalist system. They were joined 
in the late 1930s by a radical left to form a southern Popular Front that 
sought to overturn Jim Crow, elevate the working class, and promote civil 
rights and civil liberties. During and after World War II a growing number 
of grassroots activists protested directly against white supremacy and 
imagined it poised to fall of its own weight. They gave it a shove."

In telling this story, Gilmore broadens the scope of Southern and civil 
rights history to include individuals and organizations operating well 
beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Nationalizing and internationalizing the saga, 
she reminds us that "the South could remain the South only by chasing out 
some of its brightest minds and most bountiful spirits, generation after 
generation. Many of those who left did so, directly or indirectly, because 
they opposed white supremacy. Counting them back into southern history 
reveals an insurgent South and shows some Southerners to be a revolutionary 
lot that fought longer and harder than anyone else to defeat Dixie."

No brief review can do justice to the full range of historical characters 
and events that dominate the pages of Defying Dixie. But one example may 
give some sense of the exotic radicalism that prevailed prior to the classic 
civil rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s. Gilmore begins the book with 
the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to join the 
Communist Party. Born in Dallas, Fort-Whiteman migrated to Tuskegee, Mexico 
and Canada before settling in Harlem as an editor of the socialist magazine 
the Messenger in 1917. By 1919 his anarcho-syndicalism had morphed into an 
association with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist 
Labor Party. After he gave a speech in St. Louis on "The Negro and the 
Social Revolution," he was convicted of sedition. Following a brief prison 
term, he moved to Chicago, where he became a Communist Party organizer 
specializing in recent black migrants from the South.

In 1924, Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow for the Fifth World Congress of 
the Third International, where he informed his fellow Communists that 
"negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America." 
Enrolling in the KUTV Communist training school (a.k.a. Communist University 
of Toilers of the East), he remained in the Soviet Union for eight months 
before returning to Chicago to recruit black Americans for the KUTV and to 
found the American Negro Labor Congress. Time magazine labeled him the 
"Reddest of the Blacks." But later in the decade, after a futile campaign to 
organize black workers in the South, he found himself on the losing side of 
a factional and ideological struggle for control of the American Communist 
Party. In 1930, after arguing unsuccessfully for a policy of separatism and 
self-determination in the Black Belt, he essentially gave up on America, 
fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he married and worked as a science 
teacher. Three years later, he changed his mind and tried to return to the 
United States, but Soviet authorities refused his request. His controversial 
statements about race and class eventually led to charges of 
counter-revolutionary heresy and banishment to a Siberian gulag, where he 
died of starvation in 1939.

Fort-Whiteman's unlikely odyssey from Texas to Siberia is just one of the 
many extraordinary stories that punctuate the revisionist narrative of 
Defying Dixie. Some scholars may question Gilmore's decision, acknowledged 
in the book's introduction, to focus on expatriate activists to the virtual 
exclusion of "the local people who lived in the South and who started the 
civil rights movement in the 1950s." And others will be disappointed by the 
author's failure to offer an epilogue that connects the early history of the 
movement to the transitional events of the pre- and post- Brown era. But no 
one who reads this eye-opening book will come away with anything less than a 
renewed appreciation for the complex origins and evolution of a freedom 
struggle that changed the South, the nation and the world. *

Raymond Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of History at the 
University of South Florida and the author of "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the 
Struggle for Racial Justice," is currently writing a book on Marian 
Anderson, civil rights and the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert.

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