Death Blow to Jim Crow by Erik S Gellman

Death Blow to Jim Crow by Erik S Gellman

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.

A must-read for everyone interested in understanding the grassroots, populist nature of the long civil rights movement" - Journal of American History

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781469618999
ISBN 10	1469618990
Title	Death Blow to Jim Crow
Author	Erik S Gellman
Series	The John Hope Franklin Series In African American History And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	2014-08-01
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable