Forgotten Revolutionaries

1,200 people turned out for a 1933 rally in New York City for the Scottsboro boys, organized by the International Labor Defense and backed by the Communist Party.
Reviewed by Raymond Arsenault
Sunday, January 13, 2008


The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Norton. 642 pp. $39.95




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."



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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