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Book Review
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950
By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Norton, 642 pp., illustrated, $39.95
Historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore grew up in Greensboro, N.C., in the 1950s and remembers an abandoned mansion in her neighborhood where, neighbors whispered, "the Communist had lived." And remembers also seeing, on summer drives to the Carolina shore, billboards snarling such messages as "This Is Klan Kountry."
Out of such memories and an academic career immersed in Southern history, now at Yale, Gilmore has crafted "Defying Dixie." It is a complex narrative of people and movements whose common purpose was defying the Dixie of her childhood.
The Communist Party, she writes, "officially entered the South" in 1929, when a party organizer called a strike at the textile mills centered at Gastonia, N.C.
And the party was "[sustaining] a permanent presence in the South" when the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white women, went on trial in 1931.
The very term "Scottsboro," Gilmore writes, became "shorthand for Communist involvement in the South." Throughout the 1930s, that involvement included providing legal representation, backing a Southern Popular Front of radicals and liberals, campaigning against the poll tax and sharecropping.
There was even a proposed film project, "Black and White," that Gilmore details with wry appreciation for its political comedy.
While poet Langston Hughes labored on a shooting script, the cast, transported to Moscow from the South, found spirited opportunities for international - and interracial - liaisons. The fun ended when American representatives told Soviet officials that their support of the project would hinder US recognition of the USSR.
Times were changing with the coming of Roosevelt's New Deal and the fallout from the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. Gilmore's account loses its forward thrust as the heady days of political organizing turned to bickering at conferences and the drafting of manifestos.
By ending her account in 1950, Gilmore avoids having to tease out connections to the enduring civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s.
Gilmore's focus changes as well, becoming a quasi-biography of the African-American activist Pauli Murray, and her interaction with the iconic Southern liberal Frank Porter Graham.
Murray, who died in 1985, was a forceful presence in many of the civil right movements that Gilmore traces. But seeking admittance to the University of North Carolina's graduate school in late 1938, Murray was rejected, leading to a dialogue with UNC president Graham, who personally supported integration but felt the time was not yet right.
Murray eventually went to law school at Howard University, and Graham was appointed to fill an unexpired term in the US Senate. But their earlier association with activities in which the Communist Party had been involved would cost them dearly.
After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Murray joined its staff. "It seemed," Gilmore writes, "as if she had finally reached a position of influence and power after years of working from the margins." But Murray was rejected for the position of general counsel because of "a brief stint" in a Communist organization in the mid-1930s.
And running for a full term in the Senate in 1950, Graham was defeated after a vicious red-baiting campaign in which he was dubbed "Frank the Front."
But an even deeper price for involvement with the Communist Party in the South had been paid, silently and far from sight, some years before.
An early advocate of a radical civil rights movement in the South was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Texan black who had joined the Communist Party and was involved in the party's factional fights in the 1920s and '30s. While he did not work in the South, he had a hand in drafting the party's Negro policies.
Fort-Whiteman went to Moscow to study and was there to welcome the organizers of the Gastonia textile strike when they fled there after the strike was broken. He stayed on and was swept up in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and died in a Siberian slave labor camp in 1939.
Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
