Defying Dixie or Unexpected George Washington

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

Author: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmor

A groundbreaking history of the Southern movement for social justice that gave birth to civil rights.

The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin—in Russian—to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.

The Washington Post - Raymond Arsenault

Gilmore…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…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.

The New York Times - Maurice Isserman

As Gilmore acknowledges, she is not the first to explore the notion of the "long civil rights movement," stretching back many years before Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. Readers of histories by John Egerton, Patricia Sullivan and others will recognize many of the characters and events discussed in Gilmore's account. The return visit is mostly worthwhile thanks to her gift for vivid description and a number of interesting observations she offers along the way.

Publishers Weekly

Yale historian Gilmore turns a wide lens on the battle against Jim Crow in this worthy if overstuffed collective biography of the black and white Southern activists whose work before the larger Civil Rights movement constitute its neglected, forgotten or repressed origins. Expanding the "temporal and geographical boundaries" of the fight for racial equality, Gilmore's scholarship considers international racial politics and traces a progression from 1920s Communists, who joined forces in the late 1930s with a radical left to form a Southern popular front, to the 1940s grassroots activists. Gilmore (Who Were the Progressives?) lavishes attention on the "first American-born black Communist," Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who died in a Siberian gulag in 1939; and on FDR-era civil rights activist Pauli Murray, distinguished by her fight against segregation at the University of North Carolina in 1939 and her involvement in the defense of Virginia sharecropper Odell Walker, ultimately executed for killing his white landlord. Gilmore's sweeping, fresh consideration of pre-movement civil rights activity, with its links to both the exportation of American racism and the importation of Communist egalitarianism, is full of informative gems, but the mining is left to the reader. (Jan.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Gilmore (History/Yale Univ.; Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, 1996) reconstructs the battle of radical Southern activists against Jim Crow in the three decades preceding Brown v. Board of Education. During the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party attracted those determined to dismantle the South's white regime. Its forthright commitment to racial equality far outstripped any declaration by the NAACP, the agenda of any regional commissions dedicated to racial harmony and the platforms of the Republican or Democratic parties. Gilmore's wide-ranging research uncovers the fascinating story of how communists, socialists, liberals, legal and labor activists helped lay the groundwork for the mainstream civil-rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. Although she hobbles an already complex narrative with irritating academic tics-e.g., the tiresome use of "privilege" as a verb and, notwithstanding her concession that the Scottsboro defendants "were really boys," her insistence on preciously denominating the case as the Scottsboro "Boys"-she offers colorful set pieces about the 1929 Gastonia, N.C., textile strike; the ill-conceived 1932 attempt to film in Moscow Black and White, a movie about working conditions in Birmingham, Ala.; the origin and ambiance of The Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, N.C., a simultaneous hotbed and safe haven for radical thought; and the 1942 sit-ins by Howard University students in Washington, D.C., cafeterias. Famous names-A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Thurgood Marshall-dot the narrative, but this story's charm lies in the sensitivemini-portraits of lesser-known recurring characters: Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first American-born black communist; Junius Scales, child of privilege turned communist; Frank Porter Graham, heroic UNC president; tortured professor Max Yergan; smarmy sociologist Howard Odum; and the narrative's star, Pauli Murray, an utterly relentless, remarkable activist whose life by itself is worthy of book treatment. For Americans who believe the modern civil-rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Gilmore ably readjusts the record.

Read also Kiss Guide to Pregnancy or The Price of Smoking

Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life

Author: Harlow Giles Unger

Advance Praise for The Unexpected George Washington


"This is a biography that unquestionably lives up to its title. Readers will discover numerous, often touching traits that they never knew about the Father of the Country. Harlow Unger has written a one-of-a-kind book that will please and fascinate everyone."
—Thomas Fleming, author Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge

"It's hard to imagine George Washington as playful, tender, or funny. But Harlow Unger searches to find these seldom-seen aspects of the private man, and the result is a far more complete and believable founding father."
— James C. Rees, Executive Director, Historic Mount Vernon

Acclaim for Lafayette

"Harlow Unger has cornered the market on muses to emerge as America's most readable historian. His new biography of the Marquis de Lafayette combines a thoroughgoing account of the age of revolution, a probing psychological study of a complex man, and a literary style that goes down like cream."
—Florence King, contributing editor, National Review

"To American readers Unger's biography will provide a stark reminder of just how near run a thing was our War of Independence and the degree to which our forefathers' victory hinged on the help of our French allies, marshalled for George Washington by his 'adopted' son, Lafayette."
—Larry Collins, coauthor, Is Paris Burning? and O Jerusalem!

"An admirable account of his [Lafayette's] life and extraordinary career on both sides of the Atlantic."
— The Sunday Telegraph (London)

Table of Contents:

List of Maps and Illustrations.

Acknowledgments.

Author’s Note.

Introduction.

1 A Quest for Power and Glory.

2 An Agreeable Consort for Life.

3 "Fox Hunting . . . but Catchd Nothing."

4 A Death in the Family.

5 The Glorious Cause.

6 "The Fate of Unborn Millions."

7 An Affectionate Friend.

8 The Long Journey Home.

9 A Broken Promise.

10 “God Bless Our Washington!”

11 “Tranquillity Reigns”

12 The Voice of Your Country.

13 Vine and Fig Tree Revisited.

14 “First in the Hearts of His Countrymen”.

Epilogue.

Notes.

Selected Bibliography of Principal Sources.

Credits.

Index.