The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955

The Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs were two organizations created as part of the early civil rights efforts to address race and labor issues during the Great Depression. They fought within a leftist, Pan-African framework against disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism. By situating the development of the SNYC and the Council on African Affairs within the scope of the long civil rights movement, Lindsey Swindall reveals how these groups conceptualized the U.S. South as being central to their vision of a global African diaspora. Both organizations illustrate well the progressive collaborations that maintained an international awareness during World War II. Cleavages from anti-radical repression in the postwar years are also evident in the dismantling of these groups when they became casualties of the early Cold War. By highlighting the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists from the Popular Front to the 1960s, Swindall adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and anticolonial organizing. A volume in the series New Perspectives on the History of the South, edited by John David Smith

Author: Lindsey R. Swindall
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 05/14/2019
Pages: 254
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.58d
ISBN: 9780813056340

About the Author

Lindsey R. Swindall, a teaching assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, is the author of The Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello and Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art.