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

by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

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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.
  • ISBN10 0393348180
  • ISBN13 9780393348187
  • Publish Date 10 August 2009 (first published 12 February 2008)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Imprint W. W. Norton & Company
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 664
  • Language English