The Path To The Greater Freer Truer World

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.

This book explores the work of two organizations, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1949) and the Council on African Affairs (1937-1955), which were formed during the late 1930s and were casualties of the post-World War II red scare. Both of these groups employed a global, Pan-African perspective and were created as a consequence of social and political circumstances of the thirties. The work of both of these groups contributed to the internationalism that was prominent during the phase of the civil rights movement that began during the Great Depression.

Highlighting Bethune’s global activism and her connections throughout the African diaspora This book examines the Pan-Africanism of Mary McLeod Bethune through her work, which internationalized the scope of Black women’s organizations to create solidarity among Africans throughout the diaspora. Broadening the familiar view of Bethune as an advocate for racial and gender equality within the United States, Ashley Preston argues that Bethune consistently sought to unify African descendants around the world with her writings, through travel, and as an advisor. Preston shows how Bethune’s early involvement with Black women’s organizations created personal connections across Cuba, Haiti, India, and Africa and shaped her global vision. Bethune founded and led the National Council of Negro Women, which strengthened coalitions with women across the diaspora to address issues in their local communities. Bethune served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs for the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and later as associate consultant for the United Nations alongside W.E.B. DuBois and Walter White, using her influence to address diversity in the military, decolonization, suffrage, and imperialism. Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist provides a fuller, more accurate understanding of Bethune’s work, illustrating the perspective and activism behind Bethune’s much-quoted words: “For I am my mother’s daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.” Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nearly 300 speeches provide public speakers with a wealth of quotes and inspiration, from Pericles' funeral oration and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech to Malcolm X's powerful words on the Black Revolution. Includes 7 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Activist, journalist, and visionary Claudia Jones was one of the most important advocates of emancipation in the twentieth century. Arguing for a socialist future and the total emancipation of working people, Jones’s legacy made an enduring mark on both sides of the Atlantic. This ground-breaking biography traces Jones’s remarkable life and work, beginning with her immigration to the United States and culminating in her advocacy for the emancipation of the most oppressed. Denise Lynn reveals how Jones’s radicalism was forged through confronting American racism, and how her disillusionment led to a life committed to socialist liberation. But this activism came at a cost: Jones would be expelled from the US for being a communist. Deported to England, she took up the mantle of anti-colonial liberation movements. Despite the innumerable obstacles in her way, Jones never wavered in her commitments. In her tireless resistance to capitalism, racism, and sexism, she envisioned an equitable future devoted to peace and humanity – a vision that we all must continue to fight for today.

"The unending tragedy of Reconstruction," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois, "is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its... national and worldwide implications." And yet the long shadow of Reconstruction's failure has loomed large in the American imagination, serving as a parable of race and democracy both at home and abroad. In Reconstructing the World Harilaos Stecopoulos looks at an array of American writers who, over the course of the twentieth century, used the South as a touchstone for thinking about the nation's global ambitions. Focusing on the lives and writings of Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker, he shows the ways in which these public intellectuals viewed the U.S. South in international terms and questioned the relationship between domestic inequality and a quest for global power.By examining "big stick" diplomacy, World War II, and the Vietnam War in light of regional domestic concerns, Stecopoulos urges a reassessment of the American Century. Providing new interpretations of literary works both well-known (Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, McCullers's The Member of the Wedding) and marginal (Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, Du Bois's Dark Princess), Stecopoulos argues that the South played a crucial role in mediating between the national and imperial concerns of the United States. That intersection of region and empire, he contends, profoundly influenced how Americans understood not only cultural and political geographies but also issues of race and ethnicity.

Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to realize diversity while honoring difference.

In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as one of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.