Overview

By examining the development of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs two early civil rights organisations that have been overlooked and marginalised by the historiography of the period Lindsey Swindall reveals how the discourse on civil rights in the southern United States also employed an internationalist, anticolonial agenda during the mid-twentieth century. The escalating spread of fascism before World War II coupled with the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the mobilization of the Communist Party against segregation and colonialism helped expand the international awareness of many African American activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B.Du Bois. The SNYC and the Council on African Affairs were part of the efforts to address race and labour issues within a leftist framework, employing a global, Pan-African perspective to fight against disenfranchisement, segregation, labour exploitation, and colonialism. Swindall highlights the cooperation that occurred between progres-sive activists involved in coalition-building during the Popular Front and also adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and labour organising. Furthermore, she shows the ways in which pockets of resistance survived McCarthyism and reconnected later with activists in the 1960s.

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Lindsay R. Swindall, visiting professor of history at Sam Houston State University, is the author of The Politics of Paul Robeson’s “Othello” and Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art.

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