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

By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393062449
• ISBN13: 9780393062441
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 656 Pages
• Weight: 2.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.5" x 9.6"