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As a history and American Studies major in college, I cared deeply about civil rights issues then and now. I did not know most of what I read in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Yale historian, Glenda Elizabeth Moore, now Emerita. And I am overwhelmed at how little detail I knew and how important that detail is for providing context to our current issues of race, wealth inequality, and polarization.
(Folks wanting local focus of these columns should be satisfied because some of us lived through the period 1919 -1950. And most of us care about a society that is free of bias. Others can wait patiently or chew rocks.)
The overarching purpose of the book is to show how the civil rights movement of the 1950’s sand 60’s–and present day—had its roots in both the oppression of laborers and people of color in America, especially the South, as well as the Russian Revolution’s attempt to spread abroad.
“We are treated to a granular look at the issues of race, poverty, class, and region. Along the way we meet the early careers of people we heard of in the 1950‘s and 60’s: A. Phillip Randolph, C. Vann Woodward, Pauli Murray, Reinhold Neibuhr, Roy Wilkins, future pollster Louis Harris, and a host of others we did not know unless we read the black press. We also learn that the House Unamerican Activities Committee began to examine Fascism in America only to be kidnapped by its second chairman, Martin Dies, for his pursuit of alleged and real Reds.”
There is a similar granular study of the goals, roles, and relationships of Southern moderates, labor unions, civil rights organizations, New Dealers, Christian Socialists, older and younger African-Americans, South African issues, the German-American Bund, and both international and domestic Communists and Fascists.
Until the WWII economic stimulus and post-war expansion, most everyone in this country had little wealth, living paycheck to paycheck and trimming expenses where ever possible. My folks’ 1935 marriage began with Dad making 25 cents/hour at Zinsmaster Bakery. After putting money from his wages into envelopes for survival expenses, they had 50 cents a week discretionary money. At least he had a job.
After 1920, the Soviets advertised themselves as a race neutral society and invited Americans, especially young ones, to visit and experience a lack of discrimination. Some did. Russia focused as well on oppression of black and Indian folk in the United States as an example of capitalism’s flaws. Many young Americans tempted by Communism did not know, and only in the late 1930’s began to learn, of the oppressions of Stalinism.
Likewise, most Americans did not know of the evils of fascism until news of oppression of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other gradually came to us, especially in the black press.
While most in our country just tried to survive, and the wealthy were content, issues of race and class made little headway. What I learned most of all from Defying Dixie was that the first and strongest demands for immediate racial equality and civil liberties were driven by a small U.S. Communist Party. With the ACLU, NAACP and other left-leaning folk repeatedly highlighted specific cases of oppression—lynching, corrupt prosecutors and courts, and violence against all opposed to the Southern plantation and mill owners (many of the latter from New England).
It took events like a 1934 torture and lynching and the literal and figurative railroading of the Scottsboro Boys to begin to prick white American consciences. Our parents and grandparents were forced to look up from surviving the Great Depression. It also took growing fascism— KKK, Black Shirts, Father Coughlin, et al–and most especially Hitler’s treat of Jews—to push us forward on civil rights, civil liberties, and labor rights.
What impresses me most is that the progress made during and after the Great Depression was in no way guaranteed. Fascists, Communists, Socialist, Christian Socialists, college students, abused textile workers and sharecroppers, mill owners, plantation owners, Southern “moderates,” corrupt prosecutors and cops–all were roiling society.
Although I became aware as an adult of the 1934 Teamster strikes in Minneapolis, I had heard nothing about most lynchings or the thousands of Textile workers who 1934 strike was brutally put down by owners and law enforcement yelling “Communists,” only sometimes accurately.
And I was never told—or don’t remember— how the U.S. Supreme Court changed its view of insurrection laws and the New Deal. Owen Roberts, a Pennsylvania Hoover appointee, abandoned the “Four Horsemen of Reaction” to join three Democrat appointees and Chief Justice Hughes in 1937 shortly after Franklin Roosevelt was overwhelmingly reelected in 1936 and announced his court packing plan. See Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242 (1937); West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, and “Inside the Constitutional Revolution of 1937,” by Barry Cushman in the University of Chicago Journal’s “Supreme Court Review,” Volume 2016.
We should be glad that most of us did not have to live through either the poverty or social unrest of the 1930’s. We can be grateful for such social progress as has been made in so many areas. But the January 6th insurrection attempt reminds us that our civilized society hangs on threads of compassion, civility, and determination. The men bearing swastikas and torches in Charlottesville, Virginia are a grim reminder of Black Shirts and Klansmen of our recent past.
I am hopeful that the size of our country makes Fascist—or any other insurrection—less likely to prevail.
Read this book. I got it through our library, but Grand Marais and our High School need their own copies.
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Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, mediator, and Judge, serving from 1997-2010. He and his wife moved here in 2016. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Steve really enjoys doing weddings, He writes this column to learn about his new home area—and to indulge our curiosities and stir our thinking.
Copyright Stephen C. Aldrich and News Herald, 2021
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