Interesting week for discussion regarding the civil rights movement. First, it appeared that Dem. presidential hopeful Senator H. Clinton appeared to hint that the civil rights movement owes a greater share of thanks to President LBJ, who responded to the mood of the country and passed the Civil Rights legislation. It is sad, and a losing battle to get into a dispute over who deserves more credit.
Now comes a book that suggests the Civil Rights movement began with Communist sypmpathizers prior to the beginning of WWI. The author Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is a Yale history professor, and surely more qualified than me to provide support for her premise in Defying Dixie. The book reportedly highlights several early figures in the movement such as:
Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a widely traveled Texan [born in Dallas] who in 1919 became “the first American-born black Communist.”
By far the most compelling portions of “Defying Dixie” tell the life story of Pauli Murray, a black lesbian feminist whose lifelong activism began with an unsuccessful attempt to desegregate the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in early 1939 and culminated with her ordination as an Episcopal priest in 1977. Ms. Murray’s application to North Carolina’s graduate school came shortly after lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had won its first higher-education desegregation case in the United States Supreme Court. But Ms. Gilmore reveals how the N.A.A.C.P. counsel Thurgood Marshall was unwilling to pursue Ms. Murray’s challenge because of his disquiet over both her sexuality and her past membership in a communist splinter group that opposed the Communist Party itself.
Excerpts from Defying Dixie The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 review in NYT 1/4/08
Maybe this is what Senator Clinton had in mind when she made her recent comments:
However, she [author - Ms. Murray] rashly claims that too much emphasis on the 1950s overstates the movement’s “religious, middle-class and male roots” and fosters the notion “that middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation” — an extravagant straw man, given how women like Jo Ann Robinson and Ella Baker are now so widely heralded for their crucial roles in the upsurge that took wing between 1955 and 1960.
My primary concern is that once the civil rights movement begins to be shaded with the red of communism, will later historians, with a less than objective perspective begin to shade the leaders of the movement in the 1950s with the same brush - and thus - cause dispersions on their legacy?
While I accept the falliable of great men, I do not however feel comfortable with these recent suggestions that diminish their accomplishments.
