Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights, by Erik S. Gellman

During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a “second emancipation” in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine America’s Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and members of the working class, which established civil rights as a necessity for reinvigorating American democracy. Visit the book page: Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights