Premature Anti-Fascists

"With this Nazi/Jim Crow link as a backdrop, Gilmore writes, 'racism had become un-American' by the mid-1940s, as World War II came to an end. Albert Einstein, deploring the second-class citizenship of black Americans, warned that 'the fall of Berlin does not mean the end of fascism . . . yes, there are fascists in America, too.' Around the same time, such American icons as Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra began to publicly caution against 'race prejudice,' which they said was better left to Hitler and his ilk. This high-profile talk of tolerance helped lay the foundation for Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as we came to know it during the 1950s and '60s.
"How that foundation was laid decades earlier is the central concern of Gilmore's narrative. Rejecting the notion that 'middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation,' she writes: 'By giving the movement a 1950s start, we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle-class, and male roots.'"

Valerie Boyd reviews Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 in the Los Angeles Times.