Born along the Color Line

The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement

Bibliographic Data

ID20009555
AuthorsEben Miller (corresponding author)
Year2012
Pages368
Publication date2012-02-16
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueBorn Along the Color Line (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195174557.001.0001
OpenAlexW4254068912
Open LibraryOL10133680M
ISBN9780195174557
LanguageEN
Citations received7

In August, 1933, dozens of people gathered amid seven large, canvas tents in a field near Amenia, in upstate New York. Joel Spingarn, president of the board of the NAACP, had called a conference to revitalize the flagging civil rights organization. In Amenia, such old lions as the 65 year-old W. E. B. DuBois would mingle with “the coming leaders of Negro thought.” It was a fascinating encounter that would transform the civil rights movement. This book narrates how this little-known conference brought together a remarkable young group of African American activists, capturing through the lives of five extraordinary participants—youth activist Juanita Jackson, diplomat Ralph Bunche, economist Abram Harris, lawyer Louis Redding, and Harlem organizer Moran Weston—how this generation shaped the ongoing movement for civil rights during the Depression, World War II, and beyond. The book describes how Jackson, Bunche, Harris, and the others felt that, amidst the global crisis of the 1930s, it was urgent to move beyond the NAACP's legal and political focus to build an economic movement that reached across the racial divide to challenge the capitalist system that had collapsed so devastatingly. They advocated alliances with labor groups, agitated for equal education, and campaigned for anti-lynching legislation and open access to the ballot and employment-spreading their influential ideas through their writings and by mass organizing in African American communities across the country, North and South. In their arguments and individual awakenings, they formed a key bridge between the turn-of-the-century Talented Tenth and the postwar civil rights generation, broadening and advancing the fight for racial equality through the darkest economic times the country has ever faced

Civil rights · Civil society · Economic history · Great Depression · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · 1904-1971 · African americans · Amenia Conference (1933) · Amenia Conference (1933) (uri) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n95094510 (uri) http://viaf.org/viaf/sourceID/LC|n95094510 · Bunche, ralph j. (ralph johnson) · Civil rights movements · Economic conditions · National Association for the Advancement of Colored People · united states

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