Erik S. GELLMAN. Death Blow to Jim Crow

In examining how the National Negro Congress (NNC) became the “black vanguard” of a coalitional effort to extend New Deal progressivism and defeat fascism at home and abroad through “interracial, labor-based alliances of radicals and liberals,” Erik S. Gellman's Death Blow to Jim Crow fills a considerable gap in the literature on radicalism and civil rights in the United States during the interwar years (p. 2). Previous investigations of the relationships and interactions among African Americans and white radicals, progressives, and labor unionists in these years have largely focused on the ways that black civil rights efforts took vital cues from these other groups. The emphasis on white influences on black protest activism is particularly evident in studies like Mark Naison's Communists in Harlem during the Depression (1983) that examines interactions between African Americans and white radicals in Harlem. Such studies are important, but Death Blow to Jim Crow puts a “black-led network at the center of a narrative usually dominated by white unionists, New Dealers, Communists, and other antifascist leaders” (p. 2).

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