Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World

By examining the development of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs—two early civil rights organizations that have been overlooked and marginalized by the historiography of the period—Lindsey Swindall reveals how the discourse on civil rights in the southern United States also employed an internationalist, anticolonial agenda during the mid-twentieth century. The escalating spread of fascism before World War II coupled with the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the mobilization of the Communist Party against segregation and colonialism helped expand the international awareness of many African American activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The SNYC and the Council on African Affairs were part of the efforts to address race and labor issues within a leftist framework, employing a global, Pan-African perspective to fight against disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Swindall highlights the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists involved in coalition-building during the Popular Front and also adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and labor organizing. Furthermore, she shows the ways in which pockets of resistance survived McCarthyism and reconnected later with activists in the 1960s.