Death Blow to Jim Crow by Erik S. Gellman

Author:Erik S. Gellman [Gellman, Erik S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, History, United States, 20th Century, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780807835319
Google: rzKfzWZs5yYC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012-01-15T05:38:18+00:00

SNYC youth center, Birmingham, Alabama. Such youth centers symbolized the important range of cultural and political work undertaken by activists like Esther Cooper Jackson, Dorothy Burnham, and Sallye Belle (Davis) during the war. From box 1, National Negro Congress Photograph Collection. Courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

growth of a Negro people’s movement,” she concluded on the trip, “and the NNC can fill the bill.” Esther Cooper agreed that it was “quite a successful trip,” and she hoped that the NNC would carry out plans to move into the South since “the Youth Congress, with its new orientation on Youth Centers, cannot do all the things it formerly tried to do.” The visit revealed to Cooper what “we take for granted,” noting that Dale “was amazed at the friends we have here, and our complete acceptance among all kinds of people.” Dale noticed how Cooper, the Burnhams, and other SNYC members lived out the kind of world they wanted to create, both in their personal lives and in their activist work. They may have abided by segregation laws in Birmingham, but they did not accept either their racial or their gender proscriptions. Despite the hostile climate, they engaged with allies and their communities with a stubborn conviction and dignity.69

Underneath her defiant exterior, however, Cooper found that the South during the war might be romantic to visit but was much tougher to endure as a resident. In her letters to her husband in the military, Cooper mentioned how “every day for four long years since I’ve been here, there has been some incident”—being called by her first name by a young girl at the tailor, sitting in the dank Jim Crow waiting room at the optometrist, or leaving a doctor’s appointment when she had trouble with her pregnancy because the doctor used old, rusted instruments to examine black patients. “These humiliating things,” she explained, “warp a person’s personality,” and unless she occasionally took “a vacation” out of the South she feared “becoming a Negro nationalist or of physically hitting back at some insulting white person…or the alternative, of becoming apathetic and selfish.” To be sure, Cooper appreciated her northern NNC friends, but she grew frustrated by northern assumptions about the South. For example, the NNC had taken away Ruth Jett from the SNYC staff in “meetings in New York without our consent,” and Cooper wondered why they get to “decide what she is to do.” “I just get so damn mad,” she concluded, because “there are few people who want to ‘take’ the difficulties of living in the South” and the “glamour of mass meetings and demonstrations in New York appeal to them too greatly.”70

After her return to New York, Dale proposed to open a southern regional center of the NNC in Birmingham. Unlike her colleagues, whom Cooper privately blasted, Dale now saw the NNC’s work in the North as “inseparable with the spread of democracy in the South” and volunteered to “take the job” of running the NNC office there.

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