Few books capture the dynamism and energy of what is now called the long civil rights movement better than Lindsey R. Swindall’s The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955.
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Alphaeus Hunton: A life devoted to equality, liberation, and internationalism February 26, 2021 2:42 PM CDT By Tony Pecinovsky
Alphaeus Hunton, second from left in the foreground, along with Petitioners Julian Mayfield, Alice Windom, W.A. Jeanpierre, and Maya Angelou Make, deliver a petition to the U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana, in 1963. | New York Public Library
In a November 1950 article in Paul Robeson’s newspaper
Freedom, the scholar-activist Alphaeus Hunton noted that “the most reactionary minority of the American people,” the U.S. ruling class, “has advanced from its role of silent partner of the Western European imperialist powers.” No longer “content with arming and financing their wars against the colonial revolutionaries,” the ruling
Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture that for nearly a quarter century chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements beginning in the early 1960s, started in 1961, a year that was a kind of transitional one for the civil rights movement. The sit-ins that had begun in early 1960, and the continuing demonstrations and emerging fervor, had made national headlines, but the movement hadn’t yet achieved the national stature that it would a couple of years later. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was still a significant, if not yet overwhelming, news media story. The 1961 Freedom Rides, in which Black and white movement volunteers tested a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate bus travel by sitting together on trips through the South, brought headlines, photographs and television news footage of racist mobs, burning buses and bloodied civil rights activists.