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Death Blow To Jim Crow Summary

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Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. By Eric S. Gellman. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiii, 354. $39.95.)

In Death Blow to Jim Crow author Eric Gellman talks about the establishment of the National Negro Congress and the role it played in the 30’s and 40’s. In the book Gilman started off describing how many of the employees at the Wilson and Bennet metal barrel factory stopped working and begin to express their frustrations about such little pay. They were tired of working for just sixteen to twenty-five censt. They couldn’t make a living of such little pay and something had to be done. These workers eventually joined a union called the National Negro Council and went on strike, both blacks and whites. Black scholars, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress in hopes to demand a “second emancipation” in the states.
These people eventually won raises and 40 hour work weeks. The most important of those accolades for people of color was the seniority clause, this entailed that they would be promoted by merit and time of …show more content…

Gilman discusses the birth of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was considered the child union of the National Negro Council. After forming and going through with countless strikes the people of this group were able to form the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Union (TSLU), this union consisted of mostly African American women led by a communist. The SNYC along with workers openly challenged labor abuse as the main principle to Jim Crow and knowingly attacked Richmond’s racial and gender boundaries. Gilman argues that SNYC linked a domestic civil rights agenda to an international campaign against dictatorship and oppression. He went on to say that the members of that union played a major part in the formation of a Democratic Part in South

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