In Death Blow to Jim Crow, Erik S. Gellman, associate professor of history at Roosevelt University, offers an account of militant civil rights activism from 1936 to 1947. By tracing the grassroots political activities of the interracial National Negro Congress (NNC) and its affiliate, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) – militant tactics that included “pickets, boycotts, and marches” – Gellman shifts scholarly attention away from the “white unionists, New Dealers, Communists and other antifascist leaders” who dominate much of the literature on the Great Depression and World War II eras (2). Drawing on an extensive evidentiary base, Gellman makes a compelling argument that the NNC activists, including labor organizers and black intellectuals, “remade the American labor movement into one that wielded powerful demands against industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before, positioning civil rights as an urgent necessity” (7). Employing a number of political strategies, including some of earlier groups such as Garveyites and Communists, the NNC and its allies engaged in a nationwide grassroots effort to dismantle Jim Crow.

In five dense chapters, Gellman weaves an array of primary sources together to document how the NNC advocated the “most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction” (2). He begins by discussing NNC activists' efforts to use industrial labor unions as platforms from which to advance civil rights in Chicago. Galvanized by the Wagner Act (1935), with its federal approval of labor's right to organize, NNC activists fought to desegregate the workplace and promote the equal rights of workers regardless of race. In subsequent chapters, Gellman offers a chronological account of how NNC activists advocated racial equality in four other locales: New York City; Richmond; Washington, DC; and Columbia, South Carolina.

Gellman's discussion of young black activists in SNYC organizing tobacco workers in Richmond is especially significant. Drawing on newspaper and archival sources, Gellman tells the story of how these young activists aimed to transform not only the workplace but also the community at large, viewing workers' rights and racial equality as significantly intertwined. In this, SNYC preceded both the attempts of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) to organize tobacco and other southern industrial workers, and the organizing efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Paying attention to gender, Gellman also describes the importance of black women strikers in the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Union (TSLU) strikes. “Despite the press emphasis on male SNYC organizers,” he writes, “a black female leadership had emerged to make the TSLU successful” (88).

While the strikers were successful in bringing the issue of labor and civil rights to the forefront, their efforts were short-lived in the face of increasing mechanization and resistance from various groups, including the Tobacco Workers International Union (TWIU). According to Gellman, “Just as organizers gained a foothold in organizing tobacco workers, their jobs, the dirtiest and most labor-intensive, disappeared” (106). Despite these disappointments, SNYC activists continued to champion workers' and civil rights during the postwar era.

The monograph's final chapter details SNYC activists' activities in South Carolina during the mid- to late 1940s. In the face of mounting pressure on a local and national level, these men and women fought to dismantle Jim Crow and launched an internationalist movement aimed at overturning fascism and colonialism. By linking their local struggles to global ones, Gellman argues that activists “believed this wider vision would change the concept of Jim Crow from natural and immovable to artificial and breakable” (214). But, in the end, SNYC and its allies succumbed to Cold War suppression and their postwar internationalist movement dissolved around 1948.

Building on a number of recent works, including Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie (2008) and Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty (2009), Gellman's Death Blow to Jim Crow (2012) deepens our understanding of the period that historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall called the “decisive first phase” of the “long civil rights movement.” By offering the first comprehensive study of the NNC and its allies, Gellman reveals how militant civil rights activists of the 1930s and 1940s fought to expand the concept of American democracy by initiating a number of grassroots protest movements aimed at overturning Jim Crow. While these activists were unsuccessful in dealing the final “death blow” to Jim Crow, they helped to reshape the American labor movement. Indeed, NNC activists began advocating for racial equality in the South many years before CIO leaders addressed the issue. Through their militant protest activities across the United States, NNC activists and their allies helped to usher in a transformative era in which Jim Crow would finally be defeated.