Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Glenda Gilmore" in English language version.
Gilmore's ambitious enterprise, then, is to recover and recount the stories of those people -- Communists and radicals, activists and artists -- who defied Dixie segregationists long before TV news cameras began to roll in the 1950s, when most white Americans outside the South noticed the civil rights movement for the first time.
Yet Ms. Gilmore is certainly correct when she concludes that her book's courageous radicals "may not have been able to take credit for that civil rights movement, but they knew in their hearts that they had helped pave the way for it."
That final point is crucial to Gilmore's argument. Unfortunately her belief that radical activists of the 1930s and 1940s "hastened" the end of Jim Crow in the postwar era is more asserted than demonstrated. And without such demonstration, Pauli Murray notwithstanding, "Defying Dixie" becomes an exercise in radical antiquarianism, a series of disparate essays built around interesting personalities, the whole rather less than the sum of its parts.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)Fort-Whiteman's unlikely odyssey from Texas to Siberia is just one of the many extraordinary stories that punctuate the revisionist narrative of Defying Dixie.
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