From Scottsboro to Munich

Pennybacker, Susan D.

doi:10.1515/9781400831418

Cited by 107 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The Soviet Union even continued to sell oil to Italy. 47 For George Padmore the Soviet record over the Ethiopian conflict was shameful, especially compared to its later exertions over Spain: 'not one rouble was sent to Abyssinia, not one bandage, not one ton of wheat'. 48 For the ILP leadership, the conflict was one between rival imperialist interests and 'not worth the life of a single [British] worker'.…”

Section: Abyssinia Spain and Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s

Buchanan

2016

Contemporary European History

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The quotation in this title expresses a dilemma, as the ‘dark millions’ were likely to remain ‘unavenged’ so long as authors were asked to take sides on the Spanish Civil War rather than colonial oppression. Indeed, anti-fascism might well be thought of as, in a sense, antithetical to anti-imperialism. This article explores the relationship between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, focusing on Britain and France. The first part looks at anti-imperialism in the era of the Popular Front; the second looks at how the tensions between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were played out in the case of the major conflicts of the later 1930s in Abyssinia, Spain and China; the third discusses the imperialist assumptions of many anti-fascists. The article concludes by looking at the early phase of the Second World War.

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Section: Abyssinia Spain and Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s

Buchanan

2016

Contemporary European History

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“…With particular attention to the 1930s, Pennybacker invokes the international campaign to seek justice on behalf of nine young African-American youths accused of raping two White women in the infamous trial of the "Scottsboro boys" as a point of departure to examine the converging political worlds of communists, civil rights advocates, socialists, liberal reformers, nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and those in opposition to fascist aggression who cultivated a type of globally oriented race politics. 23 Traversing some of the same archival terrain that Pennybacker employs to document the shifting coalitions that both frustrated and sustained the anti-racist work of the Comintern throughout the 1930s, Minkah Makalani's In the Cause of Freedom offers a different context for understanding the shape and scope of Black political activity in interwar Britain. Beginning with the work of Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood, Makalani shows that Black radicals in Harlem and London built trans-Atlantic political alliances with Asian radicals including Manabendra Nath Roy, who then helped shape debates within the Comintern about the relationship between race and empire.…”

Section: Anti-colonial Black Britainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Britain and the Politics of Race in the 20th Century

Perry

2014

History Compass

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This essay examines a growing literature on postcolonial Black Britain that seeks to suture the ties between prewar and postwar histories of Black political activity in Britain. By examining how people of African descent articulated the political conditions of being Black in metropolitan Britain during the 20th century, recent studies have shown how non-state actors shaped ideas about the relationship between race and citizenship. In unearthing the myriad of ways that people of African descent navigated the politics of being both Black and British, this body of work has begun to offer critical perspectives on postcolonial Black Britain's place within the political history of the African Diaspora. Moreover, this essay argues that new work on Black Britain and the politics of race yields fruitful ground for dismantling some of the artificial historiographical partitions that have oftentimes separated metropolitan race politics in the postwar era from the broader history of empire, decolonization, and transnational anti-racist movements organized around the pursuit of Black freedom.For decades, the arrival of passengers aboard the Windrush at Tilbury Docks in June of 1948 served as the primary point of entry for understanding the formation of postcolonial Black Britain. Visual frames of newsreel footage documenting hundreds of West Indian men disembarking from the Windrush and sharing the optimism expressed in Lord Kitchener's famous calypso "London Is The Place For Me" provided powerful optics used to caption histories of how New Commonwealth migration facilitated what has been described as the "irresistible rise of multiracial Britain" in the decades following the Second World War. 1 More recently, however, scholars have been much more critical of the occlusions and silences embedded in histories, which take the journey of the Windrush passengers as "the originary moment" for understanding the development of postcolonial Black Britain and accompanying questions regarding 'race relations', citizenship, belonging, and notions of Britishness. 2 Historians, in particular, have lead the way in moving beyond the customary identifications attached to the Windrush in an effort to reflect the complexities and contingencies that informed racial (trans) formations in Britain during the 20th century. Whereas popular narratives about the Windrush generation largely centered upon the experiences of single West Indian men, Wendy Webster and Mary Chamberlain have documented the voices of Afro-Caribbean women and children and analyzed how gender and familial ties shaped the terms by which migrants made a place for themselves in British society. 3 Because the mythology surrounding the Windrush foregrounds movement between the Caribbean and Britain as a focal point of understanding the growth of multiracial communities following World War II, the work of David Killingray, Laura Tabili, and Rozina Visram has proven vital in detailing the wider 20th century history of global and inter-imperial migration from continental Europe, Asia, ...

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“…122 In Chemnitz, one protester was even shot dead by the police. 123 International solidarity could mobilize, in Europe alone, 'nearly half a million people', who participated in meetings to protest the scheduled execution of the 'Scottsboro boys', according to the American communist Louis Engdahl. 124 These campaigns indicate that international solidarity was taken seriously by rank-and-file communists and other radicals.…”

Section: Communist Internationalism Among the Rank And Filementioning

confidence: 99%

“…One example concerned the Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were sentenced to death for robbing and killing two men in Massachusetts in December 1919, and executed in 1927 116. Another campaign was for the defendants during the Meerut trials in India, a group of trade unionists arrested in 1929 under charges of conspiracy to organize an anti-colonial communist uprising 117. Yet another defended the 'Scottsboro Boys', a group of nine young male African Americans accused of raping two…”

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confidence: 99%

Between global aspirations and local realities: the global dimensions of interwar communism

Häberlen¹

2012

Journal of Global History

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This article explores the global dimension of communism during the interwar period. It criticizes a literature that either depicts communist parties as small ‘red armies’ obeying any order from Moscow, or focuses exclusively on the local level and ignores any international aspects. The article first discusses attempts of communist leaders to create a ‘world party’ based in Moscow. It next analyses the conflicts between a globally acting communist leadership and rank-and-file members concerned about their local circumstances. Finally, it highlights the role that internationalism played on the local level. Such an approach – which locates ‘the global’ on the local level, both in terms of how internationalist ideas informed people's behaviour in local contexts and in terms of how they resisted forms of globalism – might provide a means for bridging the gap between global and local histories.

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From Scottsboro to Munich

Cited by 107 publications

References 0 publications

‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s

‘The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s

Black Britain and the Politics of Race in the 20th Century

Between global aspirations and local realities: the global dimensions of interwar communism

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