Born along the color line: The second generation of the Talented Tenth and the 'problem of the twentieth century' (Louis L. Redding, Abram Lincoln Harris, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Milton Moran Weston, II)

In August 1933 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convened the second Amenia Conference at "Troutbeck," the Dutchess County, New York, home of Association board director Joel Spingarn. Out of just over thirty attendees, twenty-six of the youngest were "coming leaders of Negro thought" whom the NAACP had invited "to discuss the present and future situation of the Negro."; In this dissertation, I narrate the lives and times of five African-American intellectuals and activists between the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s. Each attended the second Amenia Conference, and each belonged to what I term the second generation of the Talented Tenth---a generation of highly educated and civil rights minded African Americans who were born at the turn of the twentieth century, came of age by the Depression, and, by mid-century, were instrumental in making African Americans' civil rights a national issue for the first time since Reconstruction. They are Louis Redding, Delaware's first African-American lawyer; Abram Harris, Howard University economist and accomplished author; Juanita Jackson, Baltimore and NAACP civil rights activist; Moran Weston, New York Amsterdam News columnist and field secretary of the Harlem based Negro Labor Victory Committee; and Howard political scientist and United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche.; Recovering this generation's work, this study challenges the accepted trajectory of the twentieth-century civil rights struggle. Well before the rise of the modern civil rights movement, this cohort collectively confronted the color line---in the courtroom, with the written word, by cultivating grassroots activist networks, and by aligning civil rights and labor struggles. Indeed, by pursuing an array of efforts bridging local and national interests, this generation strengthened the ongoing African-American freedom movement. While renowned predecessors---like W. E. B. Du Bois---and future leaders---like Martin Luther King, Jr.---have obscured this generation's legacy, the generation of black leaders "born along the color line" reshaped the contours of the twentieth-century civil rights struggle by seeking to both topple segregation and promote economic rights in the fight for full citizenship for African Americans.