Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement

A Pivotal Civil Rights Conference

Most Americans know something about the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950's -1960's, but the earlier history of the Civil Rights movement remains unfamiliar. Eben Miller's new book, "Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amernia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement" discusses the history of civil rights activism during the 1930s and 1940s and introduces the reader to some of the movement's young leaders. Miller teaches at Southern Maine Community College. This book, his first, is an expansion of his doctoral dissertation written at Brandeis University.

The book centers upon a conference held in August, 1933, at the estate of Joel Springarn at Amenia in upstate New York. Springarn, president of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, had hosted an earlier conference at Amenia in 1916. He sponsored the 1933 conference because he feared the NAACP was losing its edge, its support, and sense of direction and needed and infusion of new ideas. Thus, with the assistance of W.E.B. DuBois, Springarn invited 26 promising young African American leaders in their 20s and 30s to Amenia to chart the course for future civil rights activism. The conference took place over a weekend during which meetings were interspersed with time for relaxation and informal discussion. There were no formal minutes of the proceedings, but the conferees produced a short statement of purpose and results at its conclusion.

Miller presents the conference against the backdrop of the Depression. Beginning with its founding in 1909, the NAACP had focused on litigation and on legislation to end lynching. It had gradually come to be seen as an elitist organization far from the grass roots. Although all the young participants at Amenia were themselves highly educated, the focus of the conference was on economic issues, on workers, and on poverty. To varying degrees, the conference participants wanted to move civil rights activism from its focus on race and color to an emphasis on economics that affected poor, dispossessed people across the lines of race. Many of the conference participants were strongly influenced by Marxist economic analysis. In their statement, the Amenia participants recommended a focus on economics. The NAACP under the leadership of WalterWhite tended to disagree and pursued its traditional legal and legislative agenda while redoubling its attempts to organize and grow, especially among young people.

Miller tells the story of the Amenia Conference and its impact within the NAACP. The book does agreat deal more, however, as it describes the course of civil rights activity in the first half of the Twentieth Century and offers biographies of five young leaders who attended the conference. The biographies are fascinating and among the strongest parts of the book. They make the work somewhat cluttered and repetitive. Each of the figures he discusses might benefit from an individual study.

The five Amenia conferees Miller emphasizes are Louis Redding, Abram Harris, Juanita Jackson, Moran Weston, and Ralph Bunche, each of whom receives a lengthy chapter. Born to a middle class family in Wilmington, Delaware, Louis Redding received an excellent education, worked as an activist in the South, and became the first African American to be admitted the Delaware Bar. He was instrumental in desegregating the state court system. Abram Harris was an economist and intellectual who was the strongest voice at Amenia for focusing on economics and class rather than race. He was the primary author of the conference findings and followed his conference participation with a strong intellectual and academic career. Juanita Jackson was the youngest Amenia participant at the age of 20. Her focus was on organization, and she worked tirelessly and charismatically. After the conference, she worked with NAACP chairman Walter White and travelled throughout the country to organize young people at universities. She comes through in Miller's account as a true hero of Civil Rights. Moran Weston came to New York City from his home in North Carolina determined to receive an education and to become a minister. He fought to receive his education but prejudice initially denied him the ministry he sought. During the WW II years, he worked to promote African American participation in the War effort and, as an integral part of that effort, to end discrimination in the United States.

In presenting his story, Miller offers a lively portrayal of Harlem life and of civil rights activism during the War years. Ralph Bunche was a scholar and intellectual who received the Nobel Prize in 1950 and participated at Amenia as a young man. In the 1950's when Bunche was America's Ambassador to the United Nations and a highly respected African American, his loyalty was questioned as a result of his activities in the 1930s. Miller's account describes how Bunche worked to vindicate his reputation and establish his unswerving loyalty from the innuendos that had been raised about his activities during the years of the Depression.

In Miller's account, the Amenia Conference worked in releasing the energies and talents of a number of gifted, committed people and in forging a national civil rights movement. The book offers a strong portrayal of intellectual life and of social activism. The book shows the history of the American left through the Depression and WW II with all its promise, accomplishment, and problems. Most importantly, the book offers a history of the Civil Rights movement and offers insights into the importance, length, and difficulty of the struggle. Readers of the book will come to understand how the result of the movement in the 1950s and 60s built on the efforts of a long line of earlier leaders.

Robin Friedman