Louis Burnham
Louis Burnham
SNYC conference
In 2018 South Carolina Progressive Network published a booklet, HISTORY DENIED: Recovering South Carolina's Stolen Past by Becci Robbins. Its content is a substantive introduction to the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and the vanguard radical labor organizing among interracial youth in the severely segregated South between 1937 and 1949. Specifically, this tells of a landmark Congress convened in Columbia, South Carolina in October of 1946.
This event had in active participation such Freedom Movement notables as local South Carolina youth leaders in addition to Paul Robeson, Herbert Aptheker, Dorothy Burnham and Louis Burnham, Esther Jackson and James Jackson, Louise Patterson, Sallye Davis, Jack O'Dell, South Carolina's Modjeska Simkins and the Congress' Keynote Speaker, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who gave a speech, BEHOLD THE LAND, which "has been a must read' for all young activists ever since".[1]
"Freedom"
In the early 1950s, the publication Freedom was published monthly by Freedom Associates, 53 West 125th Street, New York 27, New York. Its editorial board consisted of Paul Robeson, Chairman; Revels Cayton, Shirley Graham, Alphaeus Hunton, Modjeska Simkins, Louis Burnham, and George B. Murphy, Jr. The printer's symbol number 178 which appears on the publication in order to identify the place where it was printed and the local of the printer's union, is also found on virtually every other piece of Communist Party USA propaganda printed in the New York area[2].
Communist militant
On Feb. 18, the auditorium was packed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem in tribute to Louis Burnham and the inauguration of the Louis Burnham Award. Burnham, Barbados-born and Harlem-raised, was one of the African-American activists whose work paved the way for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
A Communist militant, Burnham began his activism at City College of New York during the 1930s, where he helped organize the American Student Union (ASU), and was president of the Frederick Douglass Society, the Black student organization. He then went on to organize the first chapters of the ASU and the Harlem Youth Congress.
In the early 1940s Burnham, his wife Dorothy Burnham, and Esther Jackson and James Jackson went to Birmingham, Ala., at the center of Southern racist Jim Crow to organize the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). SNYC organized across the South against discrimination, Jim Crow, lynch-terror and for voting rights. They organized sit-ins, freedom rides and voter registration drives.
In the 1950s, McCarthyism drove the Burnhams out of the South, and Louis returned to Harlem where he founded the newspaper Freedom with Paul Robeson, and wrote for the National Guardian. Louis Burnham died in 1960.
The tribute began with a musical selection by Burnham’s son, Charles Robey Burnham, a violinist like his father, accompanied by singer Eisa Davis. Among the selections was a moving version of Bob Marley’s “Song of Freedom.”
Burnham’s daughter, Margaret Burnham, an activist and Boston judge, welcomed the crowd and read one of his articles from the 1940s about the Congress of SNYC in Birmingham, Ala. and their confrontation with Chief of Police “Bull” Connor, later notorious for his brutality against civil rights protesters.
Joanne Grant, who followed Burnham on the National Guardian newspaper, spoke of his commitment to Black-white unity. Historian Gerald Horne spoke of Burnham’s work in the context of the world struggles against imperialism of the time, and the role of Communists in these struggles.
Charlene Mitchell, who knew him when she was a child, appealed to the audience to continue the tradition of activism, especially by participating in the April 20 national demonstration for peace and justice in Washington.[3]
Southern Conference Educational Fund
Southern Conference Educational Fund board members included;
- Virginia Durr - Southern Conference for Human Welfare, NCAPT
- Mary McLeod Bethune
- Rufus E. Clement
- Benjamin Mays
- Charles S. Johnson - Fisk
- Helen H. Fuller - New Republic
- Lucy Randolph Mason - CIO
- Paul R. Christopher - CIO
- Lillian Smith
- George S. Mitchell - Southern Regional Council
- Myles Horton - Highlander Folk School
- Louis Burnham - Southern Negro Youth Conference
- Frank Porter Graham - University of North Carolina[4]
References
- ↑ CCDS Mobilizer August 2018
- ↑ http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt396n99b3&doc.view=content&chunk.id=d0e610&toc.depth=1&brand=oac&anchor.id=0
- ↑ PW Schomburg Library honors Burnham by: Louis Shipman March 1 2002
- ↑ [Reform, Red Scare, and Ruin: Virginia Durr, Prophet of the New South By James Smallwood page 93]