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Louis E. Burnham

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Lewis Everett Burnham
Handbill with Burnham as featured speaker, City College of New York, April 1940
Born(1915-09-29)September 29, 1915
Harlem or Barbados
DiedFebruary 12, 1960(1960-02-12) (aged 44)
New York City
Cause of deathHeart attack
NationalityAmerican
EducationSocial science degree, a year of law school
Alma materCity College of New York
Occupation(s)Activist, editor, writer
Years active1932–1960
EraJim Crow
Employer(s)Southern Negro Youth Congress, Progressive Party, Freedom, National Guardian
Organization(s)Frederick Douglass Society, Harlem Youth Congress, National Negro Congress, Young Communist League, Alabama Committee for Human Welfare
Known forActivism, Journalism
Notable workBehind the lynching of Emmett Louis Till, creation and management of and columns in Freedom, columns in National Guardian
Political partyCommunist Party, USA
MovementCivil rights movement, Voting rights
Opponent(s)Bull Connor, FBI
Board member ofSouthern Conference Educational Fund
SpouseDorothy (née Challenor) Burnham
ChildrenClaudia Burnham
Margaret Burnham
Linda Burnham
Charles Burnham
RelativesForbes Burnham

Louis Everett Burnham (September 29, 1915 – February 12, 1960)[1] was an African-American activist and journalist. From his college days, and continuing through adulthood, he was involved in activities emphasizing racial equality, through various left-wing organizations, campaigns and publications in both the northern and southern United States, particularly in New York City and Birmingham, Alabama.

Biography

Childhood and education

Louis Everett Burnham was born in Harlem, in New York City,[1] although some sources have him born in Barbados.[2] His parents were Charles Breechford Burnham and Louise St. Clair Williams Burnham, Afro-Guyanese immigrants, although some sources describe his parents as immigrants from Barbados. Louis was a cousin of future Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.[3] He grew up in a household with a strong racial consciousness, as his mother was a follower of the black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, and owned stock in Garvey's Black Star Line.[4][3] She worked as a hairdresser, and ran a rotating credit association, a system known as "partners," or "partnerhand" in the Caribbean, during the interwar period. She raised Louis in a brownstone at 253 West 139th Street[3] on Harlem's Strivers' Row that she bought with her savings. [5] His father worked as a building superintendent.[6] Both parents were churchgoers. Burnham's daughter recalled growing up with her parents and grandparents as being in "a close family."[4]

By his college years, Burnham was an accomplished violinist, and some ten years later was credited with the lyrics for a song on which his brother, Charles St. Clair Burnham, one year older, held the copyright.[3][7] He was regularly on the Dean's List at City College of New York (CCNY), where he was able to stay solvent by writing papers for middle-class white students on a variety of subjects. During this period he was Executive Director of the Harlem Youth Congress.[8] Burnham studied social science at CCNY,[9] and graduated in 1936, having matriculated in 1932. As a college student, he became interested in the civil rights movement. He helped organize the American Student Movement (ASU) and was president of the Frederick Douglass Society, the Black student organization. During Burnham's leadership of the Frederick Douglass Society, pressure from that organization pushed CCNY to create its first course in African-American history, whose instructor, Dr. Max Yergan, was the first Black ever to teach at CCNY.[10]

Traces of Burnham's student activism survive in the archives of CCNY, including in their "official student newspaper," The Campus. The newspaper lists him as part of a committee preparing an anti-war strike.[11] A leaflet lists him as a speaker at the rally indicated by the newspaper article.[12] Later he was chairman of the Anti-war and Anti-Fascist Committee, preparing a memorial for an aviator, a former newsman, killed in the Spanish Civil War.[13] Although he is listed in these news articles as a member of the class of 1937, he spoke on campus on April 16 1940, in support of an anti-lynching bill.[14]

Burnham organized the first chapters of the ASU and the Harlem Youth Congress.[15] Burnham was the Youth Secretary of the National Negro Congress, an umbrella organization of civic, labor and religious groups. As a student, he had also been Vice President of the student council. His prominence in these various organizations was due to both his congeniality and his magnetism as a speaker on racial injustice, the danger of fascism to world peace, and the problems of American young people and the many unemployed during the Great Depression.[1] Following graduation, Burnham took a year of law school[16] at St. John's University School of Law in Queens, New York.[9]

New York City

In the mid-1930's, Burnham became involved with widespread Harlem protests against Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and with the injustice being done to the teenage Scottsboro Boys, condemned to death on a false accusation of raping two white women. During this period, he joined the Young Communist League and the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA).[1] CPUSA had become widely known for opposing racism and racial segregation, especially following its organizing the Scottsboro Boys' legal defense. (Burnham had ideological commitments equal to Communism's Marxism and Leninism. He was as much influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the international anti-colonial struggle, for instance suggesting in 1944 the formation of a Black political party of "Non-Violence and Non-Cooperation.") In 1939, Burnham joined the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), becoming its organizational secretary in 1941.[16]

In 1940, Burnham ran unsuccessfully on the American Labor Party ticket for the New York State Assembly, where he was defeated by the four-term Democratic Assemblyman William T. Andrews,[17] getting about 9.5% of the votes (i.e., over 3100) in the Harlem district where President Franklin D. Roosevelt was getting the votes of five of every six voters.[18] In 1941, he married Dorothy Challenor, a Black youth activist leader who had studied biology at Brooklyn College.[2] Their move to Birmingham, which had become the headquarters of SNYC, was part of their effort to oppose racial segregation and to organize Black youth. SNYC encouraged the black Communist couples among its members, the Burnhams among them, to consider the politics of personal life, thereby anticipating a later feminism's "the personal is political."[19] In response, Burnham and other SNYC men shared household chores and child-rearing.[20][21]

In October 1941, Burnham became co-editor of the SNYC magazine Cavalcade: The March of Southern Negro Youth,[22] with its original editor, Augusta Jackson, later Augusta Strong after her marriage to one of SNYC'S founders, Edward Strong. The October issue reversed the magazine's previous antiwar stance, coinciding with Germany's sudden wartime attack on the Soviet Union. Issues usually included some art, short fiction or poetry, with a continued focus on the difficulties facing the largely rural southern Black population.[23]

Birmingham, Alabama

In 1942, Burnham joined the SNYC staff in Birmingham, Alabama.[16] In Birmingham, Burnham worked on Black voting rights and planning Black cultural events, in addition to SNYC administrative work. He lectured to local activists on the world's anti-colonial movement and considered that the Second World War opened doors to revolutionary consciousness for people of color globally. With Birmingham as his base, Burnham helped to establish several SNYC chapters at southern black college campuses.[23]

With Esther Cooper (later Esther Cooper Jackson after her marriage to James E. Jackson), Burnham co-led a six-member SNYC delegation in May 1942 that visited federal offices in Washington, D.C.. They conferred with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Attorney General Francis Biddle, as well as a half dozen other officials. The meetings were designed to advance proposals to integrate southern Black youth into the war effort.[24] The visit typified SNYC's ongoing activism during the war on behalf of desegregation of the military, defense industry jobs for Black workers, and elimination of the poll tax in support of Black voters.[23]

As a result of SNYC's efforts during this period, Birmingham opened their first municipal swimming pool for Blacks, which of course was racially segregated. Immediately following the Second World War, they worked intensively on voter registration of returning veterans and eliminating the poll tax that Alabama and other Southern states used to prevent Blacks from voting.[3] Burnham helped organize voter registration campaigns, lunch counter sit-ins and non-violent marches.[6] In 1946, Burnham led Black veterans of the Second World War on marches in Birmingham to demand the right to vote, which Blacks were largely denied throughout the South.[1]

In 1945, a Black man from Laurel, Mississippi, Willie McGee, was tried, convicted, and condemned to death by an all-white jury, on dubious rape charges. The attorney in charge of his appeal contacted Burnham. Almost two weeks after the jury found McGee guilty, Burnham traveled to Laurel to interview the principals in the case. Subsequently he sent a report on the case to George Marshall, then the head of the New York-based National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. A study of the McGee case concludes that Burnham's "detailed and accurate [memo]... was one of the most reliable things ever written about the case."[25]

In 1946, as SNYC was organizing a Southern Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina, Burnham joined with activists from South Carolina to create a Leadership Training School in nearby Irmo. Participants included union-affiliated workers, teachers, and college students from throughout the south, many intending to start their own local SNYC chapters. The Southern Youth Legislature drew more than 1500 delegates and some 5000 visitors, the "biggest interracial gathering in the history of South Carolina." With World War II having just concluded, the word "war" was often used in speeches, such as Burnham's, urging the attendees to "make war on white supremacy vandals who seek to turn the clock back on progress."

In one instance of Burnham's activism in Birmingham, he acted with thirty-one local activists to reestablish an Alabama chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). Among other efforts, the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare worked on the case of Recy Taylor, who had been kidnapped and raped by white men.[16] In another example of his activities, in 1947 he joined a number of distinguished southern representatives of the professions and labor as a founding board member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund.[26]

Burnham got into trouble with the authorities in Birmingham, where the police commissioner was "Bull" Connor, who became internationally notorious in 1963 for turning dogs and fire hoses on Black children protesting racial segregation. In one incident, Connor arrested Burnham for sitting down with a white colleague in a racially segregated, Blacks-only restaurant.[3]

In 1948, as SNYC prepared for its annual convention, Birmingham police escorted Burnham to Connor's office. Connor read to Burnham from a SNYC flyer promoting the event, challenging the descriptions of the conditions that Blacks faced there: "Young Southerners oppressed and beaten... Young Southerners burned and hung... Young Southerners suffering the daily injustices of Klansmen's law." Connor, himself a Klan supporter, denied the presence of the Klan in Birmingham to Burnham, but threatened its arrival if the convention proceeded.[27] Connor threatened Burnham personally: "Why, you’re the Executive Secretary of the organization—Why, that ain’t no job, you should be working in the mills or the mines. I ought to lock you up for vagrancy." The next day, Birmingham police murdered a teenage SNYC member.[28]

That year, the Progressive Party was a vehicle for the unsuccessful Presidential campaign of 1941–1945 Vice President Henry A. Wallace. (Also in 1948, in reaction to President Truman's efforts on behalf of Black Americans, Southern segregationists temporarily left the Democratic Party and formed the Dixiecrats; their presidential candidate, Senator Strom Thurmond, won four southern states, an indication of hardening racist sentiment across the South.) As the Progressive Party's southern director, Louis Burnham headed its campaign in the South. But during this period, SNYC lost the support of the Black community and organized labor, due to political repression.[1]. The Burnhams remained in Birmingham until the SNYC office closed in 1949.[29]

The Burnhams had two daughters in Birmingham: Claudia in 1943 and Margaret in 1944. Another, Linda, was born in Brooklyn in 1948. She lived with them in Birmingham until they all moved back to New York City the following year, to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn,[4] where their son Charles was born in 1950.[3] Others from SNYC in Birmingham relocated to Brooklyn around the same time, including the Strongs (who lived in Brooklyn across the street from the Burnhams) and the Jacksons. This group, all with young children, formed a mutually supportive community amidst the fears engendered by the persecutions of the McCarthy period.[30]

Freedom, the National Guardian and Freedomways

In Brooklyn, the small circle of African-American Communists mostly avoided speaking to their children about this party tie, but took these young children to meetings and rallies.[30] During summers they were joined by Sallye Davis, another former SNYC leader, who would drive from her Birmingham home with her young daughter, the later activist Angela, to attend graduate school in New York.[31] These children and their parents socialized with each other in their own homes and those of their fellow Communists, including the intellectual luminary W. E. B. Du Bois. Having a small, closely-knit group in Birmingham, and which persisted during the Red Scare of the McCarthy period, created lasting bonds and valuable mutual support. Besides Angela Davis, other children from their group, including Burnham's own, grew up to become accomplished adults.[30]

In 1950, Burnham helped bring to life a Paul Robeson project, the monthly newspaper Freedom, as its Managing Editor. He was responsible for getting the monthly started.[32] According to Burnham's wife Dorothy, Burnham's intent was to publicize "the story of the people who were active in the movement and who were being persecuted during the McCarthy period.".[19] The newspaper ran monthly from November 1950 through August 1955, although it was bimonthly for the last two issues because it was running out of funds.

In its initial issue, Burnham wrote an article defending anyone "who is courageous enough to open their mouths, join an organization, sign a petition, or participate in a delegation or attend a meeting to fight for peace in the world, good jobs, decent wages at home, and full equality for Negroes. They are American progressives."[33] An interview with the United Nations ambassador from the People's Republic of China, in the second issue, highlighted another focus of Burnham's in the pages of Freedom, the international anti-colonial struggle. He wrote: [emphasis in original] "the colored people everywhere are conducting their struggles for full human equality."[34]

Burnham also assisted Robeson more directly, in support of Robeson's effort to get his passport restored, writing: "It is one of the shameful consequences of the Cold War that the American most honored abroad is most cruelly persecuted at home." And he prepared a collection of Robeson's songs and messages, for peace conferences in Europe, Asia and Africa.[35] He was one of many who signed Robeson's petition on behalf of African-Americans to the United Nations, We Charge Genocide.[36]

The writer that Burnham hired who became the best known of Freedom's staff was Lorraine Hansberry, who eight years later won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. He hired her in 1951 when she was 20, shortly after her arrival in New York. At the newspaper, she worked initially, in her own words, "typing (eh?) receptionist and writer." Burnham nurtured her sense of herself as a writer, one of several who were published in the pages of his newspaper.[37]

From 1958 to 1960, Burnham wrote for the National Guardian[38] as the associate editor for civil rights and national liberties.[1] He reported from the South, Little Rock, Chicago, Detroit and Harlem, and wrote interpretive pieces upon his return from these forays.[39] A friend of Burnham's from SNYC days, and later Brooklyn neighbor, James E. Jackson, reportedly described Burnham's method of gathering material in Little Rock in 1958, the year after nine Black students were escorted into segregated Little Rock Central High School by the 101st Airborne Division: "Burnham spent a lot of time speaking to people on lunch hours, on the job at the factories there. Talking to the Negro youth there and observing people on the street, sitting in barbershops he got reaction." Apparently skeptical of the likelihood of immediate racial progress, Burnham reportedly told Jackson that "there is an unprecedented, an almost swagger, of new confidence on the part of the Negroes. And part of that is compounded by naive effect [sic] that the government is on their side, the law is on their side, and the reactionaries, the Southerners have got to give in sooner or later and the time will be sooner."[40]

During this period, in 1959, Burnham was elected to the National Committee of CPUSA.[1]

Near the end of his life, SNYC veterans Burnham, Esther Cooper Jackson,[1] and Edward Strong, who had participated in its creation in 1937,[41] conceived of a Black literary and political quarterly.[42] But Burnham had a heart attack and died on February 12, 1960, while he was giving a lecture on "Emerging Africa and the Negro People's Fight for Freedom" to young artists and writers[43] for Negro History Week, at the Intercultural Society in midtown Manhattan in New York City.[44][45] In this final speech, he said, "I know you get tired of the continuing struggle sometimes. We all do—and then there are reversals in situations—but we must not despair, we must not rest too long. Tomorrow's new world beckons. Tomorrow belongs to us."[39]

He was 44 years old; he was survived by his wife and four children, as well as his mother and brother. His obituary in The New York Times summarized his career: "more than twenty years a leader in the fight for Negro civil rights and the right to vote. He wrote and lectured widely before school and youth groups."[44] Key figures in the anti-colonialism fight spoke at Burnham's memorial service, among them James Jackson, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Aronson and Alphaeus Hunton.[46] Others in his circle of activists and writers brought the idea of the new periodical to fruition: the quarterly journal Freedomways.

Family

Louis Burnham's wife, Dorothy Burnham, was already actively advocating for social justice at the time of their marriage, and has continued this throughout her long life. After her husband's death, she was an active leader in the national organization Women for Racial and Economic Equality, as well as with the Sisters Against South African Apartheid, Genes and Gender, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; in addition, she served on the board of Freedomways.[29] She taught biology and related subjects at City University of New York.[47]

Their daughter Margaret Burnham is a law professor and racial justice activist, and a former judge in Massachusetts.[48] Their daughter Linda Burnham is a journalist and women's rights activist, particularly regarding women of color.[49][4] Their son Charles Burnham is a violinist.[15][50]

Character

A friend during Burnham's youth, Howard "Stretch" Johnson, who often met Burnham at his mother's house, wrote of him, "He had a mordant wit, always saw the humorous side to keep us all 'cracked up,' and could recite poetry by the yard. At the same time, he had an ability to put words down on paper with a speed and precision... He had a far-above-average ability to marshal his facts through well-documented research and translate his material into well-written and convincing prose."[8]

According to Lorraine Hansberry, Burnham had "an altogether commanding personality... His voice was very deep and his language struck my senses immediately with its profound literacy, constantly punctuated by deliberate and loving poetic lapses into the beloved color of the speech of the masses of our people... The things he taught me were great things: that all racism was rotten, White or Black, that [emphasis in the original] everything is political; that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny.”[37]

In his eulogy at Burnham's memorial service, W. E. B. Du Bois said, "Above all none can forget his honesty and utter sacrifice." He urged his listeners to attend to their health, which he said that Burnham had neglected "because of his absorption in what he saw as his duty."[51]

In his memoir, the attorney John Abt described Burnham as "one of the loveliest human beings I've ever met... A rich cultural apostle who swam in music, poetry, and literature... always pleasant company... a great facility to move in all kinds of circles... a most eloquent public speaker [who] could engage an audience at will."[52]

In their memoir of the National Guardian, its founders Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson wrote that Burnham "was a man touched with grace, easy to be with and reassuring. In his writings, lectures, and conversation, he never dissembled. His seriousness, manifest in his painstakingly careful speech, was leavened by high humor. The love that people bore him was demonstrated in his hosts of friends—from the teenagers on his Brooklyn block, through the bearded youngsters who came to him for counsel, to the patrician figure of Du Bois, his mentor and his colleague."[39]

An article on Negro History Week by "The Editors," in the fourth issue of Freedomways, celebrated Burnham and introduced a selection of his writings. It included these words: "He led primarily by virtue of the power of attraction of his example... He was a hero in the practical struggles for equality and justice in the Deep South who had marched often in the shadow of death in Willie McGhee country in Mississippi, and under the guns of the police chief “Bull” Conner in Birmingham, Alabama... He was a talented writer and an incomparable orator. He was a fine scholar and an inspiring organizer of social action."[43]

Burnham's daughter Linda Burnham, who was 12 when he died, stated: "Even today, you know, when I’m kind of in deep middle age, older people will come up to me who remember my father and — who just remember. He had a lot of grace, and was a very welcoming person, and he’s remembered in that way."[4]

Quotes

“From one end of the South to the other law and order have broken down. A public climate has been created in which a Negro’s life is worth no more than a White man’s whim.” [53]

"Much of what Negroes fight for today is not to gain new ground but to restore positions once dearly won and foully taken away."[43]

"It is worth noting that if Emmett Till had been a Mississippi farm boy instead of a Chicago lad on vacation in Mississippi, the world probably would never have known his fate."[54]

"The forward surge of the Negro people is the most distinctive and progressive feature of Southern politics."[55]

"How, then, should American literature deal with these people, crushed for centuries beneath an insufferable weight of exploitation, calumny and derision, yet always rising, their presence and their struggle ever mocking the strident pretensions of the nation?[56]

Occasionally speaking of Black people generally, in conversation with the still youthful Lorraine Hansberry: "They are beautiful, child."[37]

Publications

  • Burnham, Lewis E. (1946). Smash the Chains. New York: American Youth for Democracy. OCLC 31686688.
  • Burnham, Louis E. (1955). Behind the lynching of Emmett Louis Till (PDF). New York: Freedom Associates. OCLC 1127513283. Retrieved 23 August 2020..
  • Mulzac, Hugh (1972). A star to steer by. New York: International Publishers. ISBN 071780352X. OCLC 914896111. As told to Louis Burnham and Norval Welch

See also

Civil rights movement (1896–1954)

References

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  44. ^ a b "Louis Burnham, 44, Editor on Weekly". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  45. ^ "Editor, Civil Rights Fighter, Dies in N.Y.C." Pittsburgh Courier. Vol. 51, no. 9. 27 February 1960. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  46. ^ Munro, John (2017). The anticolonial front : the African American freedom struggle and global decolonisation, 1945-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 295. ISBN 978-1316992883. OCLC 1141918846.
  47. ^ "Dorothy Burnham Biography". The HistoryMakers. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  48. ^ "Margaret Burnham Biography". The HistoryMakers. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  49. ^ "Collection: Linda Burnham papers". Retrieved 2020-08-18.
  50. ^ "Charles Burnham". All About Jazz. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  51. ^ Bois, W. E. B. (1985). "Louis Burnham (28 April 1960)". In Aptheker, Herbert (ed.). Against racism : unpublished essays, papers, addresses, 1887-1961. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 300. ISBN 9780870231346.
  52. ^ Abt, John; Myerson, Michael (1993). Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. p. 160. ISBN 9780252020308. OCLC 27265102.
  53. ^ "In the United States the battle is one for Negro Equality, Not Jim Crow". Fighting Talk. 12 (3): 6. March 1956. Retrieved 16 August 2020 – via JSTOR.
  54. ^ Burnham, Louis (1955). Behind the lynching of Emmett Louis Till (PDF). New York: Freedom Associates. p. 5. OCLC 1048883443. Retrieved 22 August 2020.
  55. ^ Boudreau, Kristin (2006). The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. p. 133. ISBN 9781591024033. OCLC 62888228. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  56. ^ Washington, Mary (2014). The other blacklist : the African American literary and cultural left of the 1950s. New York New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231526470. OCLC 1088439510. Quoting article in The Guardian, 1959

Further reading

Burnham, Louis E. (1962). "From the Writings of Louis E. Burnham". Freedomways. 2 (1): 10–31. JSTOR community.28036978.


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