Description
"From Scottsboro to Munich" is a collective biography of individuals involved in interracial activism in the disastrous decade before the Second World War. The project concerns the wider Atlantic world and the British empire. It pursues a netork of men and women activists from the moment of the Scottsboro rape case in the American South through Ethiopia and Spain, to the German exile campaigns and the English attempts to court fascism in the Munich Crisis at the end of the decade. Britain was refuge and provocation for many seeking to address racial and imperian concerns; the ties between London and the United States were crucial to the survival of anti-racist and anti-colonial endeavors in the face of growing global crisis, and the accompanying humanitarian and anti-fascist mobilizations. The lives of the American, British, Indian, Carribean, African and European individuals at the heart of this project, help us to understand more fully the transnational roots of both the postwar Civil Rights movements that shook the Atlantic world and the independence struggles that signaled an end to empire. The project imaginatively links Russian, Dutch and British archives to collections in the Schomburg Center, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, as well as oral history.
