The South, as its great historian C. Vann Woodward once noted, developed into the United States’ “most distinctive region.” Among its distinctions  bound up with but outlasting its peculiar institution of chattel slavery  were white Southerners’ preoccupations with human limitations, guilt and evil. Not for them the optimistic creed or “dream of perfection” associated with their Northern brethren. In that sense, Woodward argued, the South’s outlook was “a thoroughly un-American one.”

Which brings us to the central irony underlying “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” by Glenda Gilmore, a native North Carolinian and the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale University. In the early to mid-20th century, Gilmore argues, it was primarily individuals and groups judged “un-American” by their contemporaries who took on the daunting task of bringing the South in line with the American “dream of perfection”  at least insofar as perfection could be measured by adherence to the promise of equal protection before the law. In a wide-ranging narrative that moves from Chicago to Moscow to Chapel Hill, N.C. (where Gilmore tends to linger affectionately), she introduces scores of dedicated, colorful and sometimes eccentric dreamers and agitators. They include Communists and Socialists, preachers of the social gospel, disciples of Gandhi, prominent academics and impoverished millworkers who, although mostly forgotten today, prepared the way, she argues, for the better known civil rights advocates of the 1950s and 1960s.

As Gilmore acknowledges, she is not the first to explore the notion of the “long civil rights movement,” stretching back many years before Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. Readers of histories by John Egerton, Patricia Sullivan and others will recognize many of the characters and events discussed in Gilmore’s account. The return visit is mostly worthwhile thanks to her gift for vivid description and a number of interesting observations she offers along the way.

Image Pauli Murray, pictured in the 1940s, compared racist America to Nazi Germany. Credit... The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; from “Defying Dixie”

Two characters in her narrative particularly stand out. The first is Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Dallas-born graduate of Tuskegee Institute who was one of the first blacks recruited into the American Communist Party. Dispatched soon afterward to Moscow as part of an official delegation, he lectured about race discrimination in the United States to an audience that included Joseph Stalin. In the style of many radicals of the era, he became a thorough Russophile: in Gilmore’s marvelous account, he walks down a street in a black neighborhood in Chicago greeting friends shortly after his return from his pilgrimage to Moscow, sporting a robochka  a Russian peasant blouse  as well as “knee-high felt boots and a small mustache.” Fort-Whiteman was instrumental in pushing American Communists to broaden their concept of class struggle to include the fight against racism. In the 1930s he moved permanently to Moscow, married a Russian woman and entertained black visitors who had come to see the vaunted Soviet experiment in action. Like many foreign Communists living in Moscow in that era, he ran afoul of the secret police, and died of starvation and mistreatment in a labor camp in 1939.