Louis Everett Burnham (September 29, 1915 – February 12, 1960) was an African-American activist and journalist. 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, although some sources have him born in Barbados. His parents were Charles Breechford Burnham and Louise St. Clair Williams Burnham, immigrants from Barbados. Louise was a cousin of future Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. 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. 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 on Harlem's Strivers' Row that she bought with her savings. His father worked as a building superintendent. Both parents were churchgoers. Burnham's daughter recalled growing up with her parents and grandparents, in "a close family."
In 1932, Burnham graduated from Townsend High School. By his college years, he 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. 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. Burnham studied social science at CCNY. As a college student, he became interested in the civil rights movement. He helped organize the American Student Union (ASU), a mostly White youth organization, 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 CCNY's first Black faculty member.
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. A leaflet lists him as a speaker at the rally indicated by the newspaper article. 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. 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.
Burnham organized the first chapters of the ASU and the Harlem Youth Congress. 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. Following graduation, Burnham took a year of law school at St. John's University School of Law in Queens, New York.
New York City In the mid-1930s, 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). The 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.
In the spring and summer of 1939, Burnham brought the historian Herbert Aptheker with him on an organizing trip to the south. Aptheker had written about Black slave revolts and taught at the New York Workers School, where he had met Burnham. Burnham aimed to bring tobacco field workers into the Tobacco Workers International Union. The pair traveled to Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. They carried hundreds of copies of two Aphtheker pamphlets, one about Black slave revolts, the other about Black participation in the Civil War, in Burnham's car. Burnham arranged for Aptheker to lecture about Black resistance to slavery at organizing meetings in the cities and towns on their route. Ultimately they sold all of Aptheker's booklets.
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, getting about 9.5% of the votes (i.e., over 3,100) in the Harlem district where President Franklin D. Roosevelt was getting five in six votes. In 1941, he married Dorothy Challenor, a Black youth activist leader who had studied biology at Brooklyn College. 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. Burnham's efforts to organize southern Black youth through SNYC were far more effective than they had been via ASU, as those youth were much more inclined to trust an organizer from a Black organization than one from a predominantly white one. 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."> In response, Burnham and other SNYC men shared household chores and child-rearing.
In October 1941, Burnham became co-editor of the SNYC magazine Cavalcade: The March of Southern Negro Youth, 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.
Birmingham, Alabama In 1942, Burnham joined the SNYC staff in Birmingham, Alabama. 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.
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. 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. Burnham appears in a photograph where he addresses a right to vote rally in New Orleans, in 1943.
A sample of SNYC's aims and projects can be found in Burnham's organizational report at the 1942 Atlanta joint meeting of SNYC's advisory board and National Council. The proposals were: Creating some active councils in Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, to gain 3,000 new members in those areas by SNYC's sixth anniversary. Establishing six more industrial youth centers in New Orleans and cities and towns in Alabama. Creating councils on college campuses in the states mentioned above, and in Atlanta. Three campaigns: "expand opportunities for Negro youth to service in flying services of Army and Navy;" voting and education for citizenship; developing opportunities for war industry jobs and training.
All of the proposals in Burnham's report passed.
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.
In 1943, Burnham spoke about the role of Black youth during the ongoing world war on the CBS sponsored Black radio program “Wings over Jordan.” He discussed the widespread view of war in the South, saying that any student was “likely to witness in front of his school building an Army jeep populated with soldiers from a nearby camp... He may talk to the soldiers... In all of this he finds himself drawn closer to the war effort, he finds added stimulation for the purchase of war stamps and bonds.” Burnham said that Black youth who weren't in the military, by buying war stamps and bonds, “unusual sacrifices and small acts of self-denial,” could participate in the war effort.
In 1944, Burnham was the provisional secretary of the Association of Young Writers and Artists (AYWA), which was affiliated with SNYC. This organization's aim was to involve Black youth in the various fields of the arts, both as individuals and in groups. It hoped to bring their work to the general public and strengthen the understanding of the relationship between culture and events and trends in society. Burnham offered a $10 cash award, as well AYWA medals, for the best contributions interpreting Howard Fast's novel of the U.S. Reconstruction era, Freedom Road, in such disparate media as poetry, drama and sculpture, among others. Cited in
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."
In October of that year, Burnham corresponded with Florida governor Millard F. Caldwell, seeking justice for lynching victim Jesse James Payne, a sharecropper in his late twenties. Burnham followed up with the governor, after the Governor responded to Burnham with a brief letter dated the following day.
Immediately following the Second World War, SNYC 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. Burnham helped organize voter registration campaigns, lunch counter sit-ins and non-violent marches. 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.