General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We Live In The Emotional And Economic Wreckage Of This Broken Home.... [View all]The Magistrate
(96,043 posts)If it was a fling, it was a long one, since it can be traced back into the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, a good deal we now associate with the left was not, back then, considered to be in the mainstream of the left. Not that you could not find left voices speaking for racial equality and women's rights, and even for an end to persecution of homosexuals, a century ago, but such positions were taken as being on the left's fringe, even by most leftists.
Racial equality inched its way into a mainstream position on the left here starting in the twenties, largely as a by-product of anti-colonialist agitation, which became a major line for leftists around the world in the early Soviet period.
That the Civil Rights struggle could gain wide support in the fifties and sixties was also a sort of by-product, a lingering and unintended effect of war-time propagandas against the Nazi 'Aryan Master Race' ideology --- that was just too close to Jim Crow at home for many to remain entirely comfortable with it.