In this manuscript, Erik Gellman examines the civil rights movement that occurred a generation before the better known movement in the 1960s. In 1936, Black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC), a group that demanded a "second emancipation" for African Americans. For the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) sought to coordinate anti-racist activism of its more than 75 local councils into a national movement against Jim Crow.