From his college days, and continuing through adulthood, 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.

[4][8] 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.

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.

[10] 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.

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.")

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.

They conferred with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Attorney General Francis Biddle, as well as a half dozen other officials.

Immediately following the Second World War, they 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 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.

[31] 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.

Participants included union-affiliated workers, teachers, and college students from throughout the south, many intending to start their own local SNYC chapters.

The back page includes an exhortation to join and contribute to SNYC: You cannot afford to sit this one out.In urban centers, rural areas and on college campuses, the crusade proceeds in the fields of citizenship education, veterans' welfare, cultural expression, vocational training and interracial unity.

[33]In one instance of Burnham's activism in Birmingham, he acted with thirty-one local activists to reestablish an Alabama chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW).

[34] Among other efforts, the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare worked on the case of Recy Taylor, who had been kidnapped and raped by white men.

[35] Burnham got into trouble with the authorities in Birmingham, where the police commissioner was "Bull" Connor, who became internationally notorious in 1963 for turning dogs and fire hoses on Black children protesting racial segregation.

[38] Burnham's April 30 telegram to President Truman's Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Tom Clark framed the matter clearly: "Every type of intimidation is being used by the Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene Bull Conner, and his officers to deprive our organization of the right to free assemblage in holding our biennial meeting scheduled to open today... [T]he constituted authority of Birmingham offers us no protection."

[41] Burnham appears briefly in Carl Marzani's promotional film of the party's organizing convention in Philadelphia, where he is identified as the Vice Chairman for Alabama.

The same year Burnham promoted a campaign for federal investigation into the murder of a resident of Akron, Ohio, Samuel Bacon,[4] arrested and killed by a Mississippi Town Marshal for refusing to give up his bus seat to a white man.

She lived with them in Birmingham until they all moved back to New York City the following year, to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn,[5] where their son Charles was born in 1950.

This group, all with young children, formed a mutually supportive community amidst the fears engendered by the persecutions of the McCarthy period.

[47] During summers they were joined by Sallye Davis, another former SNYC leader, who would drive from her Birmingham home with her young daughter, the later activist Angela, to attend graduate school in New York.

Having a small, closely-knit group in Birmingham, and which persisted during the Red Scare of the McCarthy period, created lasting bonds and valuable mutual support.

In its initial issue, Burnham wrote an article defending anyone "who is courageous enough to open their mouths, join an organization, sign a petition, or participate in a delegation or attend a meeting to fight for peace in the world, good jobs, decent wages at home, and full equality for Negroes.

"[50] An interview with the United Nations ambassador from the People's Republic of China, in the second issue, highlighted another focus of Burnham's in the pages of Freedom, the international anti-colonial struggle.

[52] The writer that Burnham hired who became the best known of Freedom's staff was Lorraine Hansberry, who eight years later won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

[54] Burnham's activities in 1951 also included organizing an event to honor the publication of the first volume of Aptheker's Documentary History of the Negro People.

Apparently skeptical of the likelihood of immediate racial progress, Burnham reportedly told Jackson that "there is an unprecedented, an almost swagger, of new confidence on the part of the Negroes.

[2] Near the end of his life, SNYC veterans Burnham, Esther Cooper Jackson,[2] and Edward Strong, who had participated in its creation in 1937,[60] conceived of a Black literary and political quarterly.

[68] Du Bois helped organize fundraising "to ensure the upbringing and education" of Burnham's children, appealing in a circular letter "to the great numbers of people whose love and respect he had well earned.