Beth Bates, The Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 275 pp. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper; Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 332 pp. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.

Abstract

These two books add to a growing body of scholarship connecting the tactics and strategies of the modern civil rights movement to the black protest campaigns of the New Deal and Second World War. While historians such as Harvard Sitkoff and Cheryl Greenberg have demonstrated the influence of New-Deal policies on African-American protest politics, Bates and Arnesen explore the important role that black unionists played in shaping the civil rights agenda. Bates focuses on A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Arnesen examines the struggles of several black railroad unions. Ultimately, both authors skillfully demonstrate black unionists' influence over the race's struggle for equality, drawing particular attention to early civil rights activists' insistence that economic and political democracy were inextricably linked. But while the authors share similar assessments of African American railroaders' political significance, Arnesen's focus on multiple unions presents a more complete picture of the complex forces shaping black politics.