Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz Nanosh Lucas Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. Foreword by Quintard Taylor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. vii + 270. Maps, selected bibliography, index. $29.95, paper. Students broadening their knowledge of the civil rights movement in the West will appreciate this edited volume, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. It features 16 brief and accessible essays divided by region: the Far West, mountain states and the Desert Southwest, the Upper Midwest, and southwestern states such as Oklahoma and Texas. Two luminaries of the African American West, Quintard Taylor and Albert S. Broussard, dovetail the work with a generous foreword and excellent post-1970s epilogue. Authors in this collection immediately challenge the historical record, citing the earliest recorded lunchcounter sit-ins originating in 1941 Chicago under the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), not in Greensboro (xx, 9). They also cite Black women achieving early prominence in leadership in Seattle (30). Each scholar's range of professional experiences contributes to a mosaic of understanding in a field still reaching beyond the American Plantation South. On this point, civil rights scholarship on the Great Plains deserves special recognition. Three articles on the Upper Midwest span six states, including the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Each article introduces, as the authors refer to it, historiographically underdeveloped regions of the civil rights revolution. Independent scholar Betti Van Epps-Taylor notes North and South Dakota's long-held customs of segregation, establishing the uneven ways African Americans' civil rights activism developed across state lines. For example, earlier and more forceful involvement by chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in South Dakota followed race massacres in the 1920s. Why did South Dakota develop an NAACP so rapidly, despite the obvious need for its services in both states? Van Epps-Taylor leaves a trail for interested scholars to continue developing. A work of counterpoint, she ends on notes of racial progress made uneasy by the troubled road ahead. Emphasizing these persistent tensions, university professors Donald H. Strasser and Melodie Andrews explore the revolution in Iowa and Minnesota. These scholars emphasize how local needs guided the Black Panther Party and a similar organization, the "Soul Police" (191). Without their militancy, the authors argue, authorities would not have yielded to demands for more modest concessions (194–95). The struggle for civil rights in one region influenced another in what James Leiker, professor at Johnson County Community College, refers to as "regional symbiosis" (208). He illustrates how early developments in Kansas and Nebraska provided models for the revolution in other regions, leading to "short-term successes but longterm forgettability" (197). Confrontations along the color line were often surprisingly successful as a rapidly industrializing African American workforce exercised more buying power in traditionally closed-off areas, and custom, not law, governed segregation. Neither state, however, proved absent police brutality and mob violence. Leiker's adept combination of multiple themes, including women's roles, legal strategies, and protest politics, forms a most excellent closing to this volume's scholarship on the Plains. Deeply rooted in the historiographical traditions influenced by scholars such as Komozi Woodard and Jeanne Theoharis, this volume is certain to provide undergraduates and seasoned scholars alike with ample material for the classroom and a heavy trail of breadcrumbs for researchers in the archives. [End Page 219] Nanosh Lucas Department of History University of Oregon Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln