Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest by Dwayne A. Mack

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 nuts”and“Huckleberry Breakfast Cake,”giving readers direct access to some of the primary materials that Anderson tapped and providing aspiring cooks with some culinary inspiration. The book is filled with tidbits that foodies will relish. For example, did you know that Portland has both the oldest tofu company and also the oldest craft brewing supply store in the United States? Or that The Web-Foot Cookbook, the Northwest’s first, was created by Portland’s First Presbyterian Church ladies? Or that a large, open-air market once perched right beside the river, downtown? The biggest challenge of writing food history is that sources are spotty and ephemeral: random accounts of travelers, old newspaper ads,memoirs,cookbooks,and trade literature. Anderson makes a significant contribution by retrieving otherwise lost stories and weaving together disparate threads to create this first account of Portland’s unique food heritage. While the book does not seek to explicate how that heritage gave rise to today’s vibrant food scene, Portland: a Food Biography is an excellent read for locals who want to have a deeper sense of their city and its food traditions ,and it will also interest historians seeking to better understand the critical urban hub of Oregon’s food history. Ann Vileisis Port Orford, Oregon BLACK SPOKANE: THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE IN THE INLAND NORTHWEST by Dwayne A. Mack University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2014. Illustrations , tables, notes, bibliography, index. 184 pages. $26.95 cloth. In this readable study of black community and protest in Spokane, Washington — a middling metropolis in the Inland Northwest — Dwayne A. Mack contributes to a growing literature onAfricanAmericans in the modern West. The author parallels the work of West Coast historians Quintard Taylor, Robert O. Self, Douglas Flamming, Matthew Whitaker, Mark Brilliant, and Marne L. Campbell, although he also enriches black urban and black freedom studies scholarship. Similar to Randal Jelks and Richard B. Pierce, who have written on Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Indianapolis, respectively, Mack focuses on a midsized city with a small African American community and traditions of “polite” black protest reliant on interracial conciliation and legal gradualism. Borrowing conceptually from Luther Adams’s work on Louisville, Kentucky, the author describes how older black settlers and new black migrants together forged a spirit of“home.”Informed by scholars such as Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, moreover, Mack offers a civil rights narrative regionally located outside the Deep South and chronologically situated beyond the movement’s “classical” 1954–1965 timeline. Spokane’s African American community traced its initial origins to the 1880s; but like Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakland, and Tacoma, the number of black residents grew most dramatically during and after World War II. Yet, unlike many of its regional neighbors, Spokane occupied a marginal place in wartime defense production,and it lacked sizable Latino andAsian-American populations.Both factors powerfully molded black community-building and activism. Without the multiracial context that amplified struggles for racial reform elsewhere in the West, for example, “blacks [in Spokane] were not afforded the same opportunity to fight shoulder to shoulder with other people of color” (p. xxii). Further, because of the city’s limited industrial development, African Americans suffered severe underemployment , prompting younger, working-age residents to migrate elsewhere for meaningful  Reviews job opportunities. Deprived of youthful, militant leadership during the turbulent 1960s,and stunted by their community’s underdeveloped class structure,Spokane’s black leaders resided mainly among older business owners who catered to an interracial clientele and adhered to moderate protest politics. Nonetheless, Mack documents, black Spokane leaders challenged racist hiring policies that restricted them to service labor, discriminatory real estate practices that confined them to the city’s east side, and exclusionary public accommodations that denied them quality service at white-owned establishments. Anchored by a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and white liberal reformist agencies such as the Spokane Committee on Race Relations and the Washington State Board Against Discrimination, black civil rights initiatives yielded only occasional, piecemeal victories. African Americans achieved a more visible success in the election of businessman James Chase as the city’s first...