PAUL T. MILLERThe Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights: African Americans in San Francisco, 1945-1975. (Studies in African American History and Culture.) New York: Routledge. 2010. Pp. xvi, 167. $95.00

Abstract

The study of African American urban communities following World War II remains one of the most exciting fields in American history. Indeed, many excellent monographs have appeared in the past two decades. Thomas Sugrue's magisterial work, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), challenged scholars to reconsider the southern framework that they have adopted in assessing the civil rights movement. Few historians have paid careful attention, however, to a parallel civil rights movement in the western states and territories. Paul T. Miller's brief book reveals that black westerners waged a civil rights struggle every bit as vigorous as that of their northern counterparts. Although the book is largely a work of synthesis, Miller has effectively mined local newspapers, particularly the San Francisco Sun‐Reporter and the San Francisco Chronicle, in his effort to reconstruct the black community's attempt to gain full equality. Like that of many West Coast cities, San Francisco's African American population exploded during the World War II era as southern migrants poured into the bay cities in search of work in wartime defense industries. The bay area shipyards proved especially attractive to African Americans because they paid high wages and actively recruited black southern migrants. Yet black wartime workers also brought a new militancy and desire to end racial discrimination in wartime industries. Thus Joseph James, a black migrant and president of the San Francisco branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), successfully organized black shipyard workers to fight their relegation to a segregated auxiliary union in a case that reached the California Supreme Court.