Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West Joseph Pratt Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. By Matthew C. Whitaker. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. 398. Acknowledgments, illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 083248210. $35.00, cloth.) Matthew Whitaker has published two good books loosely contained in a single volume. Race Work is first and foremost an interesting dual biography of Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, two leaders of the black civil rights movement in Phoenix after World War II. It is also an ambitious effort to analyze "the rise of civil rights in the urban West," using Phoenix as a case study. Although the two halves do not always hold together, the book as a whole does give the reader quite useful information with which to place Phoenix into the broader story of the civil rights movement in the West and Southwest. The portrait of the Ragsdales is fascinating. Leonard came from an Oklahoma family of successful undertakers. His father's funeral home in Tulsa was burned during the vicious assault on the black community in Tulsa in 1921. The family survived and prospered, and Leonard served as a Tuskegee airman during World War II. Eleanor came from a much different background. Her family of teachers raised her in a middle-class environment in Pennsylvania in which she felt little of the overt tension symbolized by the Tulsa riot. The two found their respective ways to Phoenix after the war in search of opportunities. There they met and married. While raising a family and building successful careers and a diversified business enterprise, they took the lead in challenging racial discrimination in their adopted hometown. Striking in Whitaker's account is how often racial prejudice and discrimination forced its way into their lives, and how often they successfully stood up and challenged segregation. This "race couple" made a difference in fighting discrimination against the relatively small black communities in the fast-growing city of Phoenix. If Whitaker had published only a two hundred-page biography of the Ragsdales, Race Work would be a useful and entertaining book. But as he moves into a discussion of events in the 1960s, he looks beyond his tight focus on the Ragsdales and undertakes a broader, less coherent analysis of the civil rights movement in Phoenix. By the early 1960s, the Ragsdales were wealthy, well-established citizens with far-reaching business interests and a longstanding leadership position among middle-class blacks. As such, they were ill-prepared to understand the more strident demands of younger blacks and the assertion of new demands by their city's growing Mexican American population. Although they remained effective supporters of the civil rights movement, they retreated behind the scenes while tending to the demands of their businesses. [End Page 309] In discussing these generational and inter-ethnic tensions in the civil rights movement in a major western city, Whitaker shows the way for more research in other cities. Case studies such as his provide essential data for making comparisons among regions. Those studying Houston and Dallas, for example, will find themselves wondering if the "rise of civil rights in the West" differed substantially from the same process in the southern edge of the Southwest, where Jim Crow habits were deeply ingrained in local and state laws and deeply embedded in the psyches of migrants (both black and white) from rural Texas and Louisiana. Historians studying San Antonio and El Paso might make a somewhat different set of comparisons between their cities and Phoenix, with more attention paid to the parallel histories of the movements for civil rights by Mexican Americans and African Americans. Those seeking to make such comparisons among regions will wish that Whitaker had provided more detailed information about issues such as black voting patterns, racial and ethnic divisions in public schools, the existence of black newspapers and organizations such as the NAACP, and the position and power of the black professional/business class in Phoenix. They will, however, greatly appreciate what Whitaker accomplishes in this excellent book, which provides a well-researched, well-written case study of the struggle for...