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

Abstract

Matthew C. Whitaker, an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, has produced an engaging study of the civil rights movement in one major metropolitan center in the American West. Although the title suggests that the work is of broader scope, Whitaker concentrates on Phoenix, Arizona, and especially on the activities and impact of the remarkable civil rights activists Lincoln Ragsdale and Eleanor Ragsdale, who eventually became among the wealthiest and most influential African Americans in the West. Whitaker carefully documents the “race work” of the Ragsdales from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Although the West was supposedly more tolerant of diversity, immigrants quickly discovered that Phoenix's race relations resembled those in other American cities. For fifty years, the Ragsdales “helped dismantle an apartheid-like system in what is presently the fifth largest city in the United States” (p. 4). Phoenix assumed an importance in the history of the civil rights movement disproportionate to the size of its African American population. Although the number of blacks averaged only around five percent of the city's total population throughout the period, the city sometimes led the nation in securing civil rights victories. The Ragsdales helped desegregate Phoenix's schools one year before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and they helped integrate the city's all-white neighborhoods long before Congress outlawed restrictive covenants in 1968. Race Work would have benefited from closer comparisons between Phoenix and the experiences of western urban centers with larger African American populations—such as Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland—but it succeeds in placing Phoenix within the larger context of the national civil rights movement.