The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker

Abstract

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...