The Conspiracy of the Good: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875-2000

Abstract

Conspiracy of the Good provides an interesting account of public education in Pasadena, California, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Its focus is primarily on Pasadena—“one of the prettiest towns in America, and probably the richest,” one observer wrote in 1932 (p. 217). The evidence from Charlottesville is used primarily to provide counterpoint. The book includes parallel narratives, as well as tangential descriptions of numerous other matters. Michael E. James begins with accounts of two events of the 1990s—one of an upper-crust party on a bridge that spans Pasadena's Arroyo Seco Canyon, the other of “six young African-American boys … gunned down on a quiet residential street” (p. ix). He ends with snapshots of a civic ordinance that prohibited employers from recruiting day laborers in Pasadena, of nonwhite youths assaulting Caucasians and Asians in Charlottesville, and of modern public housing (where the projects in both cities experienced the usual downward spiral). There are additional discussions of temperance campaigns, zoot suit riots, the angst of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the sterilization of Carrie Buck.