“We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. By Mark Robert Schneider. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. xii, 476 pp. $35.00, ISBN 1-55553-490-2.)

Abstract

As the civil rights movement reached its crescendo, fractured, and ebbed in 1967, Charles Flint Kellogg published a history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in its first decade. His plan for succeeding volumes on the naacp went unfulfilled. The title of Mark Robert Schneider's “We Return Fighting” is misleading in several ways, but it takes up the naacp story where Kellogg ended. This is a history of the naacp in the 1920s. An account of the “movement” in that decade would need, at least, to include the work of the National Urban League, African American denominations, black student movements, and black clubwomen. Since Kellogg's death, however, we have needed a successor to his first volume, and this may be it. Schneider traces many stories that are familiar territory for specialists because they are told in important monographs by James Anderson, Fitzhugh Brundage, David Chalmers, Richard Cortner, Pete Daniel, Kenneth Goings, James Grossman, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Kenneth Kusmer, Gilbert Osofsky, Mark Solomon, Joe William Trotter, Mark Tushnet, William Tuttle, Nancy Weiss, George Wright, and Robert Zangrando and biographies by Jervis Anderson, Sheldon Avery, Dickson Bruce, William Hixson, David Lewis, Arnold Rampersad, Joyce Ross, and Carolyn Wedin. To his credit, Schneider's history of the naacp in the 1920s draws both on intense research in primary sources, the naacp Papers and contemporary African American and white newspapers, and an expansive reading in this rich secondary literature.