Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics by Anthony J. Badger

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

The Fight for Fair Training:Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945 Bryant Etheridge (bio) If Thurgood Marshall took offense at being counseled on litigation strategy by someone who lacked legal training, he chose not to show it. John L. LeFlore, the secretary of the Mobile, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was urging him to make better use of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). It was 1941, and LeFlore was deeply involved in the wartime civil rights struggles of Black Alabamians, especially their fight to gain employment in the state's booming industries. The Gaines ruling, he advised Marshall, constituted a vital doctrinal resource in the fight for fair employment. Marshall informed LeFlore that the NAACP's legal staff, in response to similar requests from most of the organization's branches, was already developing a test case that addressed LeFlore's concerns. At the upcoming annual conference in Houston, Texas, NAACP members from around the country would coordinate legal strategy. LeFlore, Marshall suggested, could contribute to that effort by representing the NAACP branches of Alabama at the June 1941 conference.1 [End Page 501] As LeFlore fought racism in wartime Mobile, he had no higher priority than winning access to good jobs for Black residents. The struggle to overcome white opposition to equal employment opportunity in the city's shipyards occupied him and other local activists for the rest of the war. While employment as unskilled laborers was often open to African Americans, semiskilled or skilled work was not. As a result, moving up the occupational ladder was a civil rights imperative in Mobile, as it was throughout the United States, during World War II. The assault on the Jim Crow racial division of labor was foremost on LeFlore's mind when he contacted Marshall.2 LeFlore proposed to make the Gaines case, a lawsuit that was part of the NAACP's campaign against segregation, central to attacking racialized economic inequality. The case involved an African American plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, who had applied to the law school at the University of Missouri. The all-white university rejected Gaines's application. Missouri instead offered to pay Gaines's tuition at an out-of-state law school, a workaround that many southern states used to avoid complying with even the separate-but-equal stipulation of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Gaines declined that arrangement, and the NAACP's legal team filed suit. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri's tuition reimbursement program was unconstitutional. The ruling left the state with two options for graduate law education: to open a law school for Black students or to admit Black students to the existing institution. Although the decision stopped well short of ending segregation in higher education, it was an important milestone on the long road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). With the Gaines lawsuit, NAACP lawyers aimed, in part, to make segregation too expensive to sustain. The cost of creating separate-but-equal programs in every area of graduate and professional study, they wagered, would prove too heavy a burden for southern states to bear.3 The faith LeFlore showed in the Gaines ruling as a solution to the problem of fair employment in Mobile's shipyards appears misplaced. The categorical distinction between the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated education, on one hand, and the concurrent but separate fight for economic justice, on the other, underpins our basic conceptualization of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. If alleviating [End Page 502] economic inequality was LeFlore's objective, his propounding the utility of Gaines seems to amount to a non sequitur. Perhaps LeFlore was confused. Perhaps, in offering guidance on constitutional law to an NAACP attorney, he had gotten in over his head and misconstrued the Court's ruling in Gaines. Or maybe LeFlore just screwed up and cited the wrong case. If LeFlore misunderstood the Gaines decision, he was not alone. He informed Marshall that in Mobile, Black residents stood broadly in support of using Gaines as a...

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...

Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is white! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be white and Christian!). George I. Sanchez (1958) By embracing whiteness, Americans have reinforced the color line that has denied people of African descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Americans combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) (1) THE HISTORY OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IS complex and exciting. The history of American civil rights is also promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century and the last a recently published statement from a historian of race and identity, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss whiteness differently. The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploiting legal whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals; the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to American whiteness. This contrast is worth further consideration. This essay examines the American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I. Sanchez--a prominent activist and professor of education at the University of Texas--in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most significant intellectual of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American Generation of activists during this period. As a national president of the major American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchez's political influence within the American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, offering an excellent case study of the making of American civil rights. (2) First, this work examines how Sanchez's civil rights efforts were vitally informed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integrationist, liberal reform, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Americans in the Southwest, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This New Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchez's contention that Americans were one minority group among many needing governmental assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma. During the Great Depression and World War II, Americans' strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U.S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of citizenship was controversial within the American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive phase of Americans' civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness. Third, Sanchez's correspondence with Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary connections between the American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. …

This chapter challenges the misappropriation of African American civil rights struggles by white LGBT advocates who present themselves as the victims of discrimination akin to that suffered by blacks, and, in the process, continue to marginalize the experiences of African Americans who are LGBT. Historically, pro-gay rights advocacy has reflected a racial ideology that invokes black civil rights symbols, political victories, and legal reforms, on the one hand, and elides contemporary black disadvantage and social inequality, on the other. The chapter shows how this “gay rights color blindness” deploys African American identity and civil rights history to advance a gay rights agenda in which black LGBT people are nowhere to be found and blackness, more generally, is marked as an identity whose civil rights aspirations have already been fulfilled.

This fresh and invigorating analysis illuminates the often-neglected story of early African American civil rights activism. African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement tells a fascinating story, one that is too frequently marginalized. Offering the first full-length, comprehensive sociological analysis of the Niagara Movement, which existed between 1905 and 1910, the book demonstrates that, although short-lived, the movement was far from a failure. Rather, it made the need to annihilate Jim Crow and address the atrocities caused by slavery publicly visible, creating a foundation for more widely celebrated mid-20th-century achievements. This unique study focuses on what author Angela Jones terms black publics, groups of concerned citizens—men and women, alike—who met to shift public opinion. The book explores their pivotal role in initiating the civil rights movement, specifically examining secular organizations, intellectual circles, the secular black press, black honor societies and clubs, and prestigious educational networks. All of these, Jones convincingly demonstrates, were seminal to the development of civil rights protest in the early 20th century.

IN COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS, MARY L. DUDZIAK PLACES THE STUDY OF THE POSTWorld War II Civil Rights Movement in the context of United States foreign relations. In doing so, Dudziak expands the scope of civil rights history and offers new insight into why the federal government saw African American civil rights as integral to its foreign policy mission. While there have been a growing number of books that explore how civil rights activists used the cold war strategically to wage civil rights struggles, Dudziak's study is the first to show how the federal government's commitment to Cold War foreign policy seasoned its support for civil rights reforms.' Although civil rights activists had long relied on international audiences for support and solidarity, Dudziak shows that the Cold War's reliance on preserving American prestige abroad made international observers' sentiments integral to foreign policy. Within this context, racial discrimination, especially when it was broadcast to international observers, became problematic to the Cold War effort itself. Moreover, African American civil rights leaders capitalized on the importance of foreign perceptions of the United States by publicizing acts of racial violence abroad. African American participation as soldiers and as workers at home allowed civil rights leaders to claim that they were an indispensable part of American society, and especially of the war effort. Moreover, World War II was

Spanning the 1960s through the 1980s, this article tracks the relationships between one of the leading national Left-liberal philanthropies in the post–WWII era United States—the Field Foundation—and a variety of women’s and feminist issues and organizations. Field was one of the largest and most iconoclastic philanthropies of its time. Founded during the early nineteen-forties and steeped in Popular Front and New Deal social democratic impulses, it provided generous, sustained support to grassroots movements for civil rights and antipoverty years—often decades—before other philanthropies dared. This article explores how such an organization, primarily concerned with poverty and civil rights, was drawn into supporting feminist organizations in the period from the sixties through the eighties, and what that support meant for feminism and Left liberalism. Field’s support for feminist organizations was shaped by its own agenda, which was dominated by the African American civil rights struggle. The foundation began by providing generous funding to programs for poor and nonwhite women, and then moved on to support African American women’s groups directly. Its largesse aided the development of political, economic, and organizing capacity among African American women. Their organizations consisted of both small, local community organizations like the Gee’s Bend, Alabama, Quilting Collective, and large, grassroots national membership organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization. Though different in size and scope, these organizations and the many others Field supported often developed proto-feminist or feminist politics, integrating feminist analysis with lived experiences of poverty, discrimination, lack of jobs and services, and disrespect. In fostering the feminisms of nonwhite, non-middleclass groups, this article argues, the Field Foundation influenced the fate of second-wave feminism. The foundation’s support helped women who produced feminisms that were more conscious of poverty and more antiracist than mainstream, middle-class feminisms. When, by the early eighties, mainstream, white feminist organizations heeded the call of African American and poor women, and placed antipoverty activism high on their agendas, the Field Foundation funded them, too. The fertile terrain shared by Left liberalism and some feminists in the late twentieth century provides a new vantage point from which to view the period. Dominant narratives of post-1960s liberalism portray it as listless and fractious, its decline hastened by internal divisions over civil rights, antipoverty programs, and women’s rights. But this article suggests an opposite history: a variety of energetic organizations flourished in this period. In addition, far from being divided by issues of race and gender, both the Field Foundation and African American women’s organizations, and over time some mainstream national feminist organizations, were united by their work on these issues. Such interrelated civil rights, antipoverty, and women’s rights work suggests that the period from the 1960s through the 1980s ought to be seen as a vibrant and forceful moment in the history of Left liberalism in the United States.

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 GOOD TROUBLE: PIONEERING THE POWER OF PROTEST By Andrew Jezisek Introduction The right to protest is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America. It is the bedrock of democracy, granted to all citizens of the United States regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. However, the power of protest has been employed by African Americans for generations. From the local level to the federal level and even on the world stage, African Americans have demonstrated the power of protest in order to forward their cause for social justice. Since the three Reconstruction Amendments were added to the US Constitution, African Americans have struggled for social change despite systemic and stigmatic obstacles at every turn. Nonetheless, they have steeled themselves by mobilizing alongside their allies in protests that have shaped the history of the United States of America. Blueprints for Action In 1954, the battle for integration began. The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down the “separate but equal” precedent established by the controversial Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The ruling in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that school segregation policies directed against African Americans were unconstitutional.1 However, pro-segregation southern politicians had no intention of toeing the new line. A struggle between African Americans and white supremacists was inevitable. African American civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a roadmap to the goal of equality drawn out. The vehicle to get to that ultimate goal was nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest. John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and future representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, referred to this practice as getting into “good trouble.”2 Civil rights leaders planned to mobilize in activities that would potentially elicit legal penalties and violent retaliation. Marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts were the manifestations of “good trouble.” Many of these nonviolent tactics had been implemented before the American Civil Rights Movement in countries that were colonized by large European empires. Most notably, India was led to independence from the British Empire in the 1940s by nonviolent protests spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained a large following, especially from bystanders who witnessed the British’s violent opposition to the Indian Independence Movement.3 Drawing from the tactics of Gandhi, African American civil rights leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reinvented the meaning of protest in the United States in order to overturn the Jim Crow status quo.4 “Good Trouble” in Practice Nonviolent protests by African Americans continued after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1956. Jim Crow was beginning to lose footing from 1956 to 1960 as boycotts and sit-ins organized by civil rights groups forced local communities to do away with segregation on buses and in businesses.5 These acts of nonviolent civil disobedience achieved success at the federal level after local efforts were successful. The Supreme Court declared segregated busing and segregated counters in businesses unconstitutional by 1960. Yet cities in states that ignored Supreme Court rulings on segregation, particularly Alabama, still enforced discriminatory laws.6 Additionally, African American votes were suppressed by pro-segregation politicians who sought to cling to both power and the past. As a result, the same tactics of participating in “good trouble” were employed against these more entrenched discriminatory policies. At every sit-in, every march, and every freedom ride, protestors were met with brute force from white supremacy. Alabama became a central battleground in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most segregated states in the country, an assertion that was reinforced in 1963 by its newly elected governor, George Wallace, who proclaimed his oppositiontointegrationinhisinauguraladdress.Nonetheless, massive grassroots nonviolent protests were organized by the SCLC in Birmingham in April of 1963. As the protests persisted into May, the authorities in Birmingham drastically escalated their response; Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor allowed the police to arm themselves with nightsticks, fire hoses, and attack dogs...

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

The Doubts of Their Fathers:The God Debate and the Conflict between African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between the World Wars Stephen Tuck (bio) In february 1923, William Pickens, the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), penned an article in the black radical journal The Messenger called "Things Nobody Believes." The nobody was anyone "with intelligence." The things included bible stories, creation, miracles, Christ's resurrection, Christian creeds, a material heaven, and hell—which was "a helluvanidea." Most Christian teaching was "superstitious buncombe," Pickens asserted, and any "man who believes anything simply because somebody believed it two or three thousand years ago, is an idiot."1 "Pickens Denies Resurrection" and "Dean Pickens Says There Is No Hell" were front-page headlines in African American newspapers.2 Born in South Carolina in 1881, the son of former slaves, Pickens was one of the most high-profile African American leaders of the era, a renowned educator, columnist, orator, and civil rights activist. The NAACP's press release for Pickens's appointment as field secretary in 1920 trumpeted, "No orator of the race is so well known to colored Americans as Mr. Pickens." Pickens published his second autobiography in 1923, his speeches attracted large audiences, and his postbag [End Page 625] was full of fan mail, including one poem that started with the somewhat predictable rhyme, "Pickens, you're the dickens."3 Outspoken, impulsive, and frequently combative, Pickens was quick to get into arguments with anyone who crossed his path, from Marcus Garvey to his daughter's dentist.4 Or as he put it to his NAACP colleague W. E. B. Du Bois in 1921, "I have heard of men without enemies and I have often wondered what they could be doing." High on Pickens's hit list were the superstitions and dogmas "that dispense with the necessity for reason or judgement," including the Christianity that was preached in—as Pickens put it—"the average Negro church."5 Pickens had, in fact, been active in African American church circles earlier in his career. In 1922, just the year before "Things Nobody Believes," he had been a speaker at the Bishops' Council of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. But from the publication of this article onward, the NAACP's main ambassador to local communities spoke out with the zeal of the convert that he was from his self-described traditional Baptist upbringing.6 Part of Pickens's critique was of the institution of the black church and its personnel. After a meeting in [End Page 626] Pennsylvania in 1923, Pickens complained to the NAACP head office, "'The preachers help here in the usual way—by not hindering much. … [T]hey do nothing to help.'"7 Pickens frequently lampooned black clergy for their immorality, too. "We ordinary sinners," he mocked in a newspaper column, "have not even a chance to hit the spotlight any longer."8 (He also condemned "Ku Kluxed pulpits" in white churches, where the Klan had bought preachers by making "donations."9) But Pickens argued that the problem with Christianity in the "average Negro church" was not just misguided behavior that needed reform but also misguided beliefs that needed debunking. For Pickens, these beliefs not only were out-of-date and irrational but also had practical, detrimental consequences for the struggle for equality and the state of the country. He was frustrated when people appealed to their maker rather than applying themselves to make society better.10 In articles and speeches, Pickens insisted that progress for African Americans would come through self-reliance and scientific thought.11 He also noted that white supremacists were quick to invoke the "God alibi." When people "drag God into the argument," he warned, "you can usually look out for some scoundrelism that could not get by on any real logic."12 "Things Nobody Believes" was a liberal theological position expressed with Pickens's characteristic gusto. But such a position, asserted Levi J. Coppin of Philadelphia, an influential AME bishop, "is out of harmony with the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church." "So greatly at variance is his [Pickens's] credo from what is...

AS THE NATION grappled with African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, historian Oscar Handlin, like many scholars of his generation, set out to make sense of the role of race in American democracy and to determine the proper path of black liberation. Handlin, already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of immigration, viewed both civil rights and the experiences of American blacks through a lens of ethnic pluralism. Like many historians and social scientists following the Second World War, Handlin rejected race as an analytical category, asserting in Race and Nationality in American Life (1957) “that there is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character, or intelligence among the races.” Instead, he argued that ethnicity was “the only meaningful basis on which one can compare social and cultural traits.” The notion that American society was composed of disparate ethnic groups with their own particular cultural affinities resonated with liberal social scientists and historians of the 1950s and 1960s for a number of reasons. Ethnic pluralism was, of course, consistent with models of interest group politics that had gained primacy following the New Deal. More to the point, in identifying culture as the nexus of group identity, ethnic pluralism constituted a formal rejection of eugenics and other biological metaphors of race. Handlin’s identification of African Americans as an ethnic rather than racial group would ultimately lead him to draw fairly optimistic conclusions about the future of American race relations. In 1959, for example, Handlin’s The Newcomers assessed the character and consequences of Puerto Rican and black migration to New York City. The study, which was commissioned by the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, Inc., of the greater New York metropolitan area, rejected the charge that these groups were uniquely prone to social ills such as crime, vice, and family dissolution. Instead, Handlin argued that many of the problems associated with African Americans and Puerto Ricans generally paralleled those of previous immigrant

This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create initial narratives that reflected their understanding of the movement. Half the participants then read an essay on the movement written by a prominent historian, and the other half examined 18 primary sources that reflected the historian’s interpretation of the movement. Participants then each created a second narrative, again selecting images to depict their understanding of the movement. The results of the study suggest that even as students work with primary sources, they need an effective narrative framework based on recent scholarship to forge powerful counter-narratives that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to ‘do history’ and conduct their own online research is unlikely to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism.

Reviewed by: Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood by James M. Lundberg Michael E. Woods (bio) Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. By James M. Lundberg. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 231. Cloth, $34.95.) Clad in his signature white coat, Horace Greeley strode into celebrityhood as editor of the New-York Tribune. Yet the meaning of his career remains elusive. As James M. Lundberg points out in this perceptive book, Greeley “has been eluding his biographers” ever since James Parton, better known for his sprawling Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), penned a heroic account in 1854 (2). More recently, scholars have cast Greeley variously as a quintessential Whig reformer, a socialist, a liberal nationalist, and a personification of New York City in the age of capital.1 Greeley defies categorization because of his zeal for everything from Sylvester Graham’s dietary regimen to Albert Brisbane’s adaptation of Fourierism, as well as his propensity for hairpin political turns. How do we classify a man who denounced the slave power and later posted bail for Jefferson Davis? Lundberg takes a different approach in Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. By attending both to Greeley’s towering influence and his jarring setbacks, Lundberg identifies a thread of consistency running through Greeley’s eccentric career. Determined to [End Page 111] rally a fractious country behind his ambitious vision of progress, Greeley repeatedly collided with reality. Only after his disastrous 1872 presidential bid did Greeley, who had only weeks to live, seem to realize that he “embodied the inherent problems of American nationhood, rather than its transcendent harmony” (11). Less focused on Greeley’s philosophical gymnastics than on his overriding ambition to play the role of heroic genius, Horace Greeley successfully explores the theme of failure. Lundberg sketches Greeley’s hardscrabble New England upbringing before delving into his public career in the nation’s publishing capital of New York. Greeley’s labors on a series of literary journals and Whig newspapers informed his long tenure as editor of the New-York Tribune, established in 1841. Inspired by the wide circulation of penny newspapers but disgusted by their prurient and sensational content, Greeley believed fervently in the power of print—and in his own destiny to wield that power for good. Mingling an Enlightenment faith in progress with a Romantic fascination for heroic geniuses (such as himself) and a strong dose of nationalism, Greeley resolved to make the Tribune “a force for social harmony, consensus, reform, and even mass instruction” (27). Greeley’s pursuit of this dream shaped his three-decade career with the Tribune and helps explain his puzzling twists and turns. He first embraced the Whig Party, relishing its commitment to social reform and economic uplift. Although convinced that slavery and its defenders were stumbling blocks in the path of national progress, Greeley initially eschewed sectional confrontation and reluctantly supported the Whigs over the Free Soil Party in the 1848 election. Six years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act prompted him to take a stronger stand against the slave power. While he hoped that the emerging Republican Party would attract white southern nonslaveholders, Greeley became a sectional spokesman whose blueprint for national progress reflected decidedly northern ideals. Thus the aspiring peacemaker stoked the fires of sectionalism. Throughout the Civil War, Greeley remained both a Republican and a Lincoln administration gadfly. He shifted from conciliator to all-out warrior and from impatient emancipationist to self-appointed peace negotiator; but Lundberg argues that throughout the conflict, Greeley continually sought to extract a higher purpose—national redemption—from the carnage. Alas, the war refused to follow his script. During Reconstruction, Greeley still longed to serve as national unifier, and while he offered some support for African American civil rights, it was reconciliation among whites that mattered to him most. Hence did he aid Jefferson Davis, critique Radical Republicans, and attempt to wrest the presidency from Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Like his antebellum and wartime crusades, [End Page 112] Greeley’s postwar quest to restore national harmony was “bold, optimistic, and wildly unsuccessful” (146). Lundberg’s crisply written account makes a...