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

What comes to mind when we think of racially segregated lunch counters, schools, workforces, neighborhoods and marches, sit-ins, and protest designed to overthrow such racial oppression? We think not of Phoenix, Arizona, but the Deep South where the Jim Crow regime reined supreme and where a legendary civil-rights movement developed and triumphed over racial tyranny.

New historical scholarship is changing this narrative about Jim Crow and the civil-rights movement. Indeed, recent studies make clear that such race discrimination existed in the American West and was challenged by local civil-rights movements. Race Work thoroughly documents and analyzes the racial discrimination that existed in Phoenix, throughout the first half of the twentieth century and the relatively successful civil-rights movements that developed in earnest following World War II. Although more fluid than in the Deep South, racial segregation and discrimination were well entrenched in Phoenix, producing serious racial inequality. Blacks lived in racially segregated neighborhoods, attended inferior segregated schools, and were at the bottom of Phoenix's economic order. Mexican Americans functioned as a buffer group, experiencing a milder but serious form of racial discrimination.

Whitaker carefully explores the civil-rights movement that was organized by the Black community in the 1940s and 1950s to overthrow Jim Crow in Phoenix. Through the experiences of the husband and wife team of Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale who were central leaders of the movement, Whitaker tells the larger story of this major movement that employed many of the confrontational and conventional strategies of the southern civil-rights movement. He documents the fierce resistance that white Phoenicians waged to maintain racial inequality. The movement had some white allies, but Mexicans seldom participated because many thought themselves white and feared losing their middleman privileges. Class divisions and gender issues in the Black community also presented a challenge to Black solidarity.

This book is well researched. Whitaker employs social-science methods to develop and document his argument, relying on interviews, archival sources, and secondary literature to demonstrate the rise and fall of segregation in Phoenix and employing the data rigorously to prevent undue bias. The virtues and flaws of major actors are discussed in an even-handed manner. This is not a story of saints and devils but of human beings locked in a struggle for and against change.

Race Works succeeds in portraying Jim Crow and the civil-rights movement as irreducibly national in scope. At times, the book is needlessly repetitious. In some instances, centering the narrative around two major leaders truncates the scope of the movement and the broader analyses. But this is still a major contribution to our understanding of the movement that fought for equality.