Black Women in Texas History (review)

20ogBook Reviews439 1 1 , 2004, at the Thirty-ninth Annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures meeting held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The first essay in the publication , "The Invisible Flock: Catholicism in the American West," came from Anne M. Buder, a Trustee Professor (emeritus) at Utah State University. Of particular interest to Texas readers is that she is an expert on Mother Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, founder of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit in San Antonio. Father Michael Engh, a Jesuit professor and dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola-Marymount University, Los Angeles, wrote the second essay, a brilliant study entitled "From the City of the Angels to the Parishes of San Antonio: Catholic Organizations, Women Activists, and Racial Intersections. 1900-50." This essay contains information of particular interest to Texans on the roles of Robert Lucey, as Bishop ofAmarillo and Archbishop of San Antonio, and Verona Spellmire, in founding the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in Texas. The third contribution, "Wherever They Mention His Name: Ethnic Catholicism on an Industrial Island," an assessment of Catholics in eastern Utah, was written by Matthew Pehl. He is a graduate student in American history at Brandeis University. William Issel, professor of history at San Francisco State University, gave us the piece "'For Both Cross and Flag': Catholic Action in Northern California during the 1930s." Gina Marie Pitti, who earned her doctorate at Stanford University and teaches and publishes in the area of Hispanic Catholic history, contributed "Into One Parish Life: National Parishes and Catholic Racial Politics at Midcentury." The final essay, by co-editor and University of Texas at Arlington history professor Roberto Treviño, is titled "Faith and Justice: The Catholic Church and die Chicano Movement in Houston, 1965-72." This excellent book raises research and writing on the Catholic history of the United States to a higher level, focusing on people and developments rarely before emphasized, but ones key to understanding the story of Catholicism in America. AzIe, TexasPatrick Foley Black Women in Texas History. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 256. Tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603440318, $19.95 paper.) Following the trailblazing paths set by Darlene Clark Hine and Ruthe Winegarten, professors Merline Pitre and Bruce Glasrud have assembled a chronological survey of the experience of African-American women in the Lone Star State. Black Women in Texas History collects eight original essays from a wide range of scholars that span from the age of slavery to the beginning of the twenty -first century. With three essays on the nineteenth century and five covering the twentieth century, the chapters synthesize the important primary and secondary sources while framing the significant issues of each era. The book is a social history that analyzes the evolving process of African-American women "making community." The authors and editors have diligently labored to balance an incredibly bleak saga of privation, bigotry, and violence with a parallel story of 44°Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril resilience, growth, and accomplishment. One of die great strengths of this work is that all of the scholars have consciously endeavored to connect their social analysis to broader themes that include economics, culture, demography, and politics. The first three essays, all on the nineteenth century, provide a vivid and compelling picture of the age of slavery, Reconstruction, and the remaining quarter of the late nineteenth century. As circumstances changed from enslavement to emancipation to the rise ofJim Crow over the course of the nineteendh century, African-American women struggled to make and hold together their families, find remunerative and dignified work, all die while trying to fend off an everchanging cycle ofviolence and oppression. The use of WPA slave narratives in all three of these articles is impressive and the quotations cited provide a powerful oral testimony to the women who lived through these harrowing times. The next three essays cover the first diird of the twentieth century, the period stretching from the Depression to the dawning of the civil rights era, and the civil rights years from 1954 to 1974. In the face of segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement after the passage of the...