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  • Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 by Clarence Lang
  • James Zarsadiaz
Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. By Clarence Lang (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2009. 344 pp. $29.95).

Challenging conventional narratives of the long Civil Rights Movement, Clarence Lang's Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in [End Page 1093] St. Louis, 1936-1975 is a welcomed addition to one of the most studied contemporary U.S. social movements. Using the "border state" of Missouri as his case study, Lang argues that the Civil Rights Movement was not a unified black struggle with a common social agenda. Rather, Lang demonstrates the diversity and battles within black St. Louis. He illuminates the ways in which Missouri as a historic antebellum middle space between freedom and slavery influenced how activists and governmental officials across the political spectrum crafted policy and responded to matters of race, class, and social justice in the twentieth century.

Most black activists in the 1940s through the 1970s commonly stressed the need for workers' rights, access to jobs, the right to vote, and other basic social services. However, the activism of the Civil Rights Movement's "heroic" period complicated later grassroots organizing within black St. Louis with middle-class African Americans at odds with their less wealthy counterparts on matters of class. Lang shows in chapter four that St. Louis's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter, like the national leadership, espoused leftist politics and promoted working-class interests until the postwar period when ideologies of "good citizenship" via consumption and anti-communism started to alter its radical bent. Like the African American community at large, the St. Louis NAACP was forced to strategize how to push a progressive agenda amid the red-baiting and blacklisting of the 1950s. When the City of St. Louis proposed a new city charter in 1957, NAACP members campaigned against it citing concerns of uneven development and further economic marginalization of black St. Louisans. The charter had the backing of white corporate elites and those sympathetic to privatization or downtown redevelopment. The newest NAACP recruits in the mid- and late 1950s were first-time members with no previous ties to the NAACP and were often associated with organized labor. However, a number of African American residents favored the redevelopment plan for its promises of improved public space, access to hospital care, and other changes to city infrastructure. St. Louis's influential black middle-class, for example, aligned with white liberals whose conservative prescriptions to solving the city's political and social ills were impractical given the complexity of the city's working-class needs. Alluding to Fanon, Lang notes that black leaders' calls to adopt white notions of social respectability deepened rifts in the community. Class position, then, informed whether or not black residents of St. Louis supported the charter regardless of a shared black identity.

As the Civil Rights Movement came to a legislative "end" in the mid-1960s, grassroots battles for racial equality took a radical turn with the rise of Third World Liberation movements. In chapter seven, Lang describes how a loose coalition St. Louis Black Power organizations helped female public housing tenants wage the nation's first and largest citywide rent strike in 1969 later known as the "Small October Revolution." The Black Artists Group, Black Liberators, the Zulu 1200s, Congress of Race Equality (CORE), and Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION) coalesced around principles of racial equality and democratic rights, but differed in how they conceptualized class, democracy, and citizenship. Lang also illuminates the misogyny and patriarchal structure of St. Louis's Black Power Movement citing an air of masculinist heroism among male activists involved with the female-led strike. Here again, Lang emphasizes the contradictions of class politics between 1965-1971 in black St. Louis. The community was further polarized between [End Page 1094] those who "bought into" private-capitalist responses to social reform and those who continued to fight for distributive justice. While Lang's arguments about conflicting ideologies among...

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