Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement by Steve Estes (review)

In June 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, a white supremacist gunman entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (the oldest African American church in the United States) during a weekly Bible study meeting and killed nine black parishioners. Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement by Steve Estes provides a history of the city since 1965 that helps explain its conflicted history prior to that tragic event. Estes examines race and its relationship to gender integration, labor struggles, and conflict over urban gentrification. The book is very much an urban history that tackles the complexity and coexistence of Charleston's southern conservatism grounded in the continuity of white supremacist hegemony and evolutionary progressivism exhibited by advancements in race relations, sexuality, class, and gender. Many of the aforementioned aspects played out in spaces of labor, politics, education, housing, tourism, and justice as the civil rights movement influenced women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, poor people's rights, students' rights, and others on the margins in post-1965 Charleston.

Archival sources are limited as Estes only consulted six archival or public records holdings. Five of the archives are located in South Carolina, including the Charleston County Public Library. The National Archives and Records Administration is the lone national repository the author draws on for the project. According to Estes, he had to rely on a "smaller base of archival material" due to the difficulty of acquiring and locating sources that addressed his areas of focus (p. 6). Thus, the book depends on over fifty oral history interviews to provide a nuanced balance to the traditional primary sources that outline this more recent history. Local and mainstream newspapers augment local perspectives and provide context where evidentiary archival documents are nil. Interviewees also supplied materials from their private and personal collections.

The author's prose enhances his arguments by employing vivid and detailed descriptions that bind to the primary sources. The book is very well written and supported by the facts presented regardless of the archival flaws outlined above. Although Estes makes heavy use of secondary sources, he sufficiently incorporates archival and newspaper sources to help diversify references.

Charleston in Black and White helps establish a new degree of measuring the gains and losses of the civil rights movement. At least on the local level in Charleston, mainstream conservatism is still powerfully entrenched but not strong enough to deter significant social and political gains. Conversely, such tremendous gains have yet to unravel as a result of institutional inequality and domination. The dynamics and complexity of the two competing forces (conservatism/white supremacy and human rights/equality) feed each other and feed off of each other. Estes's framework is quite an effective approach to articulating the historical context and the significance of post–civil rights urban history. Moreover, the book's rich oral history improves our understanding of the period and will undoubtedly serve as a testament to political and social struggles in the urban South.