Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (review)

Book Reviews Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. By Raymond Arsenault. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xii, 690 pp. $32.50. ISBN 0-19-513674-8. Raymond Arsenault has skillfully interwoven the stories of 436 men and women who became “a select group of activists that had changed the course of American history” (p. 515). In this voluminous work, which includes a brief biography of each Freedom Rider, Arsenault finds that these dedicated but ordinary people did extraordinary things to bring about their belief in a “beloved community.” Arsenault demonstrates how they launched a “holy war for freedom” that “altered the consciousness of citizen activists [and] inspired related acts of organized protest, both in the United States and around the world.” What they did also went far beyond affecting “changes in institutional behavior or public policy.” They brought about “a revolutionary change in the character of citizen politics” which “foreshadowed the grassroots ‘rights revolution’ that would transform American citizenship over the next four decades” (pp. 511–12). Citing many examples of “experiential” learning, Arsenault illustrates how the Freedom Riders and their associates “superseded the orthodoxy of slow and steady gradualism” by establishing “a new context for social activism” and thereby “hastened the day when the federal government would embrace a broader agenda of promoting integrated schools and neighborhoods, equal access to public accommodations, affirmative action in hiring practices, and black voting rights” (p. 512). This they accomplished by non-violent direct action, rather than “the moral rectitude of nonviolence,” through use of “physical and moral courage to express their passion for social justice through the medium of nonviolent struggle” which forced them to “absorb the concrete lessons of struggle” (p. 513). Despite their intentions, according to Arsenault, “the Freedom Rides inadvertently spawned an era of racial polarization and political resistance” that startled and then emboldened southern African Americans (p. 500). It also triggered “widespread disillusionment and despair” amongst southern whites because “the suddenness of transit desegregation foster[ed] a growing resignation that desegregation of other institutions was inevitable and even imminent” (p. 500). A P R I L 2 0 0 7 143 Touted by David H. Fischer and James M. McPherson as “the first fullscale book on the Freedom Riders by a professional historian” and as “truly a definitive work” (p. xi), it brings together virtually every facet of the activities undertaken or encountered by these self-sacrificing demonstrators . Arsenault traces the liberating power of nonviolence from the original “Journey of Reconciliation” in 1947 to the proclamation of “Freedom Riders’ Day” in Mississippi on November 10, 2001. This is a meticulous, all-encompassing study of the 1961 Freedom Riders and their subsequent efforts. It is a must-read for all students of America’s freedom movement. LEE E. WILLIAMS II University of Alabama in Huntsville Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War. By Anne J. Bailey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xvi, 95 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8203-2757-3. Anne J. Bailey continues the tradition of the Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lectures at Georgia Southern University and makes an excellent addition to the books in this series. Her subject is the much-neglected one of southern ethnicity in the Civil War. The three topics she focuses on in this volume are the roles of Germans, Native Americans, and African Americans in the war. She unfortunately decided to omit what she admits to be “the largest ethnic group” (pp. xv–xvi), the Irish, to focus instead on what she calls the “nontraditional [her emphasis] . . . soldiers who were not white males with roots stretching back to the British Isles” (p. xi). Despite the omission of the “largest” group, Bailey does give us a broader picture of participation in the war. She begins by looking at the Germans and counters some of the typical views held about them and the Civil War. Most Germans who lived in the United States in 1860 had opinions similar to their native-born neighbors. Those who lived in the North supported the Union; those in the South, the Confederacy. Very few German immigrants were refugees of the liberal 1848 revolutions in Europe, a group...