More Than One Struggle: The Evolutions of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (review)

In More Than One Struggle Jack Dougherty challenges conventional civil rights narratives that depict the civil rights movement as unified and orchestrated by a few elite leaders by examining how different groups of African American activists in Milwaukee defined the struggle over racial segregation in the city's public schools between the 1930s and 1990s. Focusing primarily on the fundamental differences in the way various African Americans in Milwaukee interpreted and set out to implement the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, Dougherty effectively exposes myriad cracks in the civil rights front on both national and local levels. For instance, he explains that school segregation in Milwaukee continued to grow even after the Court's ruling, in part because many black Milwaukeeans "did not embrace the same concept of integration as did national race leaders of the time" (40). Deep splits in Milwaukee's African American community emerged as different community leaders and groups fashioned their own understandings of the Court's decision. Some refused to equate the "racial composition" of a particular school with "inferior" education and viewed Brown as "all about increasing access" rather than "racial acculturation" (44). Conversely, others believed that all-black education was inherently inferior and that "integrating schools was a necessary condition" for improving African American employment opportunities and living standards (84–85). Even if all factions shared the common goal of securing "more power for blacks in Milwaukee's education system," Dougherty cautions that "their respective struggles should not be compared head-to-head but understood through a historical lens as part of a long line of cumulative, and sometimes conflicting, movements for black education" (102–3). Future civil rights studies should take note of this precaution.

On the surface this book appears to be a straightforward case study. But the masterful way in which the author teases out the tensions that existed in Milwaukee's school desegregation struggle provides an important template for reexamining many of the "conventional assumptions embedded within national civil rights history" (106). By demonstrating how generational, class, gender, and other conflicts shaped black activism in Milwaukee, Dougherty effectively broadened the cast of historical players and presents new insights on the motivations, ideologies, and strategies of civil rights activists in the urban North. This nuanced treatment of the struggle over school desegregation presents a rich picture of black activism in Milwaukee that reminds us that the civil right movement often brought together varied and disparate voices and, thus, is "best understood by weaving together the perspectives of both movement spokesmen and ordinary participants" (129). Students of civil rights history and African American urban history should pay close attention to the standard that Jack Dougherty sets in More Than One Struggle.