Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles by Shana Bernstein (review)

In Bridges of Reform, Shana Bernstein complicates the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement—which posits that southern activism subsequently spread north and west—by shifting our historical gaze to the unique experience of Los Angeles. She argues that Los Angeles was a civil rights center—one that actually presaged the iconic movement we all know—because the city enjoyed exceptional diversity. During the 1930s–1950s, Los Angeles included sizable numbers of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and Jewish Americans, which allowed for the creation of interracial alliances and activism between various ethno-racial community organizations. By focusing on cooperation between organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Mexican American Community Service Organization (CSO), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the Jewish Community Relations Committee (CRC), Bernstein joins California historians like Mark Wild, Allison Varzally, Charlotte Brooks, and Mark Brilliant who highlight the state’s diversity as a powerful incubator of civil rights activism. (If there is any doubt to the importance of Los Angeles to the study of American radicalism, we should keep in mind that left-coast activism was not necessarily left-wing: Los Angeles, and California more generally, was also a fertile laboratory for fervent conservative politics, as Michelle Nickerson, Darren Dochuk, and Daniel HoSang have shown.)

Bernstein’s book covers the period from the 1930s, when interracial activism emerged, through the World War II years, when it gained traction and legitimacy, and into the Cold War, when it was forced to shift amid fears of communism. The “bridges of reform” at the heart of Bernstein’s tale were formed during the Great Depression, as economic conditions worsened and nativism and anti-Semitism surged. Through shared participation in FDR’s New Deal, the Communist Party, and labor unions, community organizations began to develop interracial coalitions. As the world went to war in the early 1940s, Los Angeles became central to the war effort, and racial conflict was seen as detrimental to the viability of the nation’s moral and military victory. Civil rights organizations worked together to build coalitions, soothe racial tensions in the city, and fight for a Fair Practices Committee.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, the changing conditions of the Cold War led civil rights organizations to become more moderate and marginalize former allies across the political left, in response to actions by the likes of Jack B. Tenney, the Joseph McCarthy of Los Angeles, who focused on Jewish groups as communists and accused CRC official Isaac Pacht of being “in the Stalin orbit.” In this chapter, Bernstein provides her most original and sophisticated analysis—complementing the work of scholars like Mary Dudziak, Carol Anderson, and Risa Goluboff—when she explores the multiple effects of the Cold War on the ethno-racial left. She argues that, despite the purge of supposed communists, civil rights organizations were not paralyzed into inaction during the 1950s; not only did they continue to pursue broad-based anti-discrimination, but their shared anti-communism with other community organizations reinvigorated the interracial alliances that had been formed during the 1930s. The CSO, for instance, developed a close relationship with the Jewish community’s civil rights leadership (an important contact between the two communities was the Chicago-born Saul Alinsky).

The rejuvenated postwar interracial coalition of African Americans, Mexicans, and Jews (and Japanese, to a lesser extent) had implications not only for Los Angeles, but for the entire nation. Bernstein argues that the legal battles of the late 1940s and 1950s in southern California were instrumental to the national civil rights movement that reached its apogee over the next decade: the 1946 school desegregation case Mendez v. Westminster School District of Orange County presaged Brown v. Board of Education; the restrictive covenant case Barrows v. Jackson (1953) expanded the court’s ruling in Shelley v...