Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition & the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960–1974 by Gordon K. Mantler (review)

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Gordon K. Mantler’s work adds to a growing body of literature on interracial coalition-building and offers a compelling narrative of the “experiment” (5) to create a sustained multiracial movement of labor and civil rights activists, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Appalachian whites, and American Indians. But Mantler’s chief aim is to trace cross-racial interactions between the black freedom struggle and the Chicano movement—to reveal “the relationship between race-based identity politics and class-based coalition politics that was not antithetical, but mutually reinforcing” (4).

Mantler notes the broad solidarity among blacks and whites at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, which included a small number of Mexican Americans. As he and others have pointed out, Mexican Americans participated in small numbers in the black freedom struggle, including Chicanas Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez and Maria Varela, who were longstanding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He notes that although Mexican Americans and African Americans “may have worked separately for the most part,” they fought for economic justice—good jobs, wages, and “dignified treatment” (39). Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), for example, offered “rhetorical support” (41) for César Chávez and the farm workers but little else. It was only when MLK turned against the war in Vietnam in 1967 that he found common ground with Chicano anti-war activists and the emerging Chicano movement across the Southwest—but ironically, not with Chávez, well-known for his MLK-like commitment to a nonviolent struggle for justice. Chávez sought to protect the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) from charges of Chicano and anti-war radicalism and kept his focus on the struggle of seasonal workers in the fields. MLK’s anti-war stance also did not resonate with conservative Mexican Americans, who supported the war and viewed military service as a patriotic rite of passage to first-class citizenship.

Mantler’s book is at its best when it examines the links between the African American and Chicano civil rights movement in the years leading up to the Poor People’s Campaign and the efforts of both groups to find common ground in the struggle against systemic poverty and discrimination. He brings to light the efforts of Chicano coalition advocates Reies López Tijerina, the fiery advocate of the land-grant struggle in New Mexico, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales of Colorado, founder of the Denver-based Crusade for Justice, to forge common ground with African Americans leaders, principally from SCLC and SNCC. But Chicano activists were often frustrated by the expectation that they were to play supporting roles to the black freedom struggle. When, for example, Tijerina demanded to know if blacks supported the land grant struggle, Ralph Abernathy responded that they were “with him in spirit” (110).

In the end, this richly textured and deeply researched study of multiracial coalition-building acknowledges that while Tijerina and Abernathy may have marched together at the head of a procession of Indians...