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Reviews in American History 32.1 (2004) 76-83



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"To Make America Safe for Democracy":
Black Freedom Struggles in the World War I Era

Patricia Sullivan


Alfred L. Brophy. Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation.New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 187pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).
Mark Robert Schneider. "We Return Fighting": The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age.Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

On July 30, 1920, moments before his execution, Sergeant Edgar Caldwell addressed a crowd of several thousand people that had gathered outside of the prison in Anniston, Alabama. He recited the Twenty-third Psalm and offered a short prayer before concluding with an indictment of the country he had served in the recent war. "I am but one of the many victims among my people," he said, "who are paying the price of America's mockery of law and dishonesty in the profession of world democracy" (Schneider, p. 97).

Caldwell had been sentenced to death for shooting a streetcar motorman and conductor during an altercation after he allegedly sat in the whites-only section. The two men physically threw Caldwell off the car and proceeded to kick him as he lay on the ground. The soldier pulled his gun and shot his assailants, killing the conductor and wounding the motorman. Alerted about the case by a local black minister, the NAACP appealed Caldwell's conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, which let the decision of the lower court stand.

The story of Edgar Caldwell exemplifies the volatile state of race relations in the years immediately following World War I, a time of heightened black militancy. In the South, local leaders and an invigorated NAACP, as Mark Schneider demonstrates in We Return Fighting, worked to fashion this spirit into an organized challenge to the region's system of racial oppression. "The task is Power! Power!" NAACP secretary James Weldon Johnson told the association's annual meeting in 1922, "A right is not a thing issued on a silver tray. . . . You have to fight to keep it" (p. 185-6). [End Page 76]

The tools available to black southerners in this fight were few. Largely disenfranchised, they confronted a society structured and organized to maintain and promote white supremacy. The simple yet abstract constitutional guarantee of equal justice under law was a primary weapon in the arsenal of black Americans who brought the fight for democracy home after World War I. It could be a potent spur to action, as was the case in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where blacks acted upon a sophisticated understanding of the law in challenging the arbitrary exercise of power by whites. Blacks in Tulsa, writes Alfred Brophy, sought the "rule of law" while whites "pursued a different law—a law that often devolved into control through terror and subordination of black citizens." In a fresh and insightful study of the Tulsa race riot, Brophy concludes that the origins of the riot can be found in the "conflicting attitudes of whites and blacks toward the law" (p. xx).

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 offers a gripping account of the riot and the events leading up to it, framed by a compelling portrait of Greenwood, a place where "blacks lived in relative freedom" and prosperity (p. 1). Alfred Brophy draws upon hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony given in a 1926 case before the Oklahoma Supreme Court, mostly from black witnesses, a source never before consulted for accounts of the riot. These testimonies coupled with extensive coverage provided by the black press allowed him to construct "the black version" of the mayhem that claimed at least thirty-four lives, possibly as many as one hundred fifty, and demolished the thirty-five block area of Greenwood. In the process, he uncovered new evidence pointing to the role of the police in initiating and leading the assault, a factor that has revived the case...

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