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BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2011 99 folk sources, such as the recasting of spirituals by composers such as Harry Burleigh. Interestingly, Niles himself explored black folk song early in his career in collaboration with singer Marion Kerby and in printed collections , although this material largely disappears in his later work. Pen paints an instructive picture of Niles’s participation near the end of his life in the first Newport Folk Festival. Included as an “original ” of the folk movement, his performance style and long narrative introductions to songs certainly must have seemed out of place among most of the new folk artists. Yet like Bob Dylan—who is blurbed on the dust jacket— Niles presaged the 1960s folk singer’s process of recasting and personalizing traditional song to the needs of the audience and the times. Pen also explores but does not fully explain Niles’s curious relationships with women. Several played a major role in his life, most notably the photographer Doris Ulmann. Ulmann became an artistic partner as well as a patron of Niles, funding his collecting and leaving him a sizeable annual income in her will, much to her family’s chagrin. A first wife whom he married just before he left for World War I is nearly absent from Niles’s records and writings, and Pen amply documents Niles’s stormy relationship with musical partner Marion Kerby. There is something more here, but what exactly readers are left to wonder. Pen has written a fine and detailed account of a collector and composer who brought classic songs such as “Black Is the Color,” “I Wonder as I Wander,” and “Go ’Way from My Window” into the public imagination and into the folk canon. He is especially to be commended for providing not only a fine biography of a largely forgotten pioneer but also a detailed musical analysis of Niles’s work, something frequently missing from musical biographies. Gregg D. Kimball Library of Virginia Groping toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910-1949 Priscilla A. Dowden-White Since the publication of George Lipsitz’s political biography of activist Ivory Perry, the study oftwentieth-centuryblackcommunitiesandsocial movements in St. Louis and other border-state cities has continued to evolve in the work of Kenneth Jolly, Peter Levy, Tracy K’Meyer, and others. Some scholars, reinterpreting the politics of respectability among African Americans at the turn of the century, have sought to theorize better the multiple forms of black agency that conformed simply neither to resistance nor capitulation to racism. Still others, including Toure Reed, have critically reevaluated the legacies of the National Urban League and its affiliates. On all counts, Priscilla A. Dowden-White’s Groping toward Democracy is an important contribution. Combining social history methodology and social welfare theory, the book reexamines “African American social welfare reformers’ militant (though not particularly radical ) efforts” (ix) during the 1920s and 1930s to build educational, health, and other institutions that served the social needs of black neighborhoods , generated employment opportunities for professionals and workers, pursued the larger goal of social justice, and laid the foundations for major post-World War II black freedom struggles. BOOK REVIEWS 100 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Dowden-White argues that while St. Louis’s interwar-period black reformers accepted segregation in practice, and adhered to a strategy of gradual, patient consensus building, they nonetheless took advantage of opportunities to undermine Jim Crow racial apartheid. Black St. Louisans for decades had parlayed their use of the vote into a remarkable degree of political influence . Through their “manipulation of public culture ,” they had over time perfected the skill of wresting concessions from the city’s structures of white authority “by tapping into ideas of good and efficient government, democratic citizenship , equitable social welfare services, labor peace and productivity, and community harmony” (2). Buoyed by a “dynamic interracial civic culture ” (5) encompassing St. Louis’s Urban League, the League of Women Voters, and the St. Louis Community Council, black social welfare workers attained qualified success in promoting the idea that black racial progress and fair play were essential to the common good. In the short term, they achieved a rough equalization of education, health, and other services...

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