Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–1975 by Clarence Lang (review)

BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2011 101 community mobilizing and institution building within this context. Elsewhere, Dowden-White closely and skillfully limns the evolving ideas that anchored community organization theory and practice. In the process, she further establishes St. Louis as a key site of historical investigation, and vindicates black social welfare reform as a politics deserving of evaluation on its own terms beyond a stultifying progressive-conservative dichotomy. In delineating the Urban League’s strategy of “neighborhood organization,” Dowden-White broadens the term’s definition to include social welfare reformers’ neighborhood improvement projects . Like scholars such as Charles Connerly, she evokes a vibrant black urban planning tradition discursively connected to, yet independent of, mainline white institutions and practices. Although mindful of class dynamics among African Americans during the period covered in her study, Dowden-White at times overstates the unifying nature of the politics of respectability and racial uplift, and elides the presence of competing black political tendencies that complicated cross-class racial unity. Yet this merely signals a healthy divergence in scholarly interpretations of the salience of class among African Americans, then and now. Painstakingly rendered yet accessibly written, Groping toward Democracy fuses African American history and social welfare thought in a manner that promises to appeal to specialists in both fields, as well as general reading audiences. Clarence Lang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-1975 Clarence Lang The subtitle of Grassroots at the Gateway is instructive and accurate. In Clarence Lang’s view, much scholarship on civil rights and Black Power has posited a unified racial community in pursuit of freedom that ignores or minimizes the role of working class activism and agendas. The resulting focus on middle class “civil rights leaders ” and their deeds has given short shrift to the articulation of distinctly class-based concerns and totheactionsofworking-classAfricanAmericans. As Lang notes, “St. Louis’s black laboring class shared a common ‘platform’ of jobs, trade union organizing, social security expenditures, housing, neighborhood amenities like trash collection, street repair and recreational space, public health care and education, consumer cooperatives and rights, and the abolition of Jim Crow” (41). Yet by the 1970s, the most visible protest campaigns Clarence Lang. Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-1975. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 344 pp. ISBN: 9780472050659 (paper), $28.95. BOOK REVIEWS 102 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY focused on black elite access to economic and political resources and working class demands for “social wages” had receded. Lang seeks to provide an answer to Julian Bond’s question about the shift in movement goals: “When and how were ‘jobs and freedom’ replaced by ‘joint ventures and set-asides?’” (6). Lang’s central thesis is that the black working class and black economic elites represented two distinct forces in the broad-based struggles for racial equality in the twentieth century United States, with often allied but sometimes conflicting agendas. The detailed stories of specific campaignsinSt .Louisillustratewhyheraldedvictories against segregation often produced disappointing results for the majority of the town’s black citizenry . The “lack of unity” so often mentioned as a cause of movement defeat was the product of a class divide made starker by the middle class gains arising from sustained mass movement pressure. Reflecting a national pattern, St. Louis ended up with many blacks worse off, despite the decades of struggle by several generations of committed activists. Today’s bleak urban landscape, with inner city residents locked out of opportunity, provides evidence of the defeat of the working class agenda, which both the state and black middle class leadership have abandoned. Lang’s close inspection of mid-century struggles reveals worker-based insurgency, giving the lie to the myth that elites always led or directed civil rights campaigns. Workers provided the backbone of struggle and actively shaped movement agendas to a far greater degree than scholars usually acknowledge. Lang effectively shows that the rhetoric of racial uplift pitted “responsible Negroes” (170) against their working class brethren . These class differences led to conflicts over tactics, most clearly in the 1963 Jefferson Bank boycott. The campaign provoked intense criticism among...