Freedom’s Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack (review)

As editor Herbert G. Ruffin II writes, “Since the 1970s, the history of the African American West has evolved into an exciting branch of scholarship” (363). Following the lead of historian Quintard Taylor’s In Search of a Racial Frontier (1998), “the largest and most dynamic area of study has focused on the black urban experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (363). The book’s title Freedom’s Racial Frontier evokes Taylor’s pioneering work, and this anthology of critical essays continues and expands that focus with new essays on the development of black urban communities in Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and other western cities. Most have an historical focus, but the anthology reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the study of the African American West with essays as well on literature, art, film, and music.

The anthology is divided into five topic areas: “community formation, multiculturalism, civil rights and black empowerment, artistic empowerment and identity, and United States West scholarship in a twenty-first century context” (26). Those areas provide the conceptual ideas that demarcate the new ways of thinking about the African American West that the individual essays explore. Thus, Kendra Field’s essay on “All-Black” Oklahoma towns (not a new area of historical enquiry as such) emphasizes Native American and African American relations, part of the “multiculturalism” section’s exploration of how African American “communities intermingled with other communities of color” (26). Jeanelle Hope’s essay on San Francisco Bay area poetry and activism similarly examines the interaction between African American and Asian American women. As Hope’s essay suggests, the exploration of “civil rights and black empowerment,” although a section topic of its own, is a thread that runs throughout the anthology.

The selections for the anthology broadly reflect the range of work currently taking place on the African American West. Although there are essays on Hawaii and Washington (and other places), African American experience in Texas and California receives the most emphasis, but less populous areas (such as the Plains states) are underrepresented. This is not so much a flaw in the anthology as a gap in the field. The anthology addresses that absence with some well-chosen reprints, including short journalistic articles. For readers interested in African American experience in the Great Plains, the anthology is useful in that it provides conceptual frames (such as multiculturalism) that are potentially applicable to that study.