Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz (review)

Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.)

African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day.

In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality.