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  • Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle by Darius J. Young
  • Robert F. Jefferson Jr.
Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle. By Darius J. Young. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. xiv, 177. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-5627-2.)

“The Gentleman from Memphis” has finally found his biographer (p. 1). Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle is a powerfully argued critical study of one of the most influential figures who lived during the first half of the twentieth century. According to Darius J. Young, much of black politics in the early twentieth century pivoted around the towering presence of Robert R. Church Jr. Yet his significance has been largely overlooked. Through painstaking mining of primary and secondary sources, Young addresses the deafening silence in the literature by carefully recounting Church’s life as a formidable political organizer and as the most prominent black Republican Party official in the Jim Crow South. By embracing many of the themes espoused by recent scholars of the long civil rights movement, he contends that the political mobilizing efforts made by Church and his contemporaries in the 1910s and 1920s laid the groundwork for the struggle for equality that occurred decades later. Young attempts to answer the question surrounding Church’s anonymity while presenting him as a prominent black political leader and civil rights advocate who worked for equality during the decades between the age of Booker T. Washington and the mass-movement strategies of A. Philip Randolph.

Young places Church’s social and political activities squarely in his upbringing in the American South, the context of the racial strictures of Jim Crow [End Page 509] segregation, and the middle-class racial uplift politics that structured the lives of the black professional class who lived in the region at the time. Church imbibed the lessons of racial pride and class unity imparted to him by his parents and the black community of Memphis, Tennessee. According to Young, the close-knit networks of family, education, and religion shielded Church and other members of the post-Reconstruction black upper class from the discriminatory laws, customs, and practices of Jim Crow, but they also opened up different avenues for black leaders to advance the causes of many black southerners who were less fortunate. For Church, local and national politics provided such a platform.

In later chapters, readers see the Memphis leader fighting the lily-white factions within the GOP and enlarging the possibilities of black political enfranchisement through the creation of the Lincoln League of America. Church also worked to advance the struggle for equality by helping establish a branch of the NAACP in Memphis and aiding its investigations of lynching and race riots during the period. By the middle of the 1920s, his activities had earned him national recognition as a leader on civil rights issues in the country. Church’s presence as a national figure was short-lived, as charges of patronage corruption, bitter infighting with local political bosses such as Democrat E. H. Crump, the national Republican Party leaders’ willingness to take black voters for granted, and the mass exodus of black voters from the GOP diminished his influence by the end of the decade.

As Young points out, part of the reason behind the scholarly reticence about Church’s importance may be due to Church’s own tendency to shun the public spotlight. But any future discussion of his significance must account for the painful contradictions that he and other members of the black political elite must have experienced as they tried to grapple with the economic dimensions of the color and class line. How did the “Roving Dictator of the Lincoln Belt” reconcile his inner thoughts about racial uplift with the grinding poverty and virulent racism that his working-class counterparts had encountered at the time (p. 30)? Overall, Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle is a useful study about the black struggle for political equality in the early twentieth century.

Robert F. Jefferson Jr.
University of New Mexico
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