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Review of:

Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West by Matthew C. Whitaker
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2005

Reviewed By: Kevin Allen Leonard
Reviewed in: Peace & Change
Date accepted online: 02/11/2007
Published in print: Volume 32, Issue 03, Pages 435-462
See all reviews for this journal

Book Reviews

The title of this book might lead readers to think that it is a broad, general study of the emergence of a civil rights movement in the western United States. It is actually a biographical study of a couple, Lincoln Ragsdale Sr. and Eleanor Ragsdale, who were leaders of the struggle for African American civil rights in Phoenix from the late 1940s until their deaths in the 1990s. Matthew C. Whitaker, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, relied on interviews with the Ragsdales, their children, and many other African American leaders in Phoenix, an impressive number of newspaper articles, and many secondary sources to tell the Ragsdales' story.

Whitaker argues that the Ragsdales became civil rights leaders because they both were reared in the "black professional tradition." African American professionals thought of themselves as "stewards of the black community" whose education and status required them to lead and serve. Lincoln was the son of a second-generation undertaker in Oklahoma. Both of Eleanor's parents were graduates of Hampton Institute. Eleanor grew up in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, where her father worked as a cemetery superintendent.

Lincoln Ragsdale left Oklahoma in 1944 and served in the Army Air Corps. He received gunnery training at Luke Air Field in Arizona and decided to remain in the state when he left the service. In 1948, he opened a mortuary. Eleanor Dickey came to Phoenix to teach in 1947, after she completed her college degree at Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. She chose Phoenix because two of her uncles lived in the Arizona capital. Eleanor's cousin, Thomas Dickey, introduced Lincoln and Eleanor when she arrived in the city, and they were married in 1949. After their marriage, Eleanor left teaching to assist Lincoln in the family's enterprises, which expanded beyond the mortuary to insurance and real estate.

Racial discrimination in Phoenix moved both Lincoln and Eleanor to action. When they arrived, schools were segregated, and African Americans faced persistent racial discrimination in employment and housing. They joined a number of civil rights organizations, and they challenged residential segregation in 1953, when they moved into the previously all-white Encanto District in North Phoenix. As a leader in the local NAACP, Lincoln raised funds to support the legal challenge to school segregation in Phoenix. This challenge succeeded in February 1953, more than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge declared segregation unconstitutional.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Ragsdales worked with other members of civil rights organizations to end discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. These activists employed picketing and sit-ins to apply pressure to business owners and public officials with whom they attempted to negotiate. These efforts led the Phoenix City Council to pass an ordinance outlawing discrimination in places of public accommodations in 1964. The state legislature enacted similar legislation the following year. The Ragsdales and other civil rights leaders also mounted a challenge to Phoenix's municipal political machine. Although Lincoln lost a city council election in 1964, this challenge led to African American representation on the council in 1965.

By the end of 1964, as the civil rights movement in Phoenix and nationwide began to disintegrate into a number of factions guided by different philosophies, the Ragsdales relinquished their visible leadership roles in the movement. Although they continued to work behind the scenes to support antidiscrimination efforts, they devoted more time to their businesses. They renamed the mortuary and began hiring Anglo American and Mexican American employees to serve members of those communities. Their businesses prospered, and they were able to provide greater financial support to civil rights organizations. In 1969, the Ragsdales moved from their home in Phoenix to the exclusive suburb of Clearwater Hills in Paradise Valley.

Although the Ragsdales lived far away from the majority of Phoenix's African Americans, most of whom were poor, they continued to work on behalf of all of the members of the community, Whitaker argues. The connections Lincoln had established through his business and his civil rights activism put him in positions in which he could influence government policies that affected African Americans. His relationship with conservative Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for example, led President Ronald Reagan to appoint him to the Advisory Committee on Small and Minority Businesses (ACSMB). As a member of the ACSMB for seven years, Ragsdale helped to write rules and regulations designed to increase the number of minority-owned businesses. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Ragsdales were active participants in the campaign to establish the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a paid state holiday in Arizona.

Although Race Work focuses mostly on the Ragsdales and Phoenix's African American community, Whitaker acknowledges that Phoenix's African American population was always smaller than its Mexican American population. He devotes a chapter to the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans. He argues that distinctive group identities and competition between members of these groups prevented the emergence of a sustained coalition of African Americans and Mexican Americans. Although they worked separately, members of both of these communities did effectively challenge white supremacy in Phoenix.

Biographical studies are challenging to write. Biographers must struggle with the temptation to overstate the importance of their subjects. Whitaker's challenges were compounded by the fact that Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale and their children graciously agreed to his requests for interviews and cooperated in the writing of the book. Whitaker is not uncritical of the Ragsdales, but he does tend to accept uncritically some of their words. Although some readers may wish for a more critical evaluation of the Ragsdales' statements, Race Work is an important and valuable contribution to the growing body of literature that focuses on the experiences of African Americans in the western United States.