| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. By Matthew C. Whitaker. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xvi, 382 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8032-4821-0.)
Matthew C. Whitaker, an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, has produced an engaging study of the civil rights movement in one major metropolitan center in the American West. Although the title suggests that the work is of broader scope, Whitaker concentrates on Phoenix, Arizona, and especially on the activities and impact of the remarkable civil rights activists Lincoln Ragsdale and Eleanor Ragsdale, who eventually became among the wealthiest and most influential African Americans in the West.	1
Whitaker carefully documents the "race work" of the Ragsdales from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Although the West was supposedly more tolerant of diversity, immigrants quickly discovered that Phoenix's race relations resembled those in other American cities. For fifty years, the Ragsdales "helped dismantle an apartheid-like system in what is presently the fifth largest city in the United States" (p. 4).	. . .

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