| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945. By Lee Sartain. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 212 pp. $36.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-3221-0.)

Invisible Activists is an apt title for Lee Sartain's organizational study of black women in the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Women participated mostly behind the scenes, taking on traditional female duties such as membership drives, fund raising, entertainment, and youth work, which constituted a kind of grassroots leadership akin to the sociologist Belinda Robnett's notion of "bridge leadership" (How Long? How Long? [2000], p. 19). When women did capture elected positions, they were usually vice presidents or secretaries of local branches. However, the branch secretary became increasingly "a central figure in nearly all of a chapter's affairs" (p. 30). Women frequently kept NAACP locals operational, providing a link to civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, without women's efforts, Sartain convincingly argues, "there would have been no NAACP of any substance in Louisiana" (p. 144).

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