| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher Robert Reed. The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910–1966. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 257. $35.00.

In studying the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Christopher Robert Reed invokes a number of pertinent themes. These include conflicting priorities among professional, middle-class, and working-class groups, influences of a white elite in the branch's early years, intermittent apathies among black Chicagoans toward the branch, the mixed consequences for African Americans of urban, machine politics, the branch's commitment to egalitarianism, and race-based mobilizations within the South Side. He identifies a half-dozen phases of growth or transition experienced by the chapter from its origins as a committee in 1910 to the mass-action decade of the 1960s. Despite these essential topics, the book lacks consistent cohesion and clarity, in part because Reed occupies himself with narration and commentary more than synthesis and analysis. Readers are too often left to tie pieces together for themselves or to wonder what happened to an unresolved issue or event. 1

There are, nonetheless, strengths to be noted. The author shows how certain business, professional, and political elements, rather than the NAACP chapter, carried the action for racial advancement in World War I and postwar years. Chapter six, on branch president A. C. MacNeal's effective leadership from 1933 to 1937, is one of the book's best. The treatment of a heightened militancy within the branch and its renewed activism in public affairs (1954 to 1957, when the NAACP's Willoughby Abner became "the city's foremost agent of protest advocacy" [p. 162]) is compelling, as is Reed's explanation of Congressman William Dawson's overthrow of Abner in the organization's December 1957 election of officers. . . .

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