| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Matthew C. Whitaker. Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. (Race and Ethnicity in the American West.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 382. $35.00.
Once confined to the Deep South and the period between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Voting Rights Act, the civil rights movement (or freedom movement, as some call it) has, under sustained scholarly pressure, expanded in so many dimensions so as to virtually require wholesale reconceptualization. In his biography of a Phoenix mortician and his wife, Matthew C. Whitaker contributes to this trend by investigating two individuals of both a class and a city not typically associated with the freedom struggle. While the story he tells lacks some of the drama of other movement accounts, it illuminates quite effectively an important and often neglected strain of African American politics from the past half century.	1
Eleanor and Lincoln Ragsdale came to Phoenix in the late 1940s following relatively privileged childhoods in other parts of the country. The city they encountered, Whitaker demonstrates convincingly, differed only marginally in its treatment of African Americans from the South. Digging in their heels, the Ragsdales slowly chipped away at the edifice of racism surrounding them. Whitaker attributes their activist strategy to the "black professional tradition" in which both were raised. Combining racial consciousness with entrepreneurialism and a strong work ethic, the couple focused on desegregation—in schools, neighborhoods, and the labor market—in the belief that equality lay more in opportunity than in wealth redistribution or black nationalism.	. . .

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