| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xvi, 291 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-691-12299-1.)

This book grew out of a larger project on civic engagement "to identify and trace the largest voluntary membership associations across all periods of U.S. history, from 1790 to the present" (p. xi). In the course of their research, the authors discovered a large number of African American voluntary associations. Although scholars have long recognized the importance of the black church in African American culture, social life, and politics, they have generally ignored the role of voluntary associations. Despite being barred from most areas of American civic life due to enslavement, white supremacy, and segregation, African Americans were still able to organize their own voluntary associations. With controls for education and income, the authors determine that African Americans joined voluntary associations at a much higher rate than whites. Moreover, African American women played a stronger role in such organizations than white women did in their own organizations.

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