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CHRONICLING GRASSROOTS AFRICAN AMERICAN
COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISTS
African Americans
in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids.
By Randal Maurice Jelks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xvii
+ 217 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $25.00
(paper).
Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West.
By Matthew C. Whitaker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xiv
+ 382 pp. Maps, photos, tables, notes, bibliography, appendices, and index.
$35.00 (cloth).
Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for
Human Rights 19601977. By Winston A. Grady-Willis. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xxiv + 288 pp. Photos, map, notes, bibliography,
and index. $22.95 (paper).
James Patterson Smith
University of Southern Mississippi
African American history in
general and the historiography of the civil rights movement in particular
have long begged for scholarly works that explore the experiences of local
communities and local leaders in confronting issues of race, class, poverty,
gender, and the struggle for civil rights. The three new works reviewed
here offer valuable new contributions to the much needed chronicling and
analysis of local African American institutions and leaders. The first
two books, Randal Maurice Jelks's African Americans in the Furniture
City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids and Matthew C.
Whitaker's Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West,
take us away from the South to let us view pernicious racism, de facto
Jim Crow, and heroic local black resistance outside the bounds of the
old Confederacy. The third work, Winston A. Grady-Willis's Challenging
U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights 19601977,
takes us to one of the traditional hotbeds of Deep South de jure
segregation to explore the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and the many lesser known local activist groups that emerged and thrived
in Atlanta's black communities in the 1960s and 1970s.
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