Race and Civil Rights in 20th-Century U.S. History

If you're interested in exploring how race and civil rights played out in America during the last 100 years, you could hardly find three better books than these. To follow the story chronologically, you would read Boyle, then Branch, and finally Brilliant.

Boyle tells a story from 1920s Detroit. Branch focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights movement from 1954 to 1963. Brilliant looks at civil rights in California between 1941 and 1978.
The tight monograph in the group is Brilliant. In my opinion, due to book size and literary style, the easiest to read is Boyle. Here's a taste of each one:

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

The first thing readers should know is that Taylor Branch has a serious "man crush" on Martin Luther King, Jr. His obvious bias is just fine with me mainly because (a) it's understandable and (b) it's nice when an author doesn't attempt to hide what he really thinks. The second thing to know is that this door-stop of a book is just the first of three volumes chronicling the life and times of MLK. Branch begins with the assumption that the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. "is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years" (xii). For obvious reasons, he also asserts that any biography of King must relate the story of the civil rights movement. Branch gives some attention to King's predecessors, his family of origin, and his early years. However, this lengthy, engaging narrative really takes off in 1954, when King became the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. It ends in 1963 with the March on Washington and, finally, the assassination of President Kennedy. Branch’s focus on King has drawn criticism from those who see the leadership of the civil rights movement through a much wider lens. This book won a Pulitzer Prize.

Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Picador, 2004.

Ask any well-informed American what the 1920s were all about, and the answer will likely include flappers, speakeasies, dancing the Charleston, the Harlem Renaissance, and the growth of jazz. Arc of Justice reveals that the answer should also include the presence of deadly racism in America, even in a northern city like Detroit. Boyle sets out to tell the story of one Ossian Sweet, his family and friends, and the incident and subsequent trial that made him a significant historical figure. A fine piece of journalistic and popular history, this book does not begin with a thesis statement per se. As Boyle continues, however, it appears that he wants to drive home the point that although the saga of Ossian Sweet is a compelling story, one that should be told, of greatest significance is the story's context, an American racism that often seems to recognize no restraint or limit. In that sense, it might be possible to categorize Arc of Justice as a work of microhistory.

Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

The main title of this book quotes the insightful lawyer and author Carey McWilliams (1905-1980), who made the observation as early as 1943. McWilliams was referring to a racial diversity in America that simply did not match up with the standard black/white binary conception of racial differences and interests. It was significant that McWilliams lived for many years in California, home to large numbers of Asian-, Mexican-, and Native Americans. Brilliant's book "examines the civil rights consequences of California's racial diversity--how America's 'racial frontier' became America's civil rights frontier" (5). Its coverage begins in 1941, the year the U.S. was dragged into the Second World War, an event that was soon followed by the internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. The book concludes in 1978 with the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke "reverse discrimination" case.

Chloe and Dad go to Pepperdine

On Sunday, April 29th, I went to worship with my home congregation, the San Jacinto Church of Christ in Amarillo, TX. Nothing unusual about that. The unusual part began sometime after lunch.

That afternoon, I said my good-byes to Michele and Aubrey and drove to Albuquerque, NM, where my daughter Chloe would be flying in from Hartford later that afternoon. I hadn't seen Chloe since my last trip to Connecticut in January. So I was excited about our reunion. I was also excited about our plans: We were headed for the Bible Lectures at Pepperdine University, a first for both of us.

There aren't many signs of civilization between Amarillo and Albuquerque. As it turned out, I didn't stop once. That worked out pretty well since Chloe landed about 15 minutes after I got to the airport! By the time she got off the plane and we picked up her bag, it had already been a fairly long day for the both of us. But I wanted to get as far west as Grants, NM by that night. It was time for dinner, so we decided to get something to eat near the airport. I asked a stranger where we should go to eat. "Go over to Central and have supper at Scalo," she said. She told us that it wasn't far from the airport and that the food was great. She was right. Here's the stuffed pork chop Chloe had.

By about 10 that night, we'd made it to Grants, where we spent the night. Sometime Monday morning, we made it to the Arizona border.

By the early afternoon, we'd made it to Flagstaff, AZ. And we were hungry. But we didn't want to eat at a fast-food place. We were looking for something a bit more adventuresome. So we drove around for a minute until we happened upon this place. It was really good . . . .

And we took pictures of each other. . . .

By the time we finished our leisurely lunch, we knew it had to make good time. We had to make it to the coast that night. So from Flagstaff on, it was serious car time. We stopped only a few more times and made it to Thousand Oaks, CA in good time. We got to sleep in the next morning, and since the Pepperdine events wouldn't start until later that day, we decided to go take a look at Beverly Hills. Here's the nice little "ristorante" where we had lunch on Beverly Drive.

Later that afternoon, we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to the Pepperdine campus in Malibu. The California weather wasn't cooperating just yet. It was overcast and kind of gray. But it was beautiful anyway.

Once we got moved in to the dorm, we walked down the hill to Firestone Fieldhouse. There, we got to sing with hundreds of other Christians and hear a really fine sermon by Jonathan Storment. I was especially interested in one of the late-night sessions, the series by John Mark Hicks and Bobby Valentine. Their focus for the week was the great K. C. Moser in the context of his times. The first night was so good, I wound up going to all three sessions. Here they are on the first night.

After breakfast the next morning, I was ready to meet and to hear Tom Olbricht speak about the history of Bible lectureships. I really enjoyed taking in his two presentations on Wednesday and Thursday. . . .

Later, Chloe and I met up and went to the Harding School of Theology luncheon. It was great to see Dean Evertt Huffard for the first time in several years. I also got to meet fellow blogger Matthew Morine (purple shirt in the photo) and several others. We listened to Dr. Ed Gray who reminded us of the role and kingdom purposes of Christian counselors. His presentation featured an announcement regarding a new program of counseling studies at HST.

By Thursday, the clouds had mostly gone away, and the Pacific coast was drenched in sunlight. . . . .

Later that afternoon, we went further up the hill to where the graduate schools are. We found a nice patio where we just sat and read and took this picture . . . .

Friday morning, I got to hear Terry Gardner's really fine presentation on the life and times of Austin McGary. The Restoration Quarterly luncheon featured a talk by Doug Foster. He focused on four historic leaders among the African-American Churches of Christ.

That afternoon, we headed east. We spent the night at Needles, CA, and by Sunday morning, I was taking Chloe to the Albuquerque airport. It had been a great week for the two of us, one that we won't forget for a long time.

From Dust Bowl Days to the Reagan Revolution

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: Norton, 2011.

This post is a version of something I wrote up for an online discussion group that focuses on the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. The group is reading this book together, and I was assigned to report on the Introduction and Chapter 1. Here's the gist of what I sent in:

According to his faculty web page, Darren Dochuk completed the PhD at Notre Dame in 2005. Since then he has taught twentieth century U.S. history at Purdue University. He specializes in religion, politics, and culture. Over the last ten years, he has published a good number of journal articles and has contributed several book chapters. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is his first book. A second book is forthcoming. So it seems like we'll be hearing a good bit from this young historian in the years to come.

Introduction: "At Home with the Angels"

Dochuk begins his book with an impressive description of the Billy Graham crusade held at the baseball stadium in Anaheim, California in September 1969. The author tells of the campaign's tremendous preparation and remarkable success. Among the statistics he reports: a ten-day campaign with a total attendance of 384,000 and over 20,000 decisions for Christ. He also mentions how Graham, from North Carolina, reflected on how comfortable he was, how at home he felt there in the Los Angeles area. Dochuk then comes to his point:

This book explains why Southern California proved so welcoming to Graham and nurturing of his worldview. More specifically, it describes and assesses the ways in which this evangelist's style of southern plain-folk religion--uprooted and relocated to the West Coast by monumental social changes begun in the 1930s--reoriented Southern California evangelicalism toward the South by the late 1960s. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt also tells the analogous story of how transplanted southern evangelicalism, itself revitalized and recreated in the Golden State, moved from the margins of the southern Bible Belt to the mainstream of America's first Sunbelt society (xv).

Although the author notes that the southerners who migrated to Southern California came from a variety of states, he describes their religious outlook as "Texas theology," which can be characterized as busy, vocal, promotional, and task-oriented (xvii). He says that, notwithstanding the images presented in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, southern migrants to Southern California were not so much "victims of circumstance," but rather "champions of a cause" (xvii). It wasn't that they were fleeing Egypt; they were responding to the Macedonian call. With their political views never far from their faith, these southern evangelicals not only reshaped Southern California's religion, they also impacted the politics of that region and far beyond. In fact, says the author, the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency represented their success.

But, says Dochuk, it didn't happen easily or suddenly. The long struggle was spread out over the years between 1910 and 1970. Within those six decades, he identifies four distinct periods to which the major sections of his book correspond. He overviews his book as follows:

Part I "charts plain-folk evangelicalism's relocation from the western South to the West Coast."

Part II "examines the clash of cultural views that resulted from southern evangelicalism's West Coast sojourn." Specifically, he reports how southern evangelicals lost the battle for their "early nineteenth-century populism" in California's Democratic Party and later "forged a powerful political front on behalf of the emerging conservative movement."

In Part III he describes how the conservative impulse began to define itself in the churches and church-run schools of California and how it moved from there into precinct and government. He says that this "phalanx of institutions threw its full weight behind Barry Goldwater's presidential run in 1964."

Part IV, says Dochuk, "shows how this evangelical front helped win the governorship for Ronald Reagan in 1966, the South for Richard Nixon in 1972, and ultimately the country for Reagan's Republican Party in 1980." (The overview is found on pp. xx-xxi).

Chapter 1, "Plain Folk"

Dochuk sets out to describe those people who made the migration to Southern California. A large percentage of them came from the Western South, by which he means southern states, most all of them west of the Mississippi (including, especially, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, but also Missouri and Louisiana). According to the author, these folks embodied the Jeffersonian ideal of the plain person who knew how to raise a crop, who rejected special privilege and elitism, and who deeply valued the local community and, therefore, civic responsibility. Their political heroes were men like "Jeff Davis, the 'Wild Ass of the Ozarks,' W. Lee 'Pass the Biscuits, Pappy' O'Daniel of Texas, and Louisiana's Huey Long" (11).

Dochuk suggests that because these western southerners did not live at the center of the South, their memory of the Civil War was not so pointedly tragic. From a younger, less-settled part of the country than their cousins in the Upper and Deep South, they represented a culture that was forward-looking and optimistic. Upon moving west to California, they sought first to find good jobs and to establish strong churches in communities that would reflect their values and way of life. Dochuk points to the example of Bell Gardens, California in the 1930s, called by critics "Billy Goat Acres." Here was a place where recent arrivals from the South could find cheap housing close to local industry, a place where a person could keep chickens and raise a decent-sized garden.

"Yearning for familiarity" (a great phrase), these transplants naturally planted churches. They soon discovered that living in such close proximity to one another and bound together by a common political, social, and religious outlook, what sprang up among them was a strong sense of belonging. But they also discovered that the same favorable economic and labor environment was just as available to other types of people as well. So, it was up to the evangelicals to convert their neighbors in California, to save the lost of the world, which was now very close by.

So much for my overview of the Introduction and Chapter 1. The first thing I want to add is that my summary doesn't read nearly as well as the book itself. For the sake of brevity, I've left out almost all of the author's interesting details. But they are what make the journey of discovery in his description so enjoyable.

I have only one minor criticism of the book to this point: I think Dochuk tends to overplay the idea that evangelicals from the South saw themselves as missionaries to Southern California. Observation and experience suggest that why a family moves and why they say they moved are sometimes two very different stories. Oftentimes, this is a matter of the family making the most of a less-than-desirable situation, and telling the version of the story that is most easy to live with, playing up the good that emerges in the new place. Dochuk suggests that the Grapes of Wrath view of southern migration to California doesn't represent the historical truth very well. Of course he's right about that. On the other hand, I don't think it was missionary zeal that led people like Okies to places like Bell Gardens. The evidence seems to suggest that it was hardship at home and the promise of a better life in California. Is there any evidence, for example, that southerners moved to California for the same kinds of reasons that members of the Churches of Christ moved to the Northeast in the Exodus Movement of the 1960s? I haven't seen any evidence for that so far. This is not to discount the real impact of these southerners. My only quibble is that I don't think there's a strong connection between why they moved to California and the religious and political influence they had once they got there.