Forest Issac Jones’s Good trouble is very much a personal account of his encounters with the civil rights history of Derry, particularly its influences from the American South. Through his visits to the city and interviews with activists on both sides of the Atlantic, Jones highlights shared experiences of discrimination borne by Black Americans and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and in turn, the connection between their use of non-violent direct action to challenge their disenfranchisement and marginalisation in society.
Across twenty-four short, digestible chapters, Good trouble discusses some of the main events and figures of each civil rights movement, with a particular focus on young people like John Lewis and Bernadette Devlin. The most striking revelation from Jones’s research is the level of reluctance within Black American communities towards their young people participating in civil rights protests and demonstrations. Throughout his interviews with Black activists who became involved as young people, including Jones’s own parents, there is a recurrent theme of apprehension from older relatives about the dangers of direct action, especially becoming entangled with the criminal justice system.
From the outset, it is clear that Good trouble is intended for an audience unfamiliar with the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, as it questions why people do not recall its link with the US. This connection is well known and noted in many studies of the Northern Irish campaign. Bob Purdie’s seminal study Politics in the streets: the origins of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland (1990) includes a critical analysis of the transatlantic connection, while Brian Dooley’s Black and green: the fight for civil rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (1998) remains the most comprehensive exploration of the parallels and deviances between the experiences of the Black population in the US and that of Catholics in Northern Ireland. Neither are consulted for this book. Indeed, save for Tim Pat Coogan and a fleeting reference to Paul Bew’s The politics of enmity (2009), there are no historians of Northern Ireland or Ireland cited. This lack of scholarly research results in some significant misunderstandings of Northern Ireland, and the analysis often reinforces tropes about the evolution and denouement of the civil rights movement.
For example, Good trouble includes a discussion of the roles of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera in Irish politics, but there is no analysis of the evolution of the discriminatory practices and structures in Northern Ireland that led to the need for the civil rights movement. More importantly, there is no mention of the dire socio-economic context of 1950s Northern Ireland, which gave rise to fears within political unionism of the potential of cross-community class consciousness to their hegemony. It was this fear, validated by the electoral successes of the Northern Ireland Labour Party in 1958, that spurred the change of course for political unionism — embodied by Terence O’Neill’s modernist agenda — which contributed to nationalists’ hopes for reform and subsequently to the formation of a concerted campaign for change. Independent unionists, liberal Protestants and trade unions were integral to this development, which should be mentioned in this study, especially as interracial cooperation was initially prevalent within the American civil rights movement.
More concerning, though, are the significant errors throughout the book, mostly regarding unionism. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in 1913 with the primary aim to resist the imposition of home rule from Westminster, not ‘to fight against the Catholics and the Catholic population’ (54). The statement ‘Unionists are sometimes called Loyalists as well’ (4) should be followed by some indication that loyalism is a distinctive form of unionism. While it is true that the terms are used interchangeably in certain political contexts, the conflation between them hinders our ability to understand the at-times conflicting attitudes within unionism towards the civil rights movement and consequently the wider context for the failure of more liberal unionists like O’Neill. The section on the People’s Democracy seems confused about its chronology and cohesion. Most significantly, the People’s Democracy was not part of the 5 October 1968 march in Derry; it was created in response to it.
Jones’s interviews provide interesting vignettes into the lives and memories of activists on both sides of the Atlantic. His background as a journalist is evident in how he builds a vivid picture of the personalities featured throughout the book, as well as his personal interactions with activists — particularly his meeting with Eamonn McCann in Sandinos Bar, Derry. Jones’s affection for Derry and its people is clear in his recollections of his journeys to the city, but, unfortunately, as an authoritative historical study, Good trouble misses the mark.
