In the twentieth-century urban North, away from the more famous stories of the southern black freedom struggle, and over many decades, black women quietly and firmly asserted their right to participate in American political systems. Some pursued their efforts exclusively via radical political organizations that worked outside the political system in order to place pressure on it. Others, however, saw the state as a potential ally in strategies to expand access to power for all Americans. And, while their efforts met with uneven rates of success, politically active black women influenced government and the law to fulfil democratic ideals of inclusion and equality.

Julie Gallagher's Black Women and Politics in New York City asserts that it was New York black women who worked on the vanguard of this northern black freedom struggle. Joining recent scholarship that emphasizes the northern activists in the long civil rights movement, and collective biographies of politically active black women, Gallagher's book documents the hitherto undocumented political careers of those who decided to use the state as a force for justice between 1910 and 1980, most (but not all) of whom cast their lots with the Democratic Party. The appearance of her work is particularly timely, given the protracted primary fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination and its obfuscation of intersectional concerns encompassing race and gender. These women, Gallagher shows, understood the simultaneity necessary in expansions of democratic principles to all citizens. Still, their influence was often stymied by racism, sexism, or both. Her verdict comes in the Conclusion:

The story begins in the early decades of the twentieth century, when New York was in the process of becoming a centre for African American politics and culture. Black women, active in suffrage, antilynching, housing, public health, and labour-organizing efforts, challenged racism and expectations for women's public conduct with grassroots activism. Some, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, were among the earliest leaders toward a shift of allegiance away from the GOP to the Democratic Party. Still, through the 1940s, black women ran under the banners of various parties, including the Republican, Liberal, and American Labor Parties, in large part because the Democratic Party was hostile to running women candidates and only sparingly ran black men. Suffrage and New Deal programs provided an entry into politics in the 1930s, and La Guardia appointed black women to city positions. In the 1940s, despite the nation's rightward turn, Sara Speaks, Maude Richardson, and Ada Jackson ran as Republicans and advocates for black New Yorkers’ civil rights. Speaks and Richardson won their respective GOP nominations; Jackson's politics were too far left for her to gain ground in the anticommunism of the late 1940s.

Gallagher continues into the 1950s and 1960s, explaining that while the Cold War hampered political dissent, black women strategically employed the state as a force for greater equality. They led efforts for school integration, the end of political neglect of black neighbourhoods, and the empowerment of black citizens. The Democratic Party relented and ran black women once its rival parties did so, and Bessie Buchanan became the first black woman in the New York State Assembly, representing Harlem. Meanwhile, across the East River, black women, including a daughter of Barbadian immigrants named Shirley Chisholm, worked with the Bedford Stuyvesant Political League and the Unity Democratic Club to demand civil rights advocacy from those in office and demystify the political process for citizens. And on a national level, black women from New York – lawyer Pauli Murray, federal judge Constance Baker Motley, Delta Sigma Theta president Jeanne Noble, and National Council of Negro Women leader Dorothy Height – fought for a “politics of inclusion” at all levels of government (138).

Gallagher chooses to culminate her narrative with the career of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to win a national elected office. Chisholm, who used New York politics as her training ground, had an activist vision of politics and faith in the political system, despite its need for reform. Importantly, Gallagher looks beyond Chisholm's symbolic victory in the race for United States Representative in 1968, and credits earlier political groundwork, as well as Chisholm's political savvy and Democratic Party affiliation, for her success. Though much of Chisholm's sponsored legislation was never passed, and the coalition she attempted to forge for a 1972 run for President never came together, Gallagher asserts that Chisholm opened a new era of participation in politics for black women.

Gallagher's work represents a powerful synthesis of over fifteen black women political activists and participants while making the case for these historical actors’ importance in both the black freedom struggle and feminist movements of the twentieth century. While sometimes a bit encyclopedic in its recitation of electoral campaigns, party manoeuvring, and political personalities, one can argue that such detail is necessary and welcome in a work that tells a largely forgotten story. This reader only wishes that Gallagher had made an even stronger case for the book's intervention in historians’ understandings of the significant social movements of the twentieth century, because knowing these women's stories changes current understandings of the origins and work of both movements. The work's accessible and elegant prose, thorough research, and clear-eyed assessment of the effectiveness of its historical protagonists make it a valuable book for students, serious lay readers, and professional historians alike.