Los Angeles is not a city one usually associates with racial harmony. From the Watts Riots of 1965 through the gang violence, Rodney King beatings, and ugly folderol surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial of the 1990s, Los Angeles in the second half of the twentieth century represented a city rent asunder by racial divisions. Rodney King might have just wanted everyone to get along, but Los Angeles seemed instead to represent a city where no one actually did so, especially people of different races and ethnicities.

And yet as Shana Bernstein ably shows in this marvelous book, Los Angeles during the middle decades of the twentieth century in many ways presented a model of interracial civil rights activism. From the 1930s into the 1960s members of the city's black, white (and especially Jewish), Mexican American, and Japanese American communities worked together to combat racism and to improve life across the city. Bernstein's work fits well into the burgeoning historiography of the “long civil rights movement” because of its challenge to traditional geographical and chronological conceptions of American race relations, not to mention its multiracial, rather than biracial, approach.

At the center of Bernstein's story are a series of activist organizations that built the “bridges of reform” of the book's title. These included (but were not limited to) the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Jewish Community Relations Committee (CRC), the Mexican-American Community Service Organization (CSO), and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). These political organizations and the coalitions they formed proved to be enduring throughout the transformations of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles and provided a potential model for interethnic cooperation, albeit one too rarely recognized and even less frequently followed elsewhere in the United States.

From the 1930s, as nation-states hurtled toward World War II, activists began mobilizing to confront the challenges that an increasingly multihued Los Angeles faced. The specter of war made the realities of racial and ethnic politics all the more real. America's entry into World War II provided considerable rhetorical ballast to the cause of antiracism, as black Americans embraced the concept of a Double Victory over racism abroad and at home while Jews supported the war effort for obvious reasons and utilized the ugliness spreading from Hitler's Germany to leverage discussions of anti-Semitism in the United States. Mexican Americans in the greater Los Angeles area, too, chose to coordinate with other racial and ethnic groups, which differed from the Mexican American experience in much of the rest of the Southwest. These groups began to coordinate and work together, realizing that from the perspective of interest-group politics, they shared more commonalities than differences. Only Japanese Americans were forced into silence, less out of self-preservation than by the simple and shameful realities of internment. After World War II, however, it was natural that their wartime experience made Japanese Americans inclined to work toward interethnic collaboration.

In at least one area Bernstein challenges, or at least complicates, a central pillar of long civil rights scholarship. In the newly dominant historiography, one of the missed opportunities in American race relations was a strengthened coalition between civil rights activists, leftist whites, and white labor unions, and, as the emerging story has it, these potential alliances crashed on rocky shores of rabid anticommunism as civil rights activists tempered their approach and kept a distance from potential old-left allies in order to avoid accusations of communist infiltration or fellow travelling. Bernstein does not deny this phenomenon, but where other historians have seen promising roads not taken she notes the flipside: that rejecting more radical approaches opened doors for activists within the newly emergent Cold War liberalism that arose in the wake of World War II, a liberalism that proved receptive to civil rights activism and readily recognized the deep flaws in American society where race and ethnicity were concerned. One suspects that Bernstein has opened up a conversation rather than ended it, and some historians will wonder why the dynamic had to be either–or rather than both–and when it came to forging coalitions to combat racism and ethnocentrism, and will question whether making a virtue of necessity is the same as a virtue. Nonetheless Bernstein has added yet another dose of complexity to the story.

Bernstein's book serves as another reminder that for all of the scholarship and writing about the American Dilemma of race we still have much to learn. Los Angeles alone remains fertile territory for discovery. Sitting as it does on the cusp of historiographies of civil rights and ethnicity, of Cold War politics and the merged histories of the United States, the West, California, and Los Angeles, Bridges of Reform represents an exciting and provocative contribution to our ongoing discussions about the role of race in these United States.