In the decade since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has emerged as a central site for investigating race, inequality and reform in the urban United States. Journalists, policy-makers and social scientists have meticulously tracked the city's uneven recovery, and historians have produced a steady stream of broadly relevant books about this seemingly sui generis metropolis. Donald DeVore's detailed study continues this trend by illuminating the multifaceted origins of the city's very long civil rights movement. Given that movement's depth and breadth, scholars and students of African American urban and civil rights history should benefit greatly from DeVore's work.
Surveying the Jim Crow era, DeVore highlights the role that African American schools, colleges, churches, businesses and civic organizations played in sustaining New Orleans’ black community and in providing a foundation for vigorous civil rights activism. By demonstrating that black New Orleanians organized their lives around ideas of racial equality and justice, community development and individual advancement, he illuminates the ways in which the philosophies of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington became blurred at the grassroots. ‘It took a “Talented Tenth” to build the community institutions (even the vocational schooling) advocated by Washington’, DeVore writes, ‘just as it required a robust network of interlocking institutions, sacred and profane, to nurture a Talented Tenth’ (p. viii).
That ‘network of interlocking institutions’ also buttressed a struggle for racial justice that began decades before the pitched battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and DeVore's success in tracing the evolution and intersections of those institutions, their leaders and black New Orleanians’ aspirational visions is one of his book's greatest strengths. According to DeVore, the durability of the city's civil rights struggle was most evident in African Americans’ campaign for educational opportunity and equity, which he describes as ‘the only sustained form of protest that the black community directed against the citadel of white political power and supremacy’ (p. 123).
That campaign began in 1900, when the school board eliminated black education beyond fifth grade, and it continued after school desegregation began in 1960. Even as African Americans’ changed their tactics from submitting petitions and scientific studies to the local school board to filing lawsuits in federal court, DeVore shows that their focus on improved schooling did not waver. He also demonstrates that various and often overlapping streams fed African Americans’ activism in education and other areas. These included working-class ‘Mothers’ Clubs’ tied to individual public schools, neighbourhood-based educational organizations, the local and national offices of the NAACP and outspoken black businessmen, doctors and educators.
DeVore's extensive research in school, church, organizational and personal records also reveals a broad cast of characters, many of whom are not acknowledged in earlier works. Among those who receive well-deserved attention is Robert E. Jones, a Methodist Episcopal minister and the editor from 1904 to 1920 of the New Orleans-based Southwestern Christian Advocate. A religious-oriented weekly, the Advocate targeted African American readers at a time when the city did not have a black-owned newspaper. DeVore also highlights black women such as Fannie C. Williams, who exemplified African Americans’ commitment to individual as well as collective advancement. A public school teacher and principal for nearly 50 years, Williams earned two undergraduate degrees and a master's degree, was active in civic organizations and spearheaded the campaign for one of the city's first modern school buildings for blacks during the 1920s. Her impact was also evident in the future leaders she educated – United Nations ambassador Andrew J. Young among them.
While DeVore examines African American community development and activism from several angles, organizational and institutional leaders receive far more attention than the rank and file. Additionally, his omission of pan-Africanist movements raises questions about his formulation that black New Orleanians ‘drank from the ideological font of both W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’ (p. viii). Were there no other ideological wells slaking black New Orleanians’ thirst?
Judith Stein's and William Ivy Hair's work on Marcus Garvey and Robert Charles, respectively, suggest other possibilities. In The World of Marcus Garvey (1986), Stein describes a voluble – and violent – battle in New Orleans between detractors and supporters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), whose local membership she pegs at roughly three thousand around the same time that DeVore records the local NAACP struggling to attract a mere thousand souls. Similarly, in Carnival of Fury (1976), Hair identifies Charles’ affiliation with the pan-Africanist Henry McNeal Turner as potentially influencing his legendary standoff with New Orleans police in 1900. Unfortunately, DeVore does not acknowledge these alternate visions of black community building and racial justice, leaving other scholars to determine the extent to which they aligned with the norms he describes. He also avoids drawing comparisons between black community development in New Orleans and other cities. These shortcomings, however, only underscore New Orleans’ richness as a site for continued exploration of the role of race in urban America.
