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Book
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Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011)
"David Golland's Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity is a wonderful work that examines the impact of local civil rights movements on national leadership and public policy. The book explores how local groups pushed for affirmative action forcing national leaders to react. But this interaction was not always to the benefit of local leaders or the people whom they represented. Golland provides elaborate details of the politics of the Philadelphia Plan and the impact this affirmative action had on the nation." --Clarence Taylor, author of Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union.
Book Panel:
40th Annual National Association of Ethnic Studies Conference, April 5-7, 2012,
New Orleans, Louisiana
Reviews:
CHOICE (subscription required*)
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Essays
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"From Pasco, Washington, to Washington, DC: Arthur Fletcher and the American Dream, 1965-1968," in Teresa Booker, Ed., Race in Urban Communities (under review)
On August 12, 1965, the streets of the Watts section of Los Angeles, California, erupted in what would become five days of fierce rioting. Angry about a racist police force and frustrated by the failure of recent federal equal employment legislation to translate into actual jobs, young black men in Watts attacked police officers and looted local businesses. Sadly, the result was an even worse situation, as devastated local black businesses laid off workers and the authorities imposed martial law. In the following two long, hot summers, equally violent riots swept through black neighborhoods in Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, and Chicago, but not Pasco, Washington.
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"A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher, Religion, and the American Underclass," Claremont Journal of Religion, Vol. I, No. 1 (January, 2012), pp. 86-107.
Arthur Fletcher (1924-2005) rose from humble origins to advise four United States presidents and head the United Negro College Fund. Yet few in the public knew of his strong spiritual life. After his wife tragically committed suicide in 1960, Fletcher sought ordination and developed the “Victorious Living Creed”—a spiritual belief which he hoped would allow African-Americans to take advantage of the new opportunities available thanks to civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. By the mid-1970s he had established an organization to promote this program known as the Society for Victorious Living.
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"Arthur Allen Fletcher, The Father of Affirmative Action" (Perspectives on African American History at Blackpast.Org, November 2011)
Arthur Allen Fletcher, known to many as the father of affirmative action, was born on December 22, 1924, in Phoenix, Arizona. Little is known of Fletcher’s birth father, but his mother, Edna, soon married Buffalo Soldier Andrew Fletcher, who would eventually adopt Arthur. The family moved from one Army base to another for much of Arthur’s childhood before finally settling in Junction City, Kansas. Fletcher graduated from Junction City High School in 1943, after leading a protest against the school yearbook which placed the photos of black students in a separate section in the back of the publication. Fletcher in his senior year organized a boycott of the segregated yearbook and the following year the practice was permanently dropped. While at Junction City High Fletcher met Mary Harden, a daughter of one of the local black community's wealthiest families. Harden's grandparents had owned....
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"Recent Works on the Mexican Revolution" (Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe, Vol. XVI, No. 1 [January-June 2005], pp. 172-179)
There have been two important trends in the Twentieth-Century historiography of Latin America that have been applied to the Mexican Revolution. The first, dealing with cultural and social history, is subaltern studies. This trend has revolutionized the field of Latin American history by using the new social history first popularized during the 1960s as a method of telling history from the bottom up. In particular, subaltern studies looks at the power arrangements and relationships on both a macro and micro level, the relationship between peone and cacique, for instance, or between city elites and rural hacendados. The trend has also generated a new methodology for viewing the relationship between Latin American countries and the western juggernauts, as Mexico can be viewed as having subaltern status to the hegemonic United States or Great Britain.
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Reviews
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David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick (Labor History, forthcoming )
Theodore Roosevelt Howard—who legally took a second middle name, Mason, in his twenties in honor of his benefactor and father figure, Dr. William Herbert Mason—was a generation older than Martin Luther King, Jr., and that is the main reason why few outside the movement have heard of him. Howard was an important civil rights leader in Mississippi from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, but by the time of the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the March on Washington of 1963, he was largely an afterthought to followers of the movement, having moved to Chicago and resumed focus on his medical practice. But rather than someone who "missed the boat," as it were, David T. and Linda Royster Beito present a thorough biography of a man who both never stopped being a civil rights leader and never stopped being a busy medical doctor. Howard never gave up one for the other, and managed to achieve distinction at both.
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Timothy J. Minchin and John A. Salmond, After the Dream (H-Net, June 2011)
After the Dream covers civil rights progress (and the lack thereof) in the South from 1965 through 2007, with a postscript on the historic election of President Barack Obama. The choice of the starting point is entirely logical. That year saw the high-water mark of interracial civil rights protests in the South at the march from Selma to Montgomery in March, followed by passage of the Voting Rights Act in June. In July, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect. The choice of region is logical from the perspective of the authors’ attention to implementation of the voting rights act and integration of public accommodation, but a full picture of the overall progress on civil rights on a national scale since the sixties is yet to be written.
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Pem Davidson Buck, Worked to the Bone (Labor History Vol. 46 No. 4 [November 2005], pp. 542-544)
Pem Davidson Buck's Worked to the Bone almost immediately lives up to its initial promise: that it will present an elaborate conspiracy theory as an explanation of the events of the last four centuries of Anglo-American history (p.4). The "elites"--who generally remain nameless--conspire to drain the sweat, i.e. the product of labor, from the non-elite majority. Indeed, this book could well bear the subtitle "Everything I Need to Know about American History I Learned Fixing Other Peoples' Sinks." The methods for this "drainage" change from generation to generation, from agriculture to industry, from local to international elites, but the paradigm remains the same, and the result is an extremely limited take on Anglo-America.
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