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ReviewAuthor(s): Eileen EaganReview by: Eileen EaganSource: The American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 827-828Published by: on behalf of theOxford University Press American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.3.827Accessed: 02-01-2016 15:22 UTC

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abolishing the Jim Crow Central Jurisdiction (CJ). Thelatter in its quadrennial conference responded byappointing a Committee of Five to explain to C36 how

 African Americans thought desegregation should pro-ceed. Regional jurisdictional conferences, except thoseincluding most white southern Methodists, immedi-

ately joined the CJ in planning an end to segregationalthough the latter was always more insistent andspecific than other bodies in attacking white Methodistracialism. These committees and commissions and

 jurisdictions and regions reflect the political and bu-reaucratic structure of an American religious denom-ination that probably represents a cross section of middle-class America better than any other. With theirgroups and plans and meetings and pronouncementsand caucuses, their rhetoric, pragmatism and occa-sional idealism Methodists struggled with what PeterC. Murray calls “the Crucible of Race.” Eventually,

 white southern jurisdictions, too, found ways to change

by rearranging regional structures above the locallevel—always after the larger society, though civil lawand social movement had already legitimized change.That is, the “church” followed; it did not lead—andthis is a source of disappointment for the author andprobably for progressive and conservative Methodistsas well, if for differing reasons.

One of the important revelations of Murray’s studyis the ways in which nongovernmental organizationscan effect social change beyond speciously concretecivil law and speciously effective social movementsneither of which is the daily locus of life for most

 Americans. That is, flawed as Methodists’ achieve-ments were, their actions together with those in other

conflicted churches and voluntary societies were im-portant engines in social transformation beyond lawand movement. The mundane but passionate conflictsbetween elites who tried to work out details of orga-nizational change and the different parties who re-sisted, prodded, denounced, and then settled ratherthan achieve all that they “wanted” brought socialchange “home” to Methodists in ways that appeals totheir better selves could never have accomplished.Ecclesiastical politics trumped Christian ethics andpushed Christians toward “Christian” goals, all by aprocess of voluntarism that felt coercive to some,inadequate to others, and clumsy to all. There was

unhappiness enough for everyone.Murray’s stories of ecclesiastical pressures, glitches,failings, and partial successes reveal that there wasnever one struggle for desegregation or racial equity—and there was no clear, final resolution of all thedifferent struggles about “race” among Methodists inall their different jurisdictions any more than withinU.S. society generally. As Murray points out (p. 232)“by the early 1970s, Methodists had only cleaned upthe mess they had created during the Jim Crow period;the goal of racial inclusiveness remained elusive, espe-cially on the local church level, where it matteredmost.” On this issue as well as those matters touchinggender, sex, peace, tradition, and public life the de-

nomination is still afflicted by a commitment to diver-sity, inclusiveness, and openness that demands it try tosustain a membership that includes people who lov-ingly embrace as well as angrily despise these threecharacteristics. This catholicity is sustained by compro-mise, forbearance, and ambiguity and may break down

soon as secular society fumbles toward its own inclu-siveness. But it is not as clear from this book as itshould be why Methodists have been so committed tothis ideal, or why black Methodists compromised theirown position and roles when electing to remainbonded with whites by entering the Central Jurisdic-tion in the first place. African-American Methodistshave been essential to keeping the church as catholicas it is and in providing a radical critique of Americansociety. Methodists, as Murray knows, have alwaysattracted radicals and harbored conservatives for rea-sons that are not altogether clear in his book. There isa Wesleyan catholicity of devotion and discipleship

 valued by those who feel indebted to the enigmaticautocrat who founded a popular movement, and thisneeds teasing out if we are to understand the innerdynamics of a church that many conservatives clearly

 want to fail. This is a good book about a significantinstitution and a continuing American agony.

DONALD G. M ATHEWS

University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill

JOY   A NN   WILLIAMSON.   Black Power on Campus: TheUniversity of Illinois 1965–75. Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 192. $34.95.

Joy Ann Williamson tells the story of the black studentmovement of the 1960s at the University of Illinois.Her primary focus is the impact of that movement onthe university, and the relation of students, and theirideas, to educational reform. Williamson also presentsthe complexity of student activism in a period of protest that embodied local and national issues.Touching on the complications of class and gender

 within the movement, the author deals directly withthe problems, and pain, students encountered in de-fining “Blackness.” The role of students in the blackpower movement deserves more study, and this worksets a good example. With an evenhanded discussion

of the contradictions within the movement, William-son argues that the students, through the Black Stu-dent Association (BSA), were successful in changingthe university’s culture and structure.

The University of Illinois had been the site of earlierstudent protest on issues including racial discrimina-tion. As other historians have noted, World War II andits aftermath encouraged veterans and other progres-sive students to challenge the conservative mores of the community and the university. Then, as later,student housing was a crucial issue. Students weresubject to landlords’ discrimination against blacks,Jews, and women (Jewish women in particular). Wil-liamson notes that in the 1960s the issue of housing

Canada and the United States   827

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sparked a major protest: the arrest in September 1968of nearly 250 newly recruited black students in theIllini Union. That event and the hostile and oftenracist press response increased solidarity among stu-dents and strengthened black power organization andideology on campus.

The BSA becomes the center of the black studentorganization and power. The successor to a Congressof Racial Equality (CORE) group, the BSA created anorganizational structure and newspaper that, whilesometimes engaging in internal conflict, did succeed inpushing the university to increase recruitment of blackstudents and to create a black cultural center and, toan extent, a Black Studies program. The successescoincided with the height of the black power move-ment (and, I would note, student activism in general).Its decline came with the decline of those movementsin the 1970s. Williamson argues that the university’sability to coopt some of the program through educa-tional reforms was a measure of the movement’sachievement as well as a reason for its demise.

This is an important contribution to a more in-depthstudy of student movements, one that includes a wider

 variety of campuses and student groups. Studies of student activism in the 1960s often focus on the civilrights movement and antiwar activity and groups likethe Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)and ignore less dramatic campus organizations. Stud-ies of black power sometimes ignore black collegestudents. That bias comes in part from the quasi-

autobiographical nature of movement historiography.It is helpful to have a newer generation of historians who can view a heated time more dispassionately. Thedownside, however, is that accounts based on writtendocuments and selective interviews may miss impor-tant aspects of a movement. Williamson interviewedthirty-one individuals (including seven or eight

 women) who were active then. It would be helpful toknow how they were selected. Missing from this ac-count is any substantial discussion of left-wing groupson campus that may have included black as well as

 white students. Since the university had a history of Marxist groups, it seems unlikely that in the period

here, there were no, or even few, black studentsinvolved in such activity. Williamson does suggestsome class issues among the black students in general.Was there no open division or debate between sup-porters of black power and supporters of power for the

 working class? Likewise, the impact of the demonstra-tions and violence at the university following themurders at Jackson State and Kent State, and theresponse of black students and the BSA to trials of theBlack Panthers and of Angela Davis, also deserveattention.

Still, Williamson offers an institutional and culturalanalysis of a significant movement and presents the

history of an important part of the struggle for aca-demic democracy and real education.

EILEEN  E AGAN

University of Southern Maine

P AUL   L YONS.  The People of this Generation: The Rise

 and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. 279.$39.95.

In recent years, a number of local studies of 1960s-eraactivism have been published. Several of them havesought to render a comprehensive picture of the

 wide-ranging tumult that swept across communitiesthroughout the United States during that period, usinglocal histories to take cross-sections of Americansociety in the 1960s. The authors of these studies (suchas Rusty Monhollan and Mary Ann Wynkoop), follow-ing the examples set by William Rorabaugh in Berkeley

 at War: The 1960s  (1989) and, to some extent, by DavidFarber in  Chicago ‘68  (1988), have included separatechapters dealing with a now-familiar series of 1960smovements. Other local 1960s studies (by authors suchas Beth Bailey, Kenneth Heineman, and this reviewer)have sought to record more detailed histories of individual political movements in specific places. PaulLyons now adds his study of radicalism in Philadelphiato the second of these types of studies.

Lyons is well situated to accomplish this task. He isthe author of   Philadelphia Communists: 1936–1956(1982), focusing on the same urban environment thathe studies here, and   New Left, New Right, and the

 Legacy of the Sixties  (1996). Clearly, Lyons knows the

history of the Philadelphia area and the history of thetwentieth-century left, both locally and nationally,quite well. He displays this knowledge in his new bookand shows considerable interpretive sensitivity, partic-ularly when discussing the interplay of old left veteransand newcomers in areas of activity such as the Phila-delphia peace movement during the 1960s.

The peculiarities of the Philadelphia metropolitanarea, most prominently the importance of Quaker-runand influenced organizations and schools, includingSwarthmore College (particularly important in theearly new left) and the active Peace Committee of theYearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, receive

ample attention. Lyons does a good job of explainingthe distinctive influence of the Quaker factor in thislocal setting while not making Philadelphia seem ut-terly peculiar.

Instead of focusing on a single institution of highereducation, Lyons surveys activism at a wide range of colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the Quaker colleges,and Catholic schools such as LaSalle College; this lastcategory is entirely neglected in other studies. Whilehis wide coverage of student activism means that someschools get too-brief treatment, this multi-school ac-count makes Lyons’s study different than other localhistories of this era.

828   Reviews of Books and Films

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