Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America.

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. By Douglas Flamming. The George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 467. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-23919-9.)

Douglas Flamming's beautifully written tale of black Los Angeles from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1930s is a pleasure to read. Flamming's portrait of a community breathes with the life of its residents as he chronicles, through oral histories, newspapers, and manuscript collections among other sources, their struggles, hopes, frustrations, and triumphs in trying to claim the West as their own. Blacks fleeing the (mostly urban) South struggled to keep Jim Crow out of their city of dreams, an especially difficult challenge given the simultaneous influx of southern white migrants. Some battles they won, others they lost. Victorious in eliminating segregation along the city's glistening shorelines, black Angelenos watched in distress as a color line crept across its previously unsegregated swimming pools. Flamming's account of a complex racial landscape, where conditions improved and worsened simultaneously, counters the traditionally told Paradise Lost version of steady decline for black Angelenos. Through gains and losses the city's black residents never wavered from their pursuit of freedom, which is the central theme of Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America.

Flamming's book helps push the boundaries of civil rights history's beyond the South and back to the turn of the century. Flamming joins Martha Biondi, Robert O. Self, Josh Sides, and others who have revealed that important activism with different loci from southern struggles originated in the urban West and North. He also asserts that this earlier activism reveals that blacks' quest for equality was an ongoing way of life rather than a movement. Flamming convinces the reader of the significance of these earlier, local campaigns by arguing that activists by joining New Deal political coalitions helped move equality to the national political agenda. Bound for Freedom's suggestion that such earlier western movements' groundbreaking work paved the way for later southern activists' success is intriguing, too. But because this study concludes in the 1930s, this link requires (and merits) further exploration.

Flamming's appreciation of historical nuance is one of the book's greatest attributes. He rejects unsympathetic interpretations by their activist successors and by post-1960s scholars that his mainly middle-class subjects "sold out" and more fairly reinterprets their activism by recognizing the radical nature of their struggles in their own context.

One last aspect of this rich treatment of African American Los Angeles begs further analysis: black Angelenos' growing multiracial interest by the late 1930s. Flamming refers often to the city's unique multiracial mix, concluding that African Americans' multiracial neighbors seemed to have remained just that--neighbors, residents, and sometimes competitors--but not potential allies. He suggests that in the 1930s biracial black/white initiatives increased and briefly mentions black participation in the mainly Mexican American civil rights organization El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Espanola. The significance of African Americans' involvement in these and other unmentioned budding multiracial initiatives remains unexplored. It is a testament to this thoughtful, deep study that it opens up such interesting paths for future exploration while it answers so many important questions.

SHANA BERNSTEIN

Southwestern University