Civil War on Race Street: the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.

Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. By Peter B. Levy. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 242. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-81302815-9; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2638-5.)

When the modern civil rights movement came to a small town on Maryland's tranquil and isolated Eastern Shore in the early 1960s, there was little reason to believe that such a place could become a racial battleground that would encapsulate all dimensions of the 1960s African American struggle for equality. Maryland was known for moderation and accommodation to change on racial matters, and Cambridge had a reputation for racial fairness. A town of thirteen thousand, where the number of whites was more than double the black population but where blacks could vote and where one served on the town council, seemed an unlikely place for the full drama of 1960s racial battles to occur. But by 1967 Cambridge had witnessed sit-ins, uncompromising local black leadership, visits by H. Rap Brown, violent destruction of sections of the town, and a white backlash that would lilt a newly elected moderate Republican governor, Spiro T. Agnew, into the national limelight. In a slender but factually packed study, Peter B. Levy adroitly covers the multidimensional significance of this racial crisis.

It is easier to describe what brought Cambridge into the early civil rights phase of the conflict than it is to explain how it veered into Black Power and violence. A convergence of factors connected the small town into the national integrationist movement. First, Maryland's segregation was an easy target for activists, who could exploit the embarrassment that segregated public accommodations affecting African diplomats caused the Kennedy administration during the Cold War. Moreover, the recently opened Chesapeake Bay Bridge ended the Eastern Shore's isolation and made it easy for young people from the mainland and adjacent states to join protesting black students on the other side. However, the mounting integrationist challenge to the local and state governing establishment produced a different kind of black leader than the moderate white ruling circles anticipated. Gloria Richardson, daughter of a prosperous drugstore owner, graduate of Howard University, and mother of two children, took charge of the struggle. Richardson was fearless and uncompromising, and her objectives soon transcended integration. She found begging for basic rights demeaning and at one point actually encouraged blacks to vote against a city referendum on integration.

How the objectives, strategy, and dynamics of this miniature reflection of the changing national racial crises unfolded is the major revelation of this excellent book. This civil rights conflict that turned into a civil war was ultimately driven by class and economic factors in a town segregated by a street named "Race." Blacks found themselves pitted, not against the old ruling class that was declining in importance, but rather against a lower class of whites whose own aspirations were frustrated. Thus, the racial clash in Cambridge became a violent class war. A place that one freedom rider called a "little Georgia" in the early 1960s became a mini-Detroit or Watts in 1967. To understand how this important transformation happened, readers of this review should turn to Levy's thoroughly researched and well-written book.

Frostburg State University 

JOHN B. WISEMAN