Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920.

Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. By Paul Ortiz. American Crossroads. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, c. 2005. Pp. xxviii, 382. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-520-25003-6; cloth, $27.50, ISBN 0-520-23946-6.)

Paul Ortiz seeks to understand the links between early African American battles against white supremacy in Florida and the emergence of a modern civil rights movement. Ortiz addresses three questions throughout the text: What resistance techniques did African Americans use? What was the effect of Florida's economic development and national politics on black resistance? In what ways did black men and women exercise citizenship in an era of disfranchisement? Ortiz successfully argues that in Florida "powerless" black individuals were able to "come together to formulate the boldest social justice agendas" only after they organized. These efforts were successful because black Floridians "drew on personal ties of mutuality to create a politics that embraced the needs of ordinary people" (p. 236).

Black Floridians pursued their challenges to Jim Crow segregation at multiple levels and through a variety of channels. Ortiz explicitly and comprehensively examines many of the groups and the methods used from working-class labor strikes to middle-class secret society, church, and civic group activities to upper-class business leaders' negotiating tactics. Ortiz makes it clear "that cooperation in African American communities was not a natural state of being; it had to be organized" (p. 50). Intraracial class divisions often led to disagreements over the efficacy of armed self-defense, self-help, and nonviolent resistance as strategies for confronting segregation and disfranchisement. Despite these differences of opinion, however, African Americans "gained an enormous amount of self-confidence and community organizing experience as they shepherded these institutions through the harsh decades of legal segregation" (p. 102). They created safe spaces for organizing, discussion, and planning and within these spaces were able to debate social change and develop a myriad of techniques to institute change. Moreover, African Americans in Florida took advantage of demographic and political changes in their efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of segregation. Ortiz clearly illustrates the breadth and depth of these changes in his discussions of the effects of the Great Migration not only on those who left Florida but also on those who stayed behind and on the implementation of woman suffrage.

This book builds upon work by Glenda Gilmore, John Dittmer, Adam Fairclough, and others in tracing African American resistance strategies at the local and state level and linking those efforts to the national movement for black freedom that emerged in the 1960s. As with these other studies, Ortiz reveals the importance of indigenous people in developing a creative, selfconfident, and determined activist base upon which the civil rights movement could build. Black Floridian leaders such as Eartha M. M. White, Joseph E. Lee, and countless others whose names have been lost to history created organizations and networks deeply rooted in communities that had become "reliable sites for promoting mutual aid, dignity, and survival" (p. 231). These preexisting relationships became the foundation of the modern civil rights movement.

JOYCE A. HANSON

California State University, San Bernardino