Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina.

Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. By Christina Greene. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 366. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5600-2; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2938-2.)

Christina Greene locates the roots of the black freedom movement in grassroots efforts to promote civil rights and economic justice in Durham, North Carolina, from the 1940s to the 1970s. She argues that black women stood at the vanguard of progressive local movements, taking the lead in desegregating public facilities, fighting for equal employment opportunities, attempting to alleviate urban poverty and its deleterious effects on the community, and forming bonds, however tenuous, with white women. She argues that "[b]y centering women's activities in our field of vision, we gain a sharper picture of how the freedom movement emerged, how it operated, and how it was sustained" (p. 223).

Greene moves beyond examining official leaders in order to focus on women whose abilities to organize and mobilize vast neighborhood and community networks at all socioeconomic levels enabled them to challenge segregation, prejudice, and economic injustice in Durham. During World War II, black women's organizations formed and supported voter registration drives, equal job opportunities, and child care. After building an important organizational infrastructure, black women moved to fight for desegregation of schools and public facilities in the 1950s and 1960s. They also fought for economic justice, demanding better recreational and housing facilities in blighted areas of Durham, and joined the Black Solidarity Committee to boycott white-owned businesses in 1968-1969. The boycott achieved several goals, including the appointment of two African Americans to the Housing Authority board and an end to "excessive utility bills in public housing projects" (p. 183). In addition, African American women took the lead in building interracial coalitions like Women-in-Action in order to address violence in Durham.

Greene provocatively highlights the great achievements by working-class and poor women in their fight for racial equality and economic justice. She finds that not only did poor black women demand a voice in middle-class-led organizations like the Black Solidarity Committee, but they also joined with poor whites to halt the closing of an interracial elementary school in Edgemont and to build a community health care center there. Poor black and white residents fought for economic opportunities for their children and families, which, as Greene maintains, "challenges the conventional narrative about social protest in the late 1960s and 1970s that has emphasized racial polarization" (p. 163). In addition, Greene finds that poor black women took the initiative on many justice issues, forcing black leaders to listen to their demands. Greene argues, "Denied the trappings of middle-class respectability in class-conscious black Durham by their poverty, by their lack of formal education, and by their confrontational style,... low-income women turned the traditional class-based definition of black womanhood on its head by speaking out 'any way they wanted to' on behalf of the poor" (p. 181). These women achieved better recreational facilities in public-housing areas and neighborhood health clinics and participated in black separatist movements like the Malcolm X Liberation University.

Greene's study suggests that in Durham, Black Power and separatism coexisted with racial integration, white racism and interracial cooperation could simultaneously occur, and African American and white women of varying socioeconomic levels could work together to effect change in their communities. At times, Greene fails to contextualize Durham's activities within a larger structure of national protest, particularly in her analyses of World War II and antipoverty efforts in the 1970s. Still, Greene's study makes a significant contribution to civil rights historiography by centering on the tireless efforts of those often unrecognized local women who successfully mobilized their communities on behalf of change.

MEGAN TAYLOR SHOCKLEY

Clemson University