Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz Foreword by Quintard Taylor Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West Race and Culture in the American West Quintard Taylor, Series Editor Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz Foreword by Quintard Taylor University of Oklahoma Press : Norman Publication of this book is made possible through the generosity of Edith Kinney Gaylord. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Glasrud, Bruce A., editor. | Wintz, Cary D., 1943– editor. Title: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West / edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz ; foreword by Quintard Taylor. Description: Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. | Series: Race and Culture in the American West ; Volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022537 | ISBN 978-0-8061-6196-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Civil rights—West (U.S.)—History—20th century. | African Americans—West (U.S.)—History—20th century. | Civil rights movements—West (U.S.)—History—20th century. | West (U.S.)—Race relations— History—20th century. Classification: LCC F596.3.N4 B53 2019 | DDC 323.1196/073078—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022537 Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West is Volume 16 in the Race and Culture in the American West series. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞ Copyright © 2019 by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act—without the prior written permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. To request permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Drive, Norman, OK 73069, or email rights [email protected]. Contents List of Maps ■ vii Foreword by Quintard Taylor ■ ix Preface ■ xv Part I: Prologue 1. Freedom Struggle: An Introduction by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz ■ 3 2. Before Brown in the West by Jean Van Delinder ■ 7 Part II: The Far West 3. Civil Rights Movement in the Pacific Northwest by Kevin Allen Leonard ■ 23 4. The Struggle on Multiple Planes: California’s Long Civil Rights Movement by Herbert G. Ruffin II ■ 38 5. Civil Rights Movement in Nevada by Elmer R. Rusco ■ 71 Part III: The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest 6. Breaking Racial Barriers: Civil Rights Movements in Montana and Wyoming by Kenneth G. Robison ■ 89 7. The Modern Civil Rights Movement in Colorado by George H. Junne Jr. ■ 107 vi Contents 8. Civil Rights in Utah: The Mormon Way by J. Herschel Barnhill ■ 122 9. Blacks and Whites Together: Interracial Leadership in the Phoenix, Arizona, Civil Rights Movement by Mary S. Melcher ■ 136 10. The Modern Civil Rights Movement in New Mexico by George M. Cooper ■ 153 Part IV: The Upper Midwest 11. Civil Rights in the Dakotas by Betti VanEpps-Taylor ■ 167 12. The Modern Civil Rights Movement in Iowa and Minnesota by Donald H. Strasser and Melodie Andrews ■ 181 13. Challenging the Color Line in Kansas and Nebraska: The Revolution at a Regional Nexus by James N. Leiker ■ 196 Part V: The South and the West Collide 14. Conceived in Segregation and Dedicated to the Proposition That All Men Were Not Created Equal: Oklahoma, the Last Southern State by Paul Finkelman ■ 213 15. The Civil Rights Movement in Texas by Alwyn Barr ■ 236 Part VI: Epilogue 16. Western Civil Rights since 1970 by Albert S. Broussard ■ 255 Selected Bibliography ■ 271 Index ■ 279 Maps United States West ■ xxii Western Regions ■ xxii vii Foreword The civil rights movement continues to be iconic in United States history. The movement challenged long-standing inequities in American society includ- ing—at the core of these inequities—the denial of the right to vote to millions of black women and men across the South, my parents in Tennessee among them. Racial barriers came down through a massive civil disobedience campaign that eventually involved the efforts of tens of thousands of people, mostly black, and mostly in the South. Few observers of the period, however, would have anticipated how that campaign, whose favorable outcome was by no means guaranteed, would soon be immortalized. By the late 1970s, powerful images would be used to tell a compelling story of the freedom struggle. These images include depictions of the March on Washington, Birmingham and Selma, Albany and Americus, and Mississippi’s freedom summer in 1964, when three brave men were killed because they wanted to democratize the state. Those images are now embedded within hundreds of popular books, movies, documentaries, television miniseries, high school and university course materials, monuments, museums, presidential proclamations, and now even tours. Collectively they attest to the nearly irresist- ible power of memory over actual history. Historians, however, have an obligation to research and interpret those events and to present them as accurately and comprehensively as we can. By the 1980s civil rights movement historians such as David Garrow and Taylor Branch portrayed the struggles of the 1960s as a single epic campaign dominated by an energized southern black community crucially backed by a liberal national political coalition headed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. This campaign, inspired by heroic figures such as Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer, secured important new laws including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ensuring equality and opportunity. Other historians such as Aldon D. Morris and John Dittmer challenged that view, arguing that the ix x Foreword movement was bottom-up, meaning it could be best explained in terms of local initiatives from grassroots organizations across the South.1 Other approaches sought to broaden our understanding of the movement. Brenda Gayle Plummer and Mary Dudziak, for example, introduced the influ- ence of international politics on U.S. civil rights, while legal historian Michael J. Klarman followed the role of the courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, in the struggle for equality. Peniel E. Joseph coupled the civil rights era with Black Power.2 In a 2005 essay in the Journal of American History, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall intro- duced the concept of the “long civil rights movement,” extending the traditional chronology of the movement—the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to the 1965 Voting Rights Act—back to the New Deal and up to the rise of New Right conservatism in the 1970s. Other historians including Adam Fairclough, Nikhil Singh, and Tomiko Brown-Nagin have built on that notion in their work.3 Although earlier historians had noted individual civil rights struggles in the North such as Martin Luther King’s 1966 campaign against Chicago housing segregation, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard in 2003 shifted the focus of civil rights activity to the North (and the West). They argued that while the issues in the North were different—housing segregation, job discrimination, police brutality, and corrupt political machines that allowed African Americans to vote but limited their political influence—these struggles were no less important than those centered in the South. Numerous historians including Martha Biondi, Matthew J. Countryman, and Thomas J. Sugrue elaborated on these themes in their respective works.4 Despite the growing awareness that the civil rights movement was a national struggle and part of the effort to bring democracy and opportunity to millions throughout the nation, the West remained understudied. Only two historians, Robert Self and Matthew C. Whitaker, have examined in book-length detail the 1960s civil rights struggle in two major cities—Oakland and Phoenix—west of the one hundredth meridian.5 In this volume, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West, Bruce Glasrud and Cary Wintz finally attempt to fully integrate the West into this crucial national struggle. This anthology brings together the work of sixteen historians who have provided either original articles or previously published pieces that highlight important aspects of the struggle for racial justice in the region. While the articles are understandably urban focused, they also address the impact of these Foreword xi struggles on entire states including those with small African American popula- tions. Statewide campaigns in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and the Dakotas, for example, employed strategies that differed significantly from those of civil rights advocates in major urban centers in California, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, or Texas. Those strategies were even more removed from those employed in the South, Midwest, or Northeast. Yet local people in the Dakotas, Oregon, or Nevada were just as committed to dismantling the racial barriers to their advancement as their counterparts in Mississippi or New York. Also, more than northerners and southerners, westerners reached out to create coalitions of whites, Latinos, Asians, and American Indians to pursue their civil rights goals, convincing them that a victory for African Americans would be a victory for all. Each article illustrates the profound role of black women in these western civil rights campaigns. We are introduced to activists such as Rowena Moore, secretary of the Omaha, Nebraska, meat cutters’ union, who fought for the rights of black women to work in the city’s packinghouses; Lucinda Todd of Topeka, Kansas, the driving force behind the landmark Brown v.