Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker: Crossing Boundaries

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Message: In Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), I argue that between 1946 and 2000, fired with a passion for racial and economic equality, Lincoln J. Ragsdale, Sr. and Eleanor Dickey Ragsdale, aided by like-minded activists across race lines, drew upon an arsenal of social-justice weapons in the sometimes triumphant and trailblazing battle for racial and economic equality in Phoenix. They did not accomplish this by feigning color blindness, dismissing racialized economic inequality as erroneous, or reducing race and class to interchangeable ingredients to be used according to convenience and taste; a pinch of class today, a smidgen of race tomorrow. They helped dismantle an apartheid-like system in what is currently the fifth largest city in the U.S., by adopting a proactive and nuanced race consciousness that understood the intertwined history and life of race, gender and class. Before the Ragsdales arrived in Phoenix in 1946, white supremacy, racism and racial segregation was already firmly established in the city. Race and racism in Phoenix, as Paul Murray intoned, “was the atmosphere one breathed from day to day, the pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which made one uncomfortable and jumpy.” Indeed, although Phoenix’s racial etiquette was less violent than that of its southern counterparts, white supremacy, segregation, and economic inequality existed in the city from its birth. De jure segregation was implemented in the Arizona Territory in 1864, when an anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriages between “Whites, Negroes, Mulattos, and Mongolians” was passed. The law was amended in 1877 to include American Indians. Children of such marriages possessed no legal rights of inheritance. John “Jack” Swilling, a former Confederate soldier and deserter, is credited with laying the city’s foundation, and it was former Arizona Governor Benjamin B. Moeur, who spoke for many Arizonan’s when he proclaimed in 1909 that “I for one, won’t send my children to school with the niggers, and I will fight sending them until I die!” That same year the territorial legislature passed a law allowing Arizona schools districts to segregate students of African descent from pupils of European ancestry. Reflecting local bigotry, Ku Klux Klan chapters were organized around the valley in 1917 to intimidate and terrorize “uppity” black people, Jews, and other “un-American agitators”. Furthermore, by 1926 the meticulously constructed Phoenix residential PalmCroft District, and its Euro-American homeowners, created and maintained restrictive covenants limiting the sale of PalmCroft real estate to whites only. People of color were relegated to the area of the city south of Van Buren Street, and black Phoenicians and other people of color were segregated from whites in parks, swimming pools, theatres, grocery stores, restaurants, hotels and cemeteries. The resulting economic, social, and political isolation people of color experienced amplified not only the malignant socio-economic effects of institutional racism, but the negative effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and demobilization after World War II in the 1940s. Being the last to be hired and the first to be fired affected black Phoenicians in many of the same ways in which it affected American Americans at large. The majority of black Phoenicians attended separate and unequal schools; worked in low-wage, non-managerial, labor-intensive occupations; lived in geographically segregated, substandard housing, often amidst deprivation and squalor; and suffered physically as a result of there being few health care providers who administered to the black community. Longtime resident John Barber believed that Phoenix “wasn’t much different than in the South. The difference here was that they didn’t lynch you.” Phoenix, in fact, was referred to by many blacks as “the Mississippi of the West”. Lincoln Ragsdale recalled that when he and Eleanor arrived, racism and racial segregation was so insidious that “the only bathrooms [blacks] could use downtown were [in] Phoenix City Hall, the bus station, the train station and the County Building”. Legendary Arizona politician and publisher, Cloves Campbell, Sr., who worked with Ragsdale as a young man, remembered that African Americans were frequently greeted by signs in local eateries proclaiming the “right to refuse anybody service.” “Well, you know what that meant,” Campbell exclaimed: “Nigga don’t come in here.” Blacks were not the only targets for racist policies and practices. African Americans and Mexican Americans who attempted to do nothing more than purchase a soda or an ice cream cone from local drug stores, were often turned away by signs that read “no Negroes, Mexicans or dogs allowed.” Jewish attorney Herbert Finn, and his family, became targets of anti-Semitic attacks, racist remarks, and terrorist activity when he spoke out against white supremacy and racial segregation. His daughter, Judge Elizabeth Finn, recalls her family receiving bomb threats, and on one occasion a letter addressed to her father denouncing him in the foulest terms as Jew sympathizing with Blacks. The Ragsdales, and other black western activists, though isolated from the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, were not strangers to these kinds of attitudes or the requisite activism required to fight them. They were roused by years of racial discrimination, World War II, and America’s promise of democracy. They were buoyed by the burgeoning postwar broad-mindedness of local white leaders and Jewish activists such as Finn, attorney William P. Mahoney, and activist Fran Waldman, and sustained by the camaraderie of Mexican American leaders such as community activist Grace Gill-Olivarez and businessman Manuel Pena. Armed with their experiences, hope, and passion, and aided by an interracial group of sympathetic leaders, the Ragsdales often led the way in securing victories for racial and economic justice in Phoenix. For example, in 1953 restrictive covenants and racial segregation in the “Valley of the Sun” found a cunning adversary in Eleanor Ragsdale. She used her knowledge of the real estate market, and exploited the retrograde color consciousness of many whites. As a real estate broker, she found a home on West Thomas Road, far from the African American enclaves in South Phoenix, that she wanted to purchase. When she was not permitted to purchase the home because she was black, she and Lincoln circumvented the restrictive covenant which barred them. Eleanor had a white friend purchase the home, and when the contract was still in escrow the friend transferred the title to the Ragsdales. When they arrived to move into their new home, Lincoln Ragsdale remembered, the realtors “wouldn’t let me in.” “Within a month of their move,” Lincoln Ragsdale recalled, three members of a neighborhood “improvement” committee told him that his family would not “be happy here.” The committee offered to buy the Ragsdale home if the family would move. The Ragsdales refused to sell. On another occasion, the family awoke to find the word “nigger” spray-painted on their white block home in “two-foot-high black letters.” Lincoln refused to remove the racial epitaph from his wall because he “wanted to make sure that the white folks knew where the Nigga lived.” By demonstrating their determination and courage, the Ragsdales transformed the humiliation of white despotism into a declaration of dignity. In the process, they alerted their neighbors of their distinction and self-respect. Also in 1953, the Ragsdales helped black attorney and legislator, Hayzel B. Daniels, along with Herbert Finn and William Mahoney, desegregate Phoenix high schools one year before the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision of 1954. Lincoln Ragsdale, along with black activist, Reverend George B. Brooks, led the way in desegregating many of Phoenix’s most influential corporations, including Valley National Bank (now Chase/Back One), Motorola, Sperry Rank, and General Electric, as early as 1962. In 1963, Lincoln Ragsdale positioned himself as one of the cornerstones of the political Citizens Action Committee (ACT) campaign that wrested Phoenix city government out of the hands of an elite group of white male leaders. The Ragsdale’s were clever and potent, and their history illuminates the omnipresence of racial inequality in Phoenix during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Their story also demonstrates that no lacuna in effective African American leadership existed in the city. Despite the advances that activist such as the Ragsdales helped engender, as late as 1960 de facto segregation continued to be one of the primary obstacles to black progress in the wake of Brown. The Phoenix Urban League reported that at least 95 percent of black Phoenicians continued to live South of Van Buren Street in the “worst housing areas in the city.” The Ragsdale’s were among a handful of wealthy black families who managed to secure housing north of McDowell Street. In 1960, a Phoenician resident noted that in South Phoenix “in almost every instance in education, employment, and housing, the minority-group members are suffering some degree of deprivation; less schooling, less employment, and more crowded housing.” Despite the passage of a public accommodations bill in Arizona in 1964 (and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act at the national level), and the success of black families such as the Ragsdales, the effects of racial prejudice, substandard schooling, unskilled low-paying jobs, and discriminatory real estate patterns, led to persistent black isolation, concentrated poverty, militancy, and rioting in the streets of Phoenix by 1967. Although these constituted major setbacks, the Ragsdales and their fellow activists continued fight and win victories for racialized justice and socio-economic progress into the 1990s, and in doing so they helped destroy generations of barriers to equal opportunity and racial equality. They helped transform the city and, arguably, the nation through their trailblazing and torch bearing leadership. Race Work tells the story of this remarkable pair, two of the most influential black activists of the post–World War II American West, and through their story, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the U.S., the Civil Rights Movement, race relations, African Americans, and the American West. I explore the Ragsdales’ family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and “race work” helped form their identities and place them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. Race Work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post–civil rights eras. More importantly, Race Work illuminates the hope that is imbedded in our ability to address the exigencies of class and race effectively when we choose to. As affluent leaders, it would have been easy for the Ragsdales to turn their backs on the poor, and as “successful” black people, it would have been convenient and perhaps profitable for them to adopt the prevailing “color-blind” ethos of most of their white counterparts. They did not. They repudiated racial and economic subjugation, and helped point the moral compass of the Phoenician community in the direction of equality, peace and prosperity. Whenever they witnessed de jure and de facto segregation, and racial and economic inequality, they lent their name, resources, and political influence to activists and organizations that worked to eliminate it. Many problems remain to be sure, and the Ragsdales were not without faults, but they rose to the occasion, and because of their efforts, and the work of their class and race conscious comrades, the Valley of the Sun became a much brighter place. Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker, a Phoenician native, is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also an affiliate faculty in African and African American Studies and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at ASU. He is also Co-Owner and CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm specializing in diversity and educational curriculum and instruction training. Professor Whitaker will read excerpts from, and sign copies of, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West, at the Phoenix Public Library-Burton Barr Central Affiliate at 1221 N. Central Avenue in Phoenix, on Tuesday, October 25 at 7:00pm, and Changing Hands Bookstore at 6428 S. McClintock Drive, on Tuesday, November 8 at 7:00pm. Copyright © The Arizona Republic. All rights reserved. Arizonas_Reckoning_with_Race.doc http://www.drmatthewwhitaker.com/publications/arizonas-reckoning-with-race/