Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States

Reluctant Reformers explores the centrality of racism to American politics through the origins, internal dynamics, and leadership of the major democratic and social justice movements between the early nineteenth century and the end of World War II. It focuses in particular on the abolitionists, the Populist Party, the Progressive reformers, and the women’s suffrage, labor, and socialist and communist movements.

Despite their achievements, virtually all these predominantly white movements failed to oppose, capitulated to, or even advocated racism at critical junctures in their history, with their efforts undercut by their inability to build and sustain a mass movement of both Black and white Americans.

Reluctant Reformers examines both the structural roots of racism in US radical movements and the impact of racist ideologies on the white-dominated core of each movement, how some whites resisted these pressures, and how Black people engaged with these movements. This edition includes a postscript describing the Black freedom movement of the 1960s and the central role it has played in the development of today’s radical social justice movements.

Robert L. Allen is Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and previously taught at Mills College and San Jose State University. He is author of Black Awakening in Capitalist America, The Port Chicago Mutiny and numerous articles and books on race and ethnicity. He was editor of The Black Scholar journal and vice president of the Black World Foundation.

Chude Pamela Allen is on the Board of Directors of the Civil Rights Movement Archive, crmvet.org. She was editor of Union Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality’s newspaper, UNION WAGE, and is author of Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation. She was featured in the films Freedom on My Mind and She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.