Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle Since Reconstruction by William H. Chafe (review)

Reviewed by: Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle Since Reconstruction by William H. Chafe Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle Since Reconstruction By William H. Chafe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 368. Notes, index. Clothbound, 34. 95. ) In Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle since Reconstruction, renowned historian William H. Chafe chronicles the long civil rights movement since 1877. This book is an opportunity for Chafe to integrate his deep knowledge of this subject with his long-standing affiliation with Duke University's "Behind the Veil Project, " which he co-founded with Larry Goodwyn in 1971. In "Behind the Veil, " dozens of graduate students conducted over one thousand interviews with African Americans throughout the South, illuminating everyday Black experiences of segregation and struggle while offering an important counterpoint to top-down civil rights histories. From the perspective of epistemology, these oral histories prompted historians to grapple with the role of ordinary people in civil rights struggles; understand the persistence of the movement; and underscore the complexities of gender, class, and region. Combining quotations and anecdotes from these dazzling oral histories with the latest historiographical innovations, Chafe has written a largely synthetic interpretation of the long Black freedom struggle in the United States. Chafe centers his book on six key themes. He argues that the Black freedom struggle was waged primarily by African Americans with minimal help from white Americans; that it spanned generations and relied on the contributions of both women and men; that Black institutions—such as churches, families, and fraternal orders—were fundamental instruments to the movement; that white Americans intervened only when absolutely necessary; that African Americans were keenly aware of the limits of civil rights legislation; and finally, that Black equality could never be truly possible in the United States without economic justice. Over the course of thirteen chapters, Chafe narrates key moments in the long civil rights movement, highlighting the major milestones alongside the disappointing setbacks. There are several notable innovations in Lifting the Chains, which make it a useful and teachable text. First, as a scholar who made his career in North Carolina, Chafe weaves the unique, and at times, exceptionalist narrative of that state's history into the larger story of the southern Black freedom struggle. This is vital on two levels. First, North Carolina had an important and iconic populist movement that culminated in the deadly Wilmington Riot of 1898. Perhaps more than any other state, North Carolina embodied the promises of interracial democracy alongside the devastating consequences of white supremacy, which quite literally crushed those dreams. In an important section, Chafe recounts his own End Page 165 interracial activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Alabama, where activist James Foreman recalled that crucial, if lesser-known history. By centering the important role of North Carolina's history and memory of populism, Chafe elegantly draws the connections between the promises of the 1890s and the sweet rewards of the 1950s and 1960s. Secondly, North Carolina was always a consistently moderate state in terms of race relations. The state had white universities, such as Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and was also home to important Black colleges including Shaw University, North Carolina Central, and North Carolina A&T State University, which educated Ella Baker and offered an intellectual home for John Hope Franklin. The city of Durham processed a strong Black middle class, but North Carolina was also the site of soldier Booker T. Spicely's brutal murder on a bus in 1944 and the launchpad for the sit-in movement in 1960. Paying special attention to this state illuminates important complexities of the long civil rights movement. Another notable contribution is that Chafe ends many chapters with a "Reflections" section, where he editorializes on the era, often with a representative figure or anecdote. One of the most provocative and important statements he offers in one such section is that "During Jim Crow, survival itself was a form of defiance" (p. 95). Because this history synthesizes the latest innovations in American historiography, Chafe is able to seamlessly combine the latest interpretations with telling anecdotes, notably, for example, Booker. . .