He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Civil Rights in Bakersfield at the University of Texas Press website.Shaw lamented. As administering the War on Poverty continued in Kern, dismantling the grassroots aspects of the antipoverty movement by delegating authority away from TAP, the CSO, and the neighborhood councils—the war grassroots organizations that had initiated the War on Poverty three years prior—became the de facto position of local government.This test is scary accurate! This excerpt comes from the end of the book’s third chapter, which covers the war on poverty in Bakersfield, California during the 1960s. At the conclusion of this chapter, I foreshadow the struggle African Americans and Mexican Americans in greater Bakersfield encountered as the war on poverty unfolded in the 1970s. Specifically, tensions within and among racial coalitions became divisive compared to the early war on poverty years when federal legislation passed in 1964 mandating “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” as well as the racial solidarity engendered by the Delano Grape Strike in 1965. The excerpt also foreshadows the role of the political right in mobilizing a counter movement to civil rights reform, first during the war on poverty by using the mechanisms of local government, and later in new ways as the civil rights movement continued.
Anti-statist opposition toward the antipoverty movement continued well into the Reagan gubernatorial years of 1967-1975. The end result pitted Mexican Americans and African Americans against each other in competition for financial resources in the rural welfare state, much to the political benefit of anti-statist Republicans. The following chapter examines the emergence of the Chicana/o civil rights movement in the content of multiracial civil rights activism in greater Bakersfield. In many ways, the limits of the antipoverty movement encouraged civil rights activists to push for civil rights reforms in other venues.
As a whole, the Page 99 Test is accurate because it captures the fomenting of racial coalitions between Black and Brown activists and the issues that pulled these groups together across racial lines. The excerpt also highlights how backlash and counter mobilization stirred activists to press for reform in other venues as noted at the end of the page where the next chapter examines the Chicana/o student movement in Bakersfield. In brief, civil rights reform was messy in greater Bakersfield during the 1960s and 1970s. The story isn’t always linear, but reform was complicated and overlapped with other movements and activisms. The messiness of the story is important though because it showcases the breadth, scope, and diversity of civil rights reform beyond the farm worker movement, which heretofore has been much more well documented in American labor and civil rights historiography.
--Marshal Zeringue
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