Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town

Racial Beachhead captures the essence of this historic town and its place in history. As a proud graduate of Ord Terrace Elementary School, I believe everyone can learn from Seaside's storied past in creating a more inclusive society. Overall, Racial Beachhead offers a fascinating alternative narrative of racial politics. McKibben provides a crucial addition to recent work on the long, wide civil rights movement, coalition building, and urban politics in twentieth-century California. Racial Beachhead's greatest contribution is its focus on a small, but integrated, military community, enriching our understanding of the American West in the mid-twentieth century.

Racial Beachhead is a corrective, not only for understanding the impact an army base had on a local community, but how military service influenced the direction of civil rights initiatives. It is a must read! This book illustrates the role of small communities in the transformation of 20th century American society.

The strength of the work is in the careful historical analysis and use of a variety of sources to bring to life this hidden coastal town that represented great racial progress in practice. You may have already requested this item. Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway. WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online. Don't have an account? Your Web browser is not enabled for JavaScript.

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As as result of this method, the community-building depicted here takes place between local leaders, members of the middle classes, military personnel working next door in Fort Ord, and veterans settled in Seaside. By the final chapter, the remainder of the story gets messier and more complex, because by the early s Seaside was struck by typical problems of the era: The closing of the army base loosened the bonds of community in Seaside, but that is also depicted, and seen by locals, as a partial result of a surge of Latino immigration.

Ethnic tension and economic hardship ensued, but integration won in the end. This reorientation became part of the solution to the challenge raised by the coming of Latinos to Seaside: Such a community study has the qualities and defects of the genre. It also provides a refreshing, welcome, and still-rare case study of interracial coalition-building in the postwar United States.

It does it elegantly, with an often emotionally moving use of quotations. Also, the author has done her homework, as she frames this community study into the questions and narrative lines drawn by authoritative scholarship. As well, the new scholarship about race, class, and gender at the metropolitan scale in the postwar US played a defining role in this case study, as the names of Becky Nicolaides, Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse show.

Most of the limitations of this case study are also inherent to the genre. Racial Beachhead raises questions about life beyond city limits: Latinos are left out of the picture—sometimes refered to offhandedly—for most of the book, until they make a remarkable entry into Seaside demography and politics in the s.

That is mostly a casualty of plain demographics: Also understandable is the general disregard of the army base as a community in itself: Future research will have to show how community-building works in a more networked fashion, showing how the chosen community interacts with neighbours, region, as well as mid-level agents and structures. No plain boosterism here, but now and then we are told about the development potential of this growing, bustling town by beautiful Monterey Bay.

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The view from the Chamber of Commerce becomes more prevalent in Chapter 5, as the military base closure sharpened the urgency of questions about economic development and inter-city competition for investment and developable space. But these defects only highlight the usefulness and necessity of such research. Readers will come out of the book with their own urges for research raised to a fever pitch, which is what case studies do best. Diversity and Democracy in a