A new and refreshing way of looking at the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Use of the concept 'political culture' helps us to understand the popular manipulation of images and their relationship to discussions of the race problem. The lives and products of Bunche, Clark, and Hansberry work well in supporting Keppel's hypothesis about the transformation of the symbolic place of African Americans after World War II...The Work of Democracy is an important and welcome departure from traditional studies of the civil rights era that employ the rhetoric of military campaigns. Keppel has joined the issue of civil rights in an unprecedented manner to the reality of American political culture. -- Robert L. Harris, Jr., Cornell University
Ben Keppel is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.
Keppel rehabilitates Bunche, Clark, and Hansberry from their
devaluation by civil rights activists since the late 1960s as
alleged representatives of failed solutions. The three successfully
stimulated a national dialogue on race and worked to embed the idea
of racial equality in America’s value system. Despite that, the
dominant cultural politics filtered out subversive parts of their
messages while simultaneously rendering them icons. This, as the
author emphasizes throughout this imaginative work, testifies not
so much to their failings as to the strength of the ‘cultural
forces arrayed around them’ and the unfinished work of
democracy.
*Georgia Historical Quarterly*
The issues Keppel raises are important for historical and
contemporary reasons. That Ralph Bunche, Kenneth Clark, and
Lorraine Hansberry had such different experiences and yet still
shared so much demands that The Work of Democracy be read as a
cautionary tale—an extended warning we should all heed in our age
of antiintellectualism, spin-doctors, and the continuing
development of politics based on difference and a quixotic search
for a mythical, symbolic American past.
*Reviews in American History*
A new and refreshing way of looking at the struggle for racial
equality in the United States. Use of the concept ‘political
culture’ helps us to understand the popular manipulation of images
and their relationship to discussions of the race problem. The
lives and products of Bunche, Clark, and Hansberry work well in
supporting Keppel’s hypothesis about the transformation of the
symbolic place of African Americans after World War II… The Work of
Democracy is an important and welcome departure from traditional
studies of the civil rights era that employ the rhetoric of
military campaigns. Keppel has joined the issue of civil rights in
an unprecedented manner to the reality of American political
culture.
*Robert L. Harris, Jr., Cornell University*
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