Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

Based on the latest research, this work provides a new look at the lives of African Americans in the Western United States, from the colonial era to the present. From colonial times to the present, this volume captures the experiences of the westward migration of African Americans. Based on the latest research, it offers a fresh look at the many ways African Americans influenced-and were influenced by-the development of the U.S. frontier. African Americans in the West covers the rise of the slave trade to its expansion into what was at the time the westernmost United States; from the post-Civil War migrations, including the Exodusters who fled the South for Kansas in 1879 to the mid-20th century civil rights movement, which saw many critical events take place in the West-from the organization of the Black Panthers in Oakland to the tragic Watts riots in Los Angeles. A rich collection of photographs, many never before published A completely up-to-date bibliography highlighting significant resources for further study on African Americans in the West

Paul Bontemps decided to move his family to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1906 on the day he finally submitted to a strictly enforced Southern custom--he stepped off the sidewalk to allow white men who had just insulted him to pass by. Friends of the Bontemps family, like many others beckoning their loved ones West, had written that Los Angeles was "a city called heaven" for people of color. But just how free was Southern California for African Americans?
This splendid history, at once sweeping in its historical reach and intimate in its evocation of everyday life, is the first full account of Los Angeles's black community in the half century before World War II. Filled with moving human drama, it brings alive a time and place largely ignored by historians until now, detailing African American community life and political activism during the city's transformation from small town to sprawling metropolis.
Writing with a novelist's sensitivity to language and drawing from fresh historical research, Douglas Flamming takes us from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, through the Great Migration, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the build-up to World War II. Along the way, he offers rich descriptions of the community and its middle-class leadership, the women who were front and center with men in the battle against racism in the American West.
In addition to drawing a vivid portrait of a little-known era, Flamming shows that the history of race in Los Angeles is crucial for our understanding of race in America. The civil rights activism in Los Angeles laid the foundation for critical developments in the second half of the century that continue to influence us to thisday.

In "Creating the Modern South," Douglas Flamming examines one hundred years in the life of the mill and the town of Dalton, Georgia, providing a uniquely perceptive view of Dixie's social and economic transformation.
"Beautifully written, it combines the rich specificity of a case study with broadly applicable synthetic conclusions."--"Technology and Culture"
"A detailed and nuanced study of community development. . . . "Creating the Modern South" is an important book and will be of interest to anyone in the field of labor history."--"Journal of Economic History"
"A rich and provocative study. . . . Its major contribution to our knowledge of the South is its careful account of the evolution and collapse of mill culture."--"Journal of Southern History"
"Ambitious, and at times provocative, "Creating the Modern South" is a well-researched, highly readable, and engaging book."--"Journal of American History"