Book review: Emancipation Betrayed by Paul Ortiz

author : Brian Huseby topic : book review

Review by Brian Huseby

When did the civil rights movement begin? With the Montgomery bus boycott and the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1950s?

In Emancipation Betrayed, Evergreen graduate Paul Ortiz convincingly demonstrates that the struggle for black liberation began long before the 1950s. Ortiz takes us from the fights of slaves for freedom in the antebellum U.S. to the struggle for black voting rights in Florida, culminating in the presidential election of 1920. Along the way, Ortiz gives numerous examples of blacks using armed self-defense to protect themselves from white attacks, rather than docilely submitting either to slavery or to post-reconstruction Jim Crow. He also destroys the myth that somehow Florida was not quite as vicious in oppression of blacks than other southeastern states. The systematic suppression of black rights was as vigorous as that found in any other state.

Was the Montgomery bus boycott the first black boycott of public transportation? No. In 1901 and 1905, blacks conducted boycotts of segregated street cars in Jacksonville and in Pensacola.

The book focuses on the effort of blacks to gain voting rights for the presidential election of 1920. Ironically, one of the measures imposed by the ruling Democratic Party to keep blacks from voting came back to haunt it. This was the law taking the voting franchise from convicted felons. Since black men were convicted of felonies many times more often than whites, at a time when only men could vote, the law worked as one of several methods of keeping blacks from the polls. Of course, this led to the decisive factor in throwing the popular vote in Florida to George W. Bush in 2000.

When women did win the right to vote in 1920, black women registered in numbers surpassing whites despite the barriers thrown up against them. Whatever the fight, Ortiz emphasizes that the struggles that succeeded were those that were organized.

Emancipation Betrayed is an excellent read of an important, but forgotten, piece of history.

Emancipation Betrayed, by Paul Ortiz. University of California Press, 2005.