Review: <i>Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley</i>, by Oliver Rosales

The popular narrative of segregation and the civil rights movement in the United States often centers the American South. In Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley, Oliver Rosales argues that in the decades following World War II, a multiracial coalition fought for civil rights in Bakersfield—California’s “Mississippi West” (11). This coalition championed a broad array of social justice issues, including desegregation, educational equity, police reform, media representation, and healthcare access. Their movement also met significant resistance from White conservatives, particularly growers, who mobilized against farmworkers and resisted labor activists. Rosales builds on the new farm labor history and the work of scholars like Mark Brilliant who have documented racial coalitions and civil rights organizing in California. Despite the suggestion of multiracial activism in the title, and an introductory chapter that emphasizes a “laboratory of races,” Rosales limits his scope in the postwar period. Civil Rights in Bakersfield primarily chronicles a specific alliance of ethnic Mexican, African American, and White liberals.Rosales provides the first scholarly exploration of the urban Chicana/o civil rights movement in greater Bakersfield, offering a new understanding of student-led movements and their advocacy for ethnic studies programs. He also reinforces the important role of community college faculty and students so often overlooked by other scholars. By following this movement from the fields to urban borderhoods, he creates a bridge between generations of activism that reveals a throughline of civil rights organizing. His careful use of oral histories and the papers of the Kern Council for Civic Unity (KCCU) humanizes the language of organizational acronyms. Rosales also provides a critical examination of the White backlash that arose in Kern County, documenting how anti-statist Republicans hindered War on Poverty programs and sowed divisions.The first three chapters examine the roots of multiracial activism in the southern San Joaquin Valley. African American and ethnic Mexican residents, marginalized in the rural periphery, fought for the Sunset-Mayflower tract—where many of them lived—to be incorporated into Bakersfield. Rosales argues that “dismantling exclusionary practices and building coalitions across racially segregated communities became a focus for civil rights activists in postwar Bakersfield” (16). Chapter 2 follows urban coalitions of Mexican American, African American, and White liberal activists in Bakersfield after World War II. These networks included organizations like the Bakersfield branch of the NAACP and the Kern Council for Civic Unity (KCCU). According to Rosales, “The racial liberalism and civic unity that marked the first era of postwar civil rights activism in Bakersfield were challenged by an influx of federal resources during the War on Poverty, continued conservative resistance, and the rise of ethnic power movements” (11). When the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) received an anti-poverty grant in 1965, county officials politicized these funds. The city of Bakersfield refused to support anti-poverty programs with local tax dollars, and conservatives infiltrated the bureaucratic structures of War on Poverty programs to undermine its mission. Rosales shows that the failures of these programs were due to the efforts of anti-statist opponents, not the anti-poverty programs themselves.The farmworker movement, specifically the Delano labor strike and grape boycott from 1965–1970, galvanized urban Chicana/os. The next section examines the course of civil rights reform through the Chicana/o movement. Rosales emphasizes two leaders in particular, activist Dr. Jesus “Jess” Gilberto Nieto and assemblyman Raymond Gonzales. Nieto was an educator at Bakersfield College who promoted ethnic studies to administrators and faculty. Rosales shows that “the relationship cultivated between educational reformers and student activists was a significant part of Bakersfield’s urban civil rights movement” (12). Gonzales was the first Latino elected to the California State Assembly from Kern County and his victory represented a milestone in the local civil rights movement. However, this victory also exposed fault lines within the political alliance of Chicana/os, African Americans, and White liberals. When Gonzales failed to support UFW-sponsored legislation, this grassroots coalition splintered. Republicans successfully campaigned for Bill Thomas, who unseated Gonzales in 1974.In the book’s remaining chapters, Rosales explores a wide range of civil rights reforms beyond the fields, such as combating police violence, promoting fair media representation, expanding access to rural health care, and desegregating local schools. In July 1969, police officers for the city of Bakersfield forcefully confronted a group of mostly Black teenagers outside Fraternal Hall. An all-White jury later convicted two of the teens of resisting arrest and failure to disperse. The racial animosity on display throughout the “Fraternal Hall Incident” drew the condemnation of local NAACP leaders and catalyzed demands for police accountability in southeast Bakersfield. Media reform efforts, particularly the successful McGraw-Hill media concessions of 1972, demonstrate the significance of representation and narrative control in civil rights work. According to Rosales, “Bakersfield civil rights leaders pressured local media outlets by aligning themselves with the national media reform movement” (155). After McGraw-Hill acquired four regional television networks, the company agreed to increase minority programming and hiring for its stations. The resulting educational film series on Chicana/o history challenged negative images of Mexican Americans in mainstream media. Although the UFW had made important strides in rural medical care, its limited capacity highlighted the broader challenges of rural health services. Historically, African American and Mexican American students experienced racial isolation in the district’s southeast schools. In 1969, the U.S. Department of Justice began investigating Bakersfield’s de jure school segregation. The Bakersfield City School District responded by establishing magnet schools, which masked continued segregation in southeast Bakersfield and across Kern County. The narrative of magnet schools “blurs the historical reality of the origins of desegregation in Bakersfield and its connection with the school integration movement and various strands of civil rights activism in greater Bakersfield” (211).Multiracial organizing is the intended focus of Civil Rights in Bakersfield. However, the author overlooks racial minorities familiar to other histories of farm labor, segregation, and the civil rights movement in California. According to Rosales, Filipino activism remained in Delano, and although Chinese immigrants lived in rural and urban Bakersfield, they were not involved in civil rights organizing. Along with Basque and Italian immigrants, Rosales writes that Chinese “were mostly integrated in a generation or two into mainstream city life” (219). Yet Rosales writes that the Chinese did experience residential and educational segregation, so why didn’t they join postwar coalitions for civil rights? Elizabeth Sine has found in Rebel Imaginaries: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression-Era California that in the Imperial Valley these populations, along with Japanese and Punjabi residents, organized to protest racial capitalism. These people also lived and worked in greater Bakersfield. So, what role did they play in Bakersfield’s civil rights movements, and if they did not participate, why? Do the sources point to a more complicated racial alignment? Finally, the struggle of Native people for cultural preservation and federal recognition is literally a footnote in the book. How would the history of Native farm labor and the unique fight for Indigenous rights complicate the narrative of Mexican American, African American, and White liberals in a settler context?In the endnotes, Rosales shares a poignant joke from late-night host Conan O’Brien. Researchers almost named California as the most liberal state, “but then they stopped for gas in Bakersfield” (228). While this joke upends national assumptions about California, it also hits on a bitter, but known, regional understanding of Kern County as a stronghold for conservatism. Yet Rosales’s work also suggests that for every gas station bigot, there was a coalition ready to fight back. This is a timely reminder. Hostilities toward immigrants, challenges to anti-poverty programs, and police violence against minority communities persist. In the postwar period, civil rights organizers in Bakersfield knew that these issues cut across race. What lessons can contemporary movements learn from the successes and failures of these coalitions?