Review, George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Temple University Press, 1988)

Missouri Historical Review, January 1990

Most histories of the civil rights struggle focus on a handful of major leaders and a few crucial events. This approach minimizes the grass-roots nature of the movement and overlooks the way many of the changes that most fundamentally affected people’s daily lives through countless conflicts in cities around the country. In this study of Ivory Perry, an active participant in the fight for civil rights in St. Louis for more than thirty years, George Lipsitz carries the history of the movement beyond a national emphasis and concentrates on indigenous leadership at the local level.

Lipsitz characterizes Perry as an “organic intellectual.” According to the author, “organic intellectuals learn about the world by trying to change it, and they change the world by learning about it from the perspective of the needs and aspirations of their social group.” According to Lipsitz, Perry fit this bill; though he never held an official leadership position in any civil rights organizations, Perry became an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and earned widespread respect within the black community for his role in organizing and leading several direct-action protests.

While recognizing the unique aspects of Perry’s career, Lipsitz also places him in context of several of the broader social trends his life illustrates. Born in 1930 in rural Arkansas, the son of sharecroppers, Perry moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1943. His childhood reflects the large-scale movement of blacks from rural to urban areas during World War II. His military services during the Korean War shows the importance of that experience on the lives of many blacks. In journeying to Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1965 to help with voter registration and desegregation and to Chicago in 1966 to help the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize tenant groups, he demonstrates how activists traveled to help the movement elsewhere, and then brought new strategies they learned back to their local struggles. When he took a job in 1965 as community organizer with the Human Development Corporation (HDC), a St. Louis antipoverty program, it represented part of a broader trend of the bureaucratization of the civil rights movement in federal programs. In this role, Perry and other activists faced contradictory forces as they gained greater financial and institutional backing while sacrificing some of their autonomy. As housing coordinator for HDC in the late-1960s and 1970s, Perry’s career represents the changing nature of the civil rights struggle, as he played an active role in a rent strike by tenants in federal housing projects and led the fight to end lead poisoning among ghetto children.

Lipsitz makes effective use of oral history to convincingly demonstrate the important role Perry played in the St. Louis civil rights movement. Yet he does so without romanticizing his subject. Lipsitz deals honestly with Perry’s shortcomings—his string of failed relationships with women, his estrangement from his children, his periodic hospitalizations for nervous exhaustion. Lipsitz portrays these failing as a result of personal causes as well as the “unremitting pressure and tensions” of his activism. Using Perry as an example of local leadership, Lipsitz has advanced the study of the civil rights movement to another level, emphasizing the crucial part played by long-forgotten participants in events that never captured national headlines.