Sarah M. Griffith. The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights

Monographs and articles describing a twentieth-century civil rights movement that was as “wide” as it was “long”—encompassing multiple racial and ethnic groups—abound, but few approach the give and take of interethnic and interracial relationships among activists as elegantly and scrupulously as historian Sarah M. Griffith in her recent book The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900–1950. By using the concept of racial liberalism and its place in Protestant activism and liberal theology during the early twentieth century, Griffith makes the unwieldy topic of multiethnic and interracial activism accessible and focused. Griffith “reevaluates and repositions liberal Protestants’ activism within the context of American Civil Rights history” and convincingly argues that both the alliances between Asian American and white Protestant organizations (such as the YMCA) that formed in resistance to racism and discrimination and the belief that Christian ideas could ameliorate the problems they produced created a foundation for a growing rights movement on the West Coast and beyond (2). Griffith’s focus on the alliance between these two sets of actors is what sets her work apart from studies of this topic.

Alliance · Civil rights · Civil society · Context (archaeology) · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies