Robert L. Allen is Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and previously taught at Mills College and San Jose State University. He is author of Black Awakening in Capitalist America, The Port Chicago Mutiny and numerous articles and books on race and ethnicity. He was editor of The Black Scholar journal and vice president of the Black World Foundation.

RELUCTANT REFORMERS Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States Robert L. Allen and Chude Pamela Allen Reluctant Reformers explores the centrality of racism to American politics through the origins, internal dynamics, and leadership of the major democratic and social justice movements between the early nineteenth century and the end of World War II. It focuses in particular on the abolitionists, the Populist Party, the Progressive reformers, and the women’s suffrage, labor, and socialist and communist movements. More