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Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism. By Will Guzmán. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 182. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03892-1.)
In Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism, Will Guzmán offers a sobering analysis of the opportunities for African Americans in the Southwest in the early twentieth century. The book uses newspapers, census records, government documents, and personal papers to detail the vast racial wasteland that was the Southwest. Through the lens of Lawrence A. Nixon, a black physician, the author shows how black professionals confronted racial violence and political disenfranchisement at a time when even the most determined efforts to secure advancements often came with demoralizing outcomes.
The biography unfolds in five chapters-from Nixon's birth in 1883...